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When the war ended, Hitler was in the hospital recovering from a chemical weapon attack. He found out that the war ended while he was in the hospital and he says in his autobiography that he was furious. He had believed all the Propaganda that Germany was invincible and winning the war, so it was a shock when Germany surrendered in November 1918.

Germany surrendered in large part because of a revolution that had broken out, and the Kaiser (emperor) had fled and was living with relatives in the Netherlands. A republic, the Weimar Republic, was formed- but it wasn't strong. Communists, who were inspired by the Bolsheviks in Russia, tried to overthrow the republic- they failed because German war veterans joined right-wing oriented "Freikorps" ("free corps") militias and fought to stop them. After these events, the Weimar government was understandably nervous about powerful extremist political parties.

The German army, the Reichswehr ("national defense"), had a subsection dedicated to spying on political parties to watch for another revolt. Hitler, who stayed in the army after getting out of the hospital, was assigned to this section, and was ordered to spy on a far right-wing party called the "German Workers Party", which was based in Munich (where Hitler had lived for a time in his youth). Hitler attended the party's meetings at a beer hall (a kind of large Bavarian pub), and after a couple months, he joined the party when it became clear that he actually believed in the same things that they did.

He quickly became the leader of the party. Then he reformed the German Workers Party into the "National Socialist German Workers Party", nicknamed "Nazi" for short (although Nazis hated that nickname). From there, the rest is history...

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7y ago

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