End of World War I; 1918-1930
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Adolf Hitler one year in Jail,

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1889 April 20,
Adolf Hitler born in Braunau-on-the Inn, Austria.

Adolf Hitler Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945) An Austrian by birth, Adolf Hitler fought for the Germans in the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross. In the aftermath of war he was drawn into extreme right wing politics in Bavaria, joined and then took over the 'National Socialist German Workers' Party' [N.S.D.A.P. or 'Nazis']. The Nazis attempted to seize power in 1923, but the coup d'etat was crushed by the police and army. Hitler gained power by constitutional means on 30 January 1933 when he was elected Chancellor of Germany. Within eighteen months he was voted dictatorial powers and had inherited the Presidency. His expansionism began with the acquisition of Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938 and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The take-over of Poland in 1939 triggered the start of the Second World War. By June 1940 German troops had occupied Paris. In 1941 the war in the east began, with the attack on the Soviet Union. The series of failures from east began, with the attack on the Soviet Union. The series of failures from Stalingrad to the Normandy landings of June 1944 led to an attempt on his life in July 1944. Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 ended the Reich.

1907 October,
Adolf Hitler fails his admission test to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

1918 November 11,
Swords End of World War I.

Hitler served in the German Army, WW1.
Hitler served in the Bavarian contingent of the German Army, was hospitalized due to being poison-gassed and was awarded the Iron Cross.

1919,
Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart, Karl Harrer form the DAP (German Workers' Party), Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, in Munich.

1919 June,
The Treaty of Versailles is completed. After The Congress of Vienna, Versailles is the the second great peace-conference.
However an reconstruction of the german war industry was once again planed.
After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles, laying down the terms and conditions of peace, was signed by the participants on 28 June 1919. Germany lost territory and its armed forces were greatly reduced. It had to pay massive compensation for war damage and admit its guilt for causing the war. These terms caused great bitterness in Germany and sowed the seeds for future discord in Europe.

1919 September,
Hitler joins an obscure fringe group, the DAP (German Workers' Party). Adolf Hitler, employed by the army as an "education officer", to report on possible subversive movements, is sent to a meeting of the Party and joins it as member number 7.

1919 November,
Hitler persuades this tiny group to hold a meeting at the Hofbrauhaus Beer hall. He speaks there and finds highly effective his passionate outpouring of abuse against enemies, mingled with dire threats and promises of retribution. He speaks at further meetings, each one with a greater attendance.

1919 December,
Hitler opens a permanent Party office and demands better organization.

1920 Januari,
League of Nations. Established in January 1920 on the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, its stated object was to keep international peace and provide an arbitrating body for disputes. Although the idea came from US President Wilson, the USA did not become a member. Germany was admitted and given a permanent seat on the Council after the Treaty of Locarno in September 1925. This was seen by the supporters of the Weimar Republic as a triumph for its Foreign Minister, Stresemann. But nationalists in Germany, the Nazis among them, saw the League as an agency of the Allied powers, enforcing the Versailles territorial settlements. Hitler took Germany out of the League in October 1933, having demanded immediate parity in armaments. Russia joined next year, but the League took no effective action against German rearmament. This failure, followed by failure to stop either Italy's attack on Ethiopia, or the Japanese invasion of China, or to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, lost the League any influence it might have had.

1920 February,
With Drexler and Feder, a man with personal theories of economic reform, a Party programme, the `25 Points', is issued, at the Hofbrauhaus. Hitler achieves an audience of 2.000 and several hundred new members are enrolled.

1920 April,
Adolf Hitler is discharged from the German Army. Adolf Hitler stops calling himself an artist.
The Party changes its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party). Its name is not yet abbreviated to `Nazi'. Among the new members are men like Alfred Rosenberg, a refugee Baltic German, full of anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism, and Captain Rohm, still a serving officer, who brings in other serving soldiers and Freikorps men.

1920 October,
The Party forms a group, many of them from the Freikorps, to keep order at their meetings. Organized by Emil Maurice, they are called the `Storm Group', the Sturmabteilung or SA.

1920 December,
Rohm persuades his former commanding officer, General von Epp, to help raise the money to buy the Party the twice-weekly paper, the Volkisdrer Beobachter, probably using secret army funds. Hitler ignores the old Party committee and works with his new friends, Rohm, Hess, Goring and several other people of a richer class which he was now meeting through Hanfstangl. General Ludendorff is made aware of him as a likely demagogue who might play a part in his own nationalist dreams. He introduces Hitler to the Strasser brothers who have links with disillusioned socialists and radicals throughout Germany.

1921 July,
Adolf Hitler becomes the leader of the German Worker's Party (DAP). He changes the name of the party to the National Sozialist German Workers' Party, the Nazi party. The Nazi movement exploited anger and xenophobia in Germany from the 1920's through 1930's.

Nazi flag

1922,
China a weak, divided, unstable republic, the struggle for life between Russia and Japan.The Chinese Communist Party is formed.

1922 October,
Mussolini's Fascists stage the "March on Rome" and succeed in seizing power. The party's blackshirts begin eliminating the political opposition.

1923 January,
France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr because Germany has not kept up with scheduled reparations payments.

1923 November,
Adolf Hitler leads his National Socialist German Workers' Party in a coup d'etat (putsch) to seize power in Bavaria.

1924,
Adolf Hitler's ill-timed and inadequate attempt to seize power at the end of 1923 fails and sees him imprisoned for 8 months in the fortress in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria Germany (till late 1924). While incarcerated he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the Third Reich's doctrinal guide book, with Rudolf Hess: The programm for the resurrection of Germany, Nazy Germany.

Landsberg prison, Austria
The fortress in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria Germany. This fortress served as a political prison; Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while imprisoned there in 1923–24, and numerous convicted Nazi war criminals were held there after 1945.

1924 April,
The Dawes Plan seeks to stabilize German currency,inflation was brought under control, and promote economic revitalization and began to improve.

1924 August,
Benito Mussolini seizes power in Italy and declares a Fascist dictatorship. He takes the title Il Duce.
Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945)
Mussolini's Fascist Party grew in popularity at the end of the First World War and in October 1922 his supporters staged the 'March on Rome'. Mussolini was initially the senior partner in the European Fascist movement and when Adolf Hitler began his political career he did so in conscious imitation of the founder of the Italian fascist state. This situation was soon to reverse. By the time Italy entered the Second World War in 1940 Mussolini's international importance was in decline and his loud bombast could not disguise Italy's weak economy and her unpreparedness for war. A meeting of the Italian Fascist Grand Council on 24 July 1943 passed a motion which gave the King control of the Italian armed forces. On the following day Mussolini was arrested and imprisoned. His successor, Field Marshal Badoglio, surrendered to the Allies in September, but three days later German troops seized Rome and rescued Mussolini.He was arrested on 28 April 1945 in Como by partisan forces and, together with his mistress Clara Petacci and other fascist associates, shot dead and hung upside-down in a Milan square.

Benito Mussolini

1925 April,
Field Marshal von Hindenburg becomes President of Germany.

1925 October 16,
The Locarno Pacts; Treaty of mutual guarantee between Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Italy.
The demilitarization of the Rhineland was recognized as permanent and German, French and Belgian post-Versailles frontiers were mutually accepted. Finally, Germany was brought into the League of Nations. Stresemann, for Germany, seemed to have brought Europe to an age of peace. An atmosphere of optimism generated later talk of an 'eastern Locarno' to agree on German-Polish borders, but this was something that no Weimar government dared do. While Strasser saw Locarno as an Anglo-French plot to use the Germans as cannon fodder against the Russians, Hitler (in Mein Kampf) welcomed the idea of an alliance with Britain against Russia. In 1935 (after Locarno had been reaffirmed at Stresa) Hitler openly announced German rearmament; in March 1936 he renounced Locarno and sent troops into the Rhineland.

1926 September 8,
Germany joins the League of Nations, the way to Worlds peace, in Locarno to maintain peace in Europe.

1928 August 27,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact: no aggressive war.

1929 June,
Hitler gains prominence by opposing the Young Plan for the settlement of Germany's reparations debt.

1929 October 23,
Failure(collapse) of the purse in New York (Wall Street), the world-wide depression begins:"The economic snowstorm".

1930 May,
Japanese Prime Minister Inukai is murdered by military officers.

1930 September
The Nazi party becomes the second largest party after German elections are held.

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