Ante Pavelić (14 July 1889 – 28 December 1959) was a Croatian fascist leader and revolutionary. As Poglavnik, he ruled the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He was founder and leader of the Croatian fascist movement Ustaše.

Pavelić was a lawyer and politician in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia known for his nationalistic beliefs, particularly about an independent Croatia. From 1927 until 1929, he was a member of the Yugoslav Parliament where he declared his beliefs about Croatian independence. In 1920s he radicalized his political activity and called on Croats to revolt against Yugoslavia.

After King Alexander I declared his 6 January Dictatorship Pavelić escaped to Vienna, where he established contact with Croatian political émigrés and formed a link with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in advocating independence for Croatia and Macedonia. He then moved to Italy where he founded the Ustaše (Croatian Revolutionary Movement); initially, this was a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Greater Croatia via armed revolt. In October 1934 he planned the assassination of King Alexander I and spent time in prison in Italy until 1936. From 1936 until 1939, Italian authorities banned Ustaše, so he dissolved the group. He lived under police watch, eventually seeking German support but without success. After 1939 he was active again, focusing mainly on Ustaše activity in Yugoslavia.

Karl Heinrich Leopold Deschner (born on May 23, 1924, in Bamberg, Bavaria), is a German researcher and writer who has achieved public attention in Europe for his thorough and fiercely critical treatment of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, as expressed in several articles and books, culminating in his opus The Criminal History of Christianity (Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek) which is planned in 10 volumes, of which 9 volumes have been published so far.

Deschner's father Karl was a Roman Catholic forest ranger in Bamberg, while his mother, Margareta Karoline, née Reischböck, was a Protestant, who grew up on the estates of her father in Franconia and Lower Bavaria. She converted later to Catholicism.

Karlheinz, the eldest of three children, attended elementary school in Trossenfurt (close to Würzburg) from 1929 to 1933. Afterwards he attended the Franciscan Seminary in Dettelbach. There he first lived with the family of his godfather and sponsor, the clerical councilor Leopold Baumann, afterward in the Franciscan monastery. From 1934 to 1942 he attended the Alte, Neue and Deutsche Gymnasium as a boarding school student with the Carmelite and English Sisters. In 1942 he passed his final exams. Like the rest of his entire class he reported immediately as a military volunteer and was wounded several times. He served as a soldier until Germany's capitulation, in the final stages as a paratrooper.

Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.