Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his suicide in April 1945.
Hitler had supreme power as a leader, but could not have come to power alone or committed such atrocities.
He was strongly supported by the strong German military class and millions of citizens who voted for the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, and celebrated him as the country’s savior at huge stadium rallies.
Hitler came to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he founded after returning home as a veteran wounded in the devastating trench warfare of World War I.
He and other patriotic Germans were outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty, in which the Allies were forced to accept the new German government, the Weimar Republic, and obliged to pay $33 billion in war reparations. Germany also had to give up its prized overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to France and Poland.
REF: nationalww2museum.org
PIC: nationalww2museum.org, History Extra, Anne Frank Stitchting, History Channel, The Times