When people ask, Adolf Hitler: what did he do, they usually aren’t looking for a dry list of dates. They want to know how one man managed to drag the entire world into a meat grinder. It’s a heavy topic. Honestly, it's one of those subjects that feels like a dark hole in history that just keeps getting deeper the more you look into it.
He wasn't just a politician. He was a catastrophic event.
The Rise from the Trenches
Hitler started out as a complete nobody. A failed artist in Vienna who spent his time sleeping in homeless shelters and nursing a growing resentment against... well, pretty much everyone. World War I gave him a purpose. He served as a message runner, got blinded by mustard gas, and ended up in a hospital bed when Germany surrendered. That was his breaking point. He bought into the "stab-in-the-back" myth, believing that the German army hadn't actually lost on the battlefield but was betrayed by Jews and communists at home.
He took over a tiny group called the German Workers' Party and turned it into the Nazi Party (NSDAP). He discovered he had this weird, hypnotic ability to speak to crowds. He didn't just give speeches; he had these choreographed performances. He’d start quiet, almost whispering, and build up to a screaming, vein-popping frenzy. People ate it up. They were poor, angry, and looking for someone to blame.
Dismantling Democracy from the Inside
By 1933, he was Chancellor. But how?
He didn't seize power in a violent coup—not successfully, anyway. His first attempt, the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, landed him in prison. That's where he wrote Mein Kampf. Once he got out, he realized he had to use the system to kill the system. He used the Great Depression to his advantage. When unemployment hit 6 million in Germany, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag.
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Once he was in, he moved fast. The Reichstag Fire in February 1933 gave him the excuse to suspend civil liberties. Then came the Enabling Act. This was the nail in the coffin. It basically gave Hitler the power to pass laws without the parliament. In a matter of months, he banned other political parties, dissolved trade unions, and threw his opponents into the first concentration camps, like Dachau.
The Orchestrated Horror of the Holocaust
You can't talk about what he did without talking about the Holocaust. This wasn't just "war stuff." It was a state-sponsored, industrial-scale factory for murder.
He implemented the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. These stripped Jews of their citizenship. It turned neighbors into enemies overnight. Then came Kristallnacht in 1938—the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues burned. Windows shattered. Thousands were arrested. But the "Final Solution," decided later at the Wannsee Conference, was the peak of the horror.
Six million Jews were killed. Millions of others—Romani people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and political dissidents—were also systematically murdered. We're talking about gas chambers, mass shootings, and forced labor. It’s hard to wrap your head around the scale of it. Historians like Timothy Snyder, who wrote Bloodlands, point out that much of this killing happened in plain sight, in the "killing fields" of Eastern Europe, not just in the camps.
Sparking a Global Conflagration
Hitler wanted Lebensraum, or "living space." He thought Germans were a "master race" that deserved more land in the East. He tore up the Treaty of Versailles. He rebuilt the military. He marched into the Rhineland. He took Austria. He took the Sudetenland. The world watched and did... basically nothing. Appeasement, they called it.
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Then he invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
That was the trigger. World War II became the deadliest conflict in human history. We are talking about 70 to 85 million deaths worldwide. Hitler’s strategy of Blitzkrieg (lightning war) crushed France in weeks. But his ego was his undoing. He invaded the Soviet Union in 1941—Operation Barbarossa. That was a death sentence for the Third Reich. The Eastern Front became a meat grinder that swallowed millions of German soldiers.
The Economic Illusion
Some people—wrongly—try to claim that "at least he fixed the economy."
Let's look at that. He did lower unemployment, but he did it by kicking women and Jews out of the workforce so they weren't counted in the stats. He started massive public works like the Autobahn, sure. But the whole economy was a Ponzi scheme built on rearmament. Germany was broke. The only way to keep the lights on was to invade other countries and steal their gold and resources. It was a "plunder economy." If he hadn't gone to war, the German economy would have collapsed under the weight of its own debt.
Why It Still Matters Today
Understanding Adolf Hitler: what did he do isn't just a history lesson. It's a warning about how quickly a modern, "civilized" society can slide into total madness. He used propaganda (thanks to Joseph Goebbels) to create an alternate reality where hate was a virtue. He turned the law into a weapon against the vulnerable.
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He ended his own life in an underground bunker in Berlin in April 1945, leaving behind a continent in ruins and a legacy of shame that Germany still grapples with today.
Critical Takeaways for Researchers
If you're looking to dive deeper into the mechanics of how this happened, avoid the sensationalist "Hitler was a monster" documentaries that skip the politics. Look at the primary sources.
- Read the Nuremberg Trial transcripts. They provide the direct evidence of the bureaucratic nature of the Nazi crimes.
- Study the Weimar Republic's collapse. It shows how economic desperation makes people vulnerable to radicalization.
- Examine the banality of evil. Hannah Arendt’s work is essential here. She explains how ordinary people become cogs in a murderous machine.
To truly understand this period, visit the digital archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) or the Yad Vashem database. These institutions provide verified, survivor-led accounts that cut through the myths and political "spin" often found in low-quality online articles. Understanding the specific steps—the laws passed, the rhetoric used, and the international failures—is the only way to ensure the phrase "Never Again" actually means something.
Next Steps for Deep Learning:
- Access the Arolsen Archives online to see the millions of documents regarding Nazi persecutions.
- Review the Munich Agreement of 1938 to understand the failure of international diplomacy.
- Compare the 1920 Nazi Party Platform with the actual laws implemented between 1933 and 1939 to see how radical rhetoric transitions into state policy.