Hitler's Rise to Power (1919-1933)

Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889. After the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts rejected his application, he spent years of poverty and drift in Vienna, where he absorbed the pan-German antisemitism common in the city. He volunteered for the German army in the First World War, was decorated with the Iron Cross First Class, and was temporarily blinded in a 1918 gas attack, an experience he later described as a personal revelation. In 1919 he joined the small German Workers' Party (DAP), initially sent to observe it, and by 1920 the party had been transformed into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), with Hitler emerging as its central figure and adopting the title of "Fuhrer."