Adolf Hitler (help·info) (April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945) was Chancellor of Germany from 1933, and "Führer" (leader) of Germany from 1934 until his death. He was leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), better known as the Nazi Party.
Hitler gained power in a Germany facing crisis after World War I, using charismatic oratory and propaganda, appealing to economic need of the lower and middle classes, nationalism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism to establish a totalitarian or fascist dictatorship. With a restructured economy and rearmed military, Hitler pursued an aggressive foreign policy with the intention of expanding German Lebensraum ("living space"), which triggered World War II when Germany invaded Poland. At the height of its power, Nazi Germany occupied most of Europe, but it and the Axis Powers were eventually defeated by the Allies.
By then, Hitler's racial policies had culminated in the mass murder of at least eleven million people, including the deliberate genocide of about six million Jews, and the systematic killings of many other groups and nationalities, including Romany people, Russian and soldiers and civilians, Polish people, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Social Democrats, members of trade unions, homosexuals and others that composed the other five million dead, in what is now known as the Holocaust.
In the final days of the war, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin with his newlywed wife, Eva Braun