While sleeping in a bunker during World War I, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) had a nightmare in which an avalanche of earth and molten lava buried him alive. Awakened from his sleep by this bad dream, Hitler left the dugout seeking fresh air to clear his head. He proceeded to wander into the open area that was the battlefield; this was extremely dangerous, but Hitler later insisted that he was being led by a will that was not his own. He remained in a semiconscious state until a sudden burst of enemy fire brought him to his senses. Immediately recognizing the danger, he turned around and sought the relative safety of his bunker only to find that there had been a direct hit on the dugout and all of his comrades were dead. Hitler interpreted this event to be an affirmation of his destiny to be a great leader to his people; he attributed his survival to a force that would protect him so he could carry out that role. He felt himself to be invincible.
Modern day analysts who review this dream do not conclude that it was an unequivocal sign of divine election. Some maintain, though, that it could have been prophetic in nature, predicting his destiny when he died in an underground bunker at the end of World War II. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung cited it as an example of “synchronicity.”
(real surname, Schickelgruber). Born Apr. 20, 1889, in Braunau, Austria; died Apr. 30, 1945, in Berlin. Leader of the German fascist (National Socialist) party and head of the German fascist state (1933-45); major war criminal.
Hitler was born into the family of a customs official. Even prior to World War I, he was already an ardent proponent of antisocialist, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic “theories.” In 1913 he moved to Munich; during World War I, he was a corporal in the German Army. From 1919 he was one of the leading members of the so-called National Socialist German Workers’ Party, becoming its head in 1921. On Nov. 8 and 9, 1923, together with General E. von Ludendorff, Hitler attempted a fascist coup d’état in Munich; it failed. In the struggle for power, Hitler made use of unrestrained demagogy, provocation, blackmail, and murder. Hitler and his henchmen, financed by the German monopolies, conducted revanchist propaganda under the banner of a struggle against the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and succeeded in kindling chauvinism in the country and engendering massive support for themselves among the population. On Jan. 30, 1933, President P. von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. After Hindenburg’s death, Hitler concentrated all legislative and executive power in his own hands, merging the posts of president and chancellor (August 1934).
Hitler and his henchmen established a bloody terrorist regime in the country and turned Germany into an armed camp. Fascist Germany, with Hitler at its head, carried out an armed intervention into the Spanish Republic (1936-39), seized Austria (1938), occupied Czechoslovakia (1938-39), and, having put together a bloc of aggressor countries, unleashed World War II. On June 22, 1941, fascist Germany attacked the USSR. In December 1941, Hitler became commander in chief of the German armed forces.
Hitler was the inspirer and one of the principal organizers of the massive extermination of innocent civilians and prisoners of war and of the monstrous atrocities committed by the fascists in German-occupied countries and especially in the temporarily seized territories of the USSR. In 1945, amid the defeat of fascist Germany, the disintegration of the fascist state, and the entry of Soviet troops into Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in the bunker of the Berlin imperial chancellery.
V. D. KUL’BAKIN