1. During his lifetime, Hitler was very secretive about his background. Only the dimmest outline of his parents emerges from the biographical chapters of Mein Kampf. He falsified his father's occupation, changing him from a customs official to a postal official. He repulsed relatives who tried to approach him.

2. One of the first things he did after taking over Austria was to have a survey carried out of the little farming village of Dollerscheim where his father's birth had been recorded. The entire village was demolished by heavy artillery. Even the graves in the cemetery where his grandmother had been buried were rendered unrecognizable.

3. Hitler’s mother died from cancer when Adolf was nineteen. She was held in love and affection by Hitler, who carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker. Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at his alpine residence. His mother may well have been the only person Adolf Hitler loved in his entire life.

4. In 1907 Hitler moved to Vienna, Austria, where the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts was located. He tried to take the entrance examination to fulfill his dream of becoming a painter. He was 18 years old, full of high hopes - but to his own surprise he failed to get admission. An entry in the Vienna Academy's classification list tells the story:

5. "That gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy's School of Painting was out of the question, the place for me was at the School of Architecture."

6. But Adolf Hitler did not pursue his ambition to enter the School of Architecture - he realized that his failure years ago to graduate from high school might block his entry. Within a year he was living in homeless shelters and eating at soup-kitchens. He declined to take regular employment and took occasional menial jobs and sold some of his paintings whenever he could to provide sustenance.

7. Adolf Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life: inability to establish ordinary human relationships, intolerance and hatred of especially the Jews, readiness to live in a fantasy-world and so to escape his failure.

8. He learned to loathe brilliant, charming, cosmopolitan Vienna for what he called its Semitism. More to his liking was homogeneous Munich, his real home after 1913. To this man of no trade and few interests World War I was a welcome event which gave him some purpose in life.

9. So Hitler went to Munich, Germany and when World War I began in 1914, he volunteered for service in the German army. Hitler was twice decorated for bravery, but only rose to the rank of corporal. When World War I ended Hitler was in a hospital recovering from temporary blindness possibly caused by a poison gas attack.

10. The Versailles Treaty that ended the war stripped Germany of much of its territory, forced the country to disarm, and ordered Germany to pay huge reparations. When the army returned to Germany the country was in despair. The country was bankrupt and millions of people were unemployed.

11. In 1920, Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers Party known as the Nazis. The Nazis called for all Germans, even those in other countries, to unite into one nation; they called for a strong central government; and they called for the cancellation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler became leader of the Nazi party and built up membership quickly, mostly because of his powerful speaking ability.

12. Adolf Hitler endorsed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and declared to march to Berlin to rid the government of the Communists and the Jews. On November 8, 1923, Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and proclaimed a revolution. The following day, he led 2,000 armed "brown-shirts" in an attempt to take over the Bavarian government.

13. This rally was resisted and put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the fighting. Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee, was arrested, and was imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year sentence.

14. Hitler served only nine months of his five-year term. While in prison, he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. It was partly an autobiographical book although filled with glorified inaccuracies, self-serving half-truths and outright revisionism which also detailed his views on the future of the German people.

15. He reserved the brunt of his hatred for the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany's defeat in the War. Jews were the German nation's true enemy, he wrote. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race.

16. In 1930, a worldwide depression hit Germany and Hitler promised to rid Germany of Jews and Communists and to reunite the German speaking part of Europe. In July, 1932, the Nazis received about 40% of the vote and became the strongest party in Germany.

17. On January 30,1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Once in this position, Hitler moved quickly toward attaining a dictatorship. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler already had control of Germany ...

18. Adolf Hitler's war with the Jews now stepped up in pace. Whereas before, anti-Semitic rhetoric helped the Nazis get elected, now they had the power to put some of their ideas into action. In April 1933, Jews were banished from government jobs, a quota was established banning Jews from university, and a boycott of Jewish shops enacted.

19. In 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed. These classed Jews as German "subjects" instead of citizens. Intermarriage was outlawed, more professions were closed to Jews, shops displayed signs reading, "No Jews Allowed." Harassment was common.

20. In another attempt to purge Germany of her Jews, a roundup of Jews with Polish citizenship was enacted in October 1938. These Polish Jews were herded like cattle and dumped at the Polish border, where the Poles kept them in no-man's land.

21. This small rebellion was a perfect opportunity for Adolf Hitler to rise up in indignation. The Nazis called for demonstrations, and violence erupted across Germany for two days. Stores were destroyed, synagogues burned, and twenty thousand Jews arrested.   The riots came to be known as Kristallnacht - the Night of Glass, for all the broken glass.

22. All his life Adolf Hitler was seized by an obsession with the Jews and he had always been straightforward about his plans. His dream of a racially "pure" empire would tolerate no Jews and he announced at many occasions the "annihilation of the Jews" living in the territory under his control.

23. In Hitler's mind, murdering millions of Jews could only be accomplished under the confusion of war - from the beginning he was planning a war that would engulf Europe…

24. In another speech on 12 April 1922 he said, referring to the Jewish Question: "Here, too, there can be no compromise - there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.“ On 21 January 1939 Adolf Hitler told the Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky: "We are going to destroy the Jews ... The day of reckoning has come."

25. Hitler avoided giving a clear written order to exterminate Jews and he avoided speaking openly about killing. He told his Nazi leaders: "Everything that can be discussed should never be put in writing, never!" However, there is clear evidence that he was deeply involved in the anti-Jewish policy before and during the war, particularly when it reached a murderous stage.

26. Hitler was fully responsible for the order for the mass executions in Poland in 1939 and 1940. He was also actively engaged in setting up plans for a Jewish reservation in Poland and he backed the Madagascar plan. He was continually preoccupied with further deportations and deportation plans.

27. In 1941 Hitler ordered the extermination of the "Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia" and the elimination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians in these territories.

28. In mid September 1941 Hitler ordered the beginning of mass deportations from Germany to ghettos in Eastern Europe. During autumn 1941 and the following winter, when preparation for the Final Solution in Europe were in full swing, Hitler spoke at various occasions openly about the annihilation of the Jews in Europe.

29. The soldiers referred to the Holocaust as a task which they had to carry out on the behalf of the highest authority in the Third Reich - Adolf Hitler. In 1941, Rudolf Hoess, SS Kommandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz was called. He was told that "the Fuhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and that "we, the SS, must carry out that order."

30. In December 1942, Himmler sent a note to Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, in which he stated: "The Fuhrer gave orders that the Jews and other enemies in France should be arrested and deported. This should take place, however, only once he has spoken with Laval about it. It is a matter of 6-700.000 Jews."

31. At a conference in April 1943, Hitler noted, in regard to the Jews in Poland: "If the Jews there don't want to work they will be shot. If they cannot work, they must rot. They should be treated like a disease which could attack healthy bodies. That is not cruel - if one keeps in mind that even innocent natural beings like hares and deer must be killed so that no damage occurs."

32. In Germany concentration camps were set up after 1933 to detain without legal procedure Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. During World War II extermination, or death, camps were established for the sole purpose of killing men, women, and children.

33. In the most notorious camps - Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany - more than 6 million people, mostly Jews and Poles, were killed in gas chambers. Millions of others were also interned during the war, and many died of gross mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease.