It’s easy to think of history as just a collection of dates in a dusty textbook. But when people ask what Hitler did, they aren’t usually looking for a timeline of 1933 to 1945. They want to know how a single human being managed to dismantle a democracy, spark a global slaughter, and engineer a genocide that still haunts our collective conscience. Honestly, the answer is a messy, terrifying mix of political manipulation, industrial-scale cruelty, and a total collapse of international willpower.
He didn't just "start a war." He broke the world.
The Stealthy Death of German Democracy
Most people assume he seized power in some grand, cinematic coup. He didn't. In 1923, he tried that—the Beer Hall Putsch—and it failed miserably. He went to prison. He realized then that if he wanted to destroy the system, he had to use the system's own tools against it.
By the early 1930s, Germany was a wreck. The Great Depression had hit, and people were hungry. Desperate. Hitler leaned into that. He used the Nazi Party to promise "Work and Bread." But what he actually did once he became Chancellor in January 1933 was move with a speed that still catches historians off guard.
The Reichstag fire in February was his big break. He blamed the Communists. Immediately, he pushed through the Reichstag Fire Decree. Just like that, basic rights were gone. No more freedom of the press. No more private mail. No more assembly. He followed this with the Enabling Act, which basically told Parliament, "Thanks, but I'll take it from here." He turned a republic into a dictatorship in months. It wasn't magic; it was the calculated removal of every single legal check and balance.
The Mechanics of the Holocaust
You can't talk about what Hitler did without addressing the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others, including Romani people, individuals with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. This wasn't just "hate." It was an industry.
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Before the gas chambers, there were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. This is a crucial detail people often skip over. He stripped Jewish people of their citizenship. He made it illegal for them to marry "Aryans." He took their businesses. He made them non-persons in their own neighborhoods.
- He established the first concentration camp at Dachau as early as 1933.
- The "Final Solution" was formalized at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.
- He used the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, to run death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was a factory setting for death. Historian Timothy Snyder, in his book Black Earth, points out that Hitler’s ideology wasn't just racism—it was a denial of humanity itself, a belief that the planet was just a pit for racial struggle where the "weak" had no right to exist.
Igniting a Global Inferno
In the late 1930s, the world watched. They saw him rearm the Rhineland. They saw him annex Austria (the Anschluss). They saw him take the Sudetenland. Britain and France tried "appeasement," basically hoping that if they gave him a little, he’d stop.
He didn't stop.
On September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland. That was it. World War II had begun. What he did next was unleash Blitzkrieg—lightning war. It was a terrifying new way of fighting that combined tanks, motorized infantry, and air power. It flattened Europe. By 1941, he made his biggest gamble: Operation Barbarossa. He invaded the Soviet Union.
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This was a war of annihilation. It wasn't about borders or soldiers; it was about "Lebensraum" (living space). He wanted to enslave or eliminate the Slavic populations to make room for German settlers. The sheer scale of the eastern front is hard to wrap your head around. Millions of soldiers died in the mud and snow of places like Stalingrad.
The Economic Mirage
Kinda weirdly, some people still repeat the myth that he "fixed the economy" or "built the Autobahn." Let's be real: he didn't.
The Autobahn projects were already planned before he took office. As for the economy? It was a house of cards. He used "Mefo bills"—essentially fake government IOUs—to fund massive military spending. The German economy was redirected entirely toward war. If the war hadn't started, the German treasury would have likely collapsed under its own debt. He didn't create a sustainable miracle; he created a war machine that required constant conquest and plundering of other nations' resources just to keep the lights on in Berlin.
The Collapse and the Aftermath
By 1945, the "Thousand-Year Reich" was a pile of rubble. Hitler spent his final days in an underground bunker in Berlin while teenagers and old men were forced to fight Soviet tanks in the streets above. On April 30, 1945, he committed suicide.
But his impact didn't end there.
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He left behind a continent in ruins. Twenty million people were displaced. The map of the world was redrawn, leading directly to the Cold War. The United Nations was formed specifically to try and prevent another version of what Hitler did from ever happening again.
Why This Still Matters Today
History isn't just a story about a dead guy with a mustache. It's a warning about how quickly institutions can crumble when people stop caring about the truth.
To truly understand this period, you have to look at the warning signs. It starts with the demonization of minorities. It moves to the erosion of the free press. It ends with the total consolidation of power.
If you want to go deeper into how this happened, start by reading the primary sources. Look at the Diary of Anne Frank for the human cost, or Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness for a day-to-day account of life under the regime. For a political breakdown, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler is the gold standard.
The most important thing you can do is visit a Holocaust memorial or museum—places like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. Seeing the physical evidence of the crimes committed makes it impossible to look away from the truth.
Understand the mechanisms of power. Watch how leaders speak about "the other." Study the way laws are changed to favor one group over another. The best way to respect the victims of what Hitler did is to ensure that the conditions that allowed his rise are never allowed to take root again.