Adolf Hitler was born Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, in 1889. When his father died in 1903 he began to "slack off" and droped out of school at the 9th grade in 1905. He still wished to be an artist but was rejected as unqualified from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in October 1907. His mother died in 1908, and he pretended to continue his studies in order to receive an orphan's pension, while he was really strolling the city. When he used up his funds, he refused to take a job and ended up in a homeless shelter. It was there that he was first exposed to extreme political ideas, particularly the racial concepts of Lanz von Liebenfels. Liebenfels published a periodical about the supposed superiority of Aryans, an ill-defined race which included Germans, and the inferiority of other races, especially Jews. At the same time Hitler acquired a hatred for socialism and came to equate it with the Jews. Later he served in all of WWI. He earned many medals for bravery, but never made it past private first class. He decided Jews had caused Germany's defeat and that he would enter politics to save the country. Hitler used his exceptional speaking skill to eventually become Fuhrer, or absolute leader, of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (abbreviated NSDAP or Nazi Party), on July 29, 1921. He slowly rose to power after many failed attempts and imprisonment and he and the Nazi Party took complete control over Germany by the summer of 1933. WWII began on September 1, 1939 with Hitlers invasion of Poland. Thats it for the history I intend to put in. The rest is either more WWII information, not important to the subject of Hitler, or just isnt really interesting. For more info on Hitler, look in an encyclopedia. I don't want to write much in the way of opinions simply because this is already lengthy, but here are some. Personally I think Hitler could have conquered the world even if only for a little while if he had just waited on Russia, and mostly not invaded in winter like Nepolian. He showed man how easily we are rallied for the craziest things and in the confusion simply follow.-Dranceon