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Adolf Hitler [a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, [c] becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.
World War II [b] or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all the world's countries—including all the great powers—participated, with many investing all available economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities in pursuit of total war, blurring the distinction between military and ...
After Hitler's death and the end of World War II in Europe, the occupying Allies divided Germany into four zones. [119] This led to the start of the Cold War between the Western Bloc , supported by the US, and the Eastern Bloc , supported by the Soviet Union. [ 120 ]
World War II deaths by country World War II deaths by theater. World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history.An estimated total of 70–85 million deaths were caused by the conflict, representing about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940. [1]
The Holocaust (/ ˈ h ɒ l ə k ɔː s t / ⓘ), [1] known in Hebrew as the Shoah (שואה), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
On 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that "racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world". [44] The racial policy of Nazi Germany portrayed the Soviet Union (and all of Eastern Europe) as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen ('sub-humans'), ruled by ...
In 1969, the West German military historian Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand published the third volume of his study of the German Army in World War II Das Heer 1933–1945 that listed OKW casualty figures and his estimate of total German casualties. Müller-Hillebrand maintained that the OKW figures did not present an accurate accounting of German ...
With the outbreak of World War II, the SS Einsatzgruppen units followed the army into Poland and the Soviet Union, where from 1941 to 1945 they murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. [232] A third of the Einsatzgruppen members were recruited from Waffen-SS personnel.