Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the Nazi Party leader, politician, and author of Mein Kampf who established a one-party dictatorship in Germany and directed a genocidal regime centered on the systematic murder of Europe's Jews. Mein Kampf grew from his imprisonment after the failed 1923 putsch and combines autobiography with a program of racist antisemitism, dictatorship, territorial expansion, and conquest of “living space” in eastern Europe. Hitler's Second Book extends his foreign-policy thinking but was not published during his rule. Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944 is a postwar editorial compilation whose transmission and wording require historical caution; it should not be treated as a transparent private transcript. These texts are evidence for studying Nazi ideology, not neutral political guidance. Mein Kampf is best approached in a critical edition alongside reliable histories of the Holocaust and the Nazi state.