- published: 13 Sep 2009
- views: 4842
Heinrich Hitler (nickname Heinz; 14 March 1920 – 21 February 1942) was the son of Alois Hitler, Jr. and his second wife Hedwig Heidemann and the half-nephew of Adolf Hitler. When World War II began, he joined the Wehrmacht and served on the eastern front, where he was captured and died in prison in 1942.
Unlike his half-brother William Patrick Hitler, Heinz was a Nazi. He attended an elite Nazi military academy, the National Political Institutes of Education (Napola) in Ballenstedt/Saxony-Anhalt. Aspiring to be an officer, Heinz joined the Wehrmacht as a signals NCO with the 23rd Potsdamer Artillery Regiment in 1941, and he participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. On January 10, 1942, he was captured by Soviet forces and sent to the Moscow military prison Butyrka, where he died, aged 21, after several days of interrogation and torture.
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.