- published: 20 Aug 2014
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Braunau am Inn (help·info) (English: Braunau on the Inn) is a town in the Innviertel region of Upper Austria (Oberösterreich), the north-western state of Austria. It lies about 90 km west of Linz and about 60 km north of Salzburg, on the border with the German state of Bavaria. The population in 2001 was 16,372. A port of entry, it is connected by bridges over the River Inn with its Bavarian counterpart, Simbach am Inn.
The town was first mentioned around 810 and received a statute in 1260, which makes it one of the oldest towns in Austria. It became a fortress town and important trading route junction, dealing with the salt trade and with ship traffic on the River Inn.
Throughout its history, it changed hands four times. It was Bavarian until 1779 and became an Austrian town under the terms of the treaty of Teschen, which settled the War of the Bavarian Succession. As a major Bavarian settlement, the town played an outstanding role in the Bavarian uprising against the Austrian occupation during the War of the Spanish Succession, when it hosted the Braunau Parliament, a provisional Bavarian Parliament in 1705 headed by Georg Sebastian Plinganser born 1680 in Pfarrkirchen; and died 7 May 1738 in Augsburg. Under the terms of the treaty of Pressburg, Braunau became Bavarian again in 1809. In 1816, during reorganisation of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, Bavaria ceded the town to Austria and was compensated by the gain of Aschaffenburg. Braunau has been Austrian ever since.
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.