Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was a 20th century human dictator who was born in Austria. He led the Nazi party in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, and later seized total control of the German nation.

Hitler was able to tap into the anger the German people felt over the reparations forced on their nation following World War I. The power-mad Hitler used the Nazi party as a tool for governmental domination. Hitler's ruthlessness would be compared to others, such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and David Jefferson Adams. He also initiated the attempted systematic genocide of Humans of Jewish descent -- the Holocaust, which led to the deaths of six million Jews alongside approximately six million other enemies of the Reich.

In the late 1930s, the Hitler and the Nazis turned their aggression outward when they began the conquest of Europe. Hitler tried to justify this in 1938 by saying, "We need breathing room."

In the face of Hitler's aggression other nations, including the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Canada, and later the United States formed an alliance to stop Hitler in his drive for conquest. The Allies drove the Nazis back to Germany and defeated them by 1945, but at a cost of millions of lives and large scale devastation of much of Europe and other Nazi occupied lands. Hitler committed suicide as Allied troops entered the city.