Adolf Hitler is remembered as one of the most tyrannical and hateful leaders of the twentieth century. Much of his hate was directed against Jews - the people he believed were responsible for Germany's decline in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of this hatred for Jewish people was also based on Hitler's own personal experiences. As a young man, he had gone to Vienna to be an artist but wasn't accepted into the city's academy of art. He attributed this failure to the Jews because modernism in art had become very fashionable and was, in his opinion, a trend started by Jewish artists.
Hitler's hate also spread to other minorities, including gay and disabled people. The reason for this stems from his belief in the purity and superiority of the German people, a belief system called Aryanism. For Hitler and the Nazis, the perfect Aryan was blonde with blue eyes and anyone who did not fit this criteria posed a threat to the German race.
As for the murders perpetrated by the Nazi party, this 'Final Solution' had began with a series of anti-Semitic laws which Hitler had passed to exclude Jewish people from everyday life in Germany. This did not completely eradicate the Jews, as Hitler had hoped, and so the next logical step was to murder them - an act he authorised in 1941. By the end of World War Two, he had approved the murder of six million Jews and many thousands of other minorities.
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