Foto-Foto Eksklusif Adolf Hitler

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Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, the fourth of Alois and Klara Hitler's six children. Fascinated from an early age by war and militarism, Hitler led an unremarkable life—indifferent student, mediocre painter, failed artist—until World War I provided the 25-year-old with a career (soldier) and a cause (the glorification of Germany). After the war ended in 1918, Hitler dedicated himself to a brand of politics and a political party defined by nationalism, anti-Semitism, and violence. In 1933, a decade after his arrest and imprisonment for a failed Nazi coup attempt, he ascended (legally) to the German chancellorship; within a year, he assumed the title of Fuhrer and, as he had long promised, set about waging war on an unprecedented scale. Hitler's shock troops overwhelmed Europe, and as country after country (Poland, the Netherlands, France) fell, LIFE photographers—Margaret Bourke-White, George Silk, William Vandivert, and many others—chronicled every aspect of Nazi rule and bore witness at every battlefront. They reported on victories and defeats, and recorded the unspeakable when the Allies liberated concentration camps—Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, and so many others—where Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and other "undesirables" had been systematically murdered. By the time of Hitler's own sordid death in a Berlin bunker in 1945, photographers from LIFE and other publications had spent years casting light on the brutal rise and grisly fall of the "Thousand Year Reich." Decades later, their pictures have lost none of their power to shock, humble, and illuminate.

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Adolf Hitler, Up Close Between 1936 and 1945, German photographer Hugo Jaeger was granted unprecedented access to Adolf Hitler, traveling and chronicling, in color, the Fuhrer and his confidants at small gatherings, public events, and, quite often, in private moments. Here, and in several other galleries on LIFE, we present rare and never-before-published photographs from Jaeger's astonishing -- and chilling -- collection. (Pictured: Hitler attends the 1939 launching of the battleship Tirpitz.)

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Hugo Jaeger, one of Hitler's personal photographers, in 1970. Jaeger's story -- and the story of how LIFE came to own his photographs of Hitler -- is nothing short of astonishing. In 1945, when the Allies were making their final push toward Munich, Jaeger found himself face to face with six American soldiers in a small town west of the city. During a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found a leather suitcase in which Jaeger had hidden thousands of color photo transparencies. He knew he would be arrested (or worse) if the Americans discovered his film and his close connection to Hitler. He could never have imagined what happened next.

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Hitler Reviews the Troops, 1938 The American soldiers threw open the suitcase that held the Hitler images. Inside, they found a bottle of cognac that Jaeger had placed atop the transparencies. Elated, the soldiers proceeded to share the bottle with Jaeger and the owner of the house. The suitcase was forgotten. (Pictured: Tens of thousands of Nazi troops parade before Hitler in 1938, Nuremberg.)

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Worshipping Hitler Between 1936 and 1945, German photographer Hugo Jaeger was granted virtually unlimited access to Adolf Hitler, earnestly chronicling, in color, the Fuhrer at public events and in private moments. (Pictured: Reichstag members salute Hitler at a session in Berlin's Kroll Opera House.)

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Memorializing the Beer Hall Putsch, November, 1938 Hitler speaks in Munich on the 15th anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which Hitler and other Nazi party members attempted to overthrow the German government. Hitler, jailed for a year for his part in the coup attempt, was the master of swaying large crowds. "I was carried on the wave of the enthusiasm which ... bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence," chief Nazi architect, Albert Speer, recalled of one Nazi rally.

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Massive Rally for the Reich, 1937 Fueled by Hitler's oratory and the sense of being part of an epic, invincible movement, Nazi rallies saw hundreds of thousands of people -- or, in the case of this 1937 rally, more than a million -- swept up by the carefully calculated grandeur. "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one," Hitler said.

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Hitler's 50th Birthday Celebration, 1939 Hitler (center, in brown uniform) reviews a military parade in honor of his 50th birthday in Berlin, April 20, 1939.

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A 'Sieg Heil' From the Ladies Women salute during Hitler's 1938 campaign to unify Austria and Germany.

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The grave of Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, in Leonding, Austria. Alois died suddenly after a morning walk in 1903. Adolf Hitler, then 13, thereafter took advantage of his mother's indulgent nature and effectively loafed through life until twice, in both 1907 and 1908, he was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He lived a desultory life as a failed artist until World War I erupted, which provided the 25-year-old with a career (soldier) and a cause (the glorification of Germany).

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Body of the Nazi Empire Athletes perform during the Reichs Party Congress in 1938, in Nuremberg, Germany. Hitler considered German bodies property of the German empire. Even in his interactions with children, he was seemingly interested mainly in the characteristics they would pass on to the future Reich.

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Berlin, 1945: Dead City In April, 1945, as Russian and German troops fought -- savagely, street-by-street -- for control of the German capital, it became increasingly clear that the Allies would win the war in Europe. Not long after the two-week battle ended, 33-year-old LIFE photographer William Vandivert was on the scene, photographing Berlin's devasted landscape. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Battle of Berlin -- including untold numbers of civilian men, women, and children -- while countless more were left homeless in the ruins. But it was two particular deaths -- that of Hitler and his longtime companion and (briefly) wife, Eva Braun -- in a sordid underground bunker on April 30, 1945, that truly signaled the end of the Third Reich. Here, LIFE.com presents never-before-published images from both the bunker itself, and the decimated city beyond its concrete walls. Above: A never-before-published photograph of a main street in central Berlin, Oberwallstrasse, where some of the most bitter fighting between Nazi and Soviet troops took place.

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Inside Adolf Hitler's Bunker Vandivert was the first Western photographer to gain access to Hitler's Führerbunker (translation: "shelter for the leader") after the fall of Berlin, and a handful of his pictures of the bunker and the ruined city were published in LIFE in July, 1945. A few of those images are re-published here; most of the pictures in this gallery, however, have never been published before. Above: A new view of a photograph that appeared, heavily cropped, in LIFE of Hitler's command center in the bunker, partially burned by retreating German troops and stripped of valuables by invading Russians.

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Adolf Hitler's Ancestral Home The village of Strones, Austria, birthplace of Adolf Hitler's grandmother, Maria Anna. As a youth growing up in Austria, Hitler was obsessed with the idea of removing the border between the German-speaking nations of Austria and Germany -- a dream he would fulfill with the forced 1938 unification of the two countries. See more of Hitler, in public and in private,

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Wilhelm Gustloff Adolf Hitler and his entourage launch the ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff, Hamburg, 1937. In January, 1945, she was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. Roughly 9,000 passengers and crew died -- the greatest maritime-disaster loss of life in history.

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1983: Adolf Hitler's Diaries In 1983, the German magazine Stern publishes extracts from what the magazine claims are the diaries of Adolf Hitler from 1932 to 1945, for which it paid $2 million. The "diaries" are, of course, ultimately proved to be forgeries. Pictured: Hitler signs for a fan in 1938, Nuremberg.

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Hitler Waves Bon Voyage
Hitler waves goodbye from aboard the Robert Ley. Six years later, on April 30, 1945, Hitler and his mistress (and, reportedly, as of April 29, his wife) Eva Braun committed suicide in a bunker beneath Berlin as the Allies crushed his army and took control of Europe. Many historians put the number of deaths attributed directly to World War II at about 70 million. Most of those killed were civilians.

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A Nazi Christmas Party, 1941 After the Americans left, Jaeger packed the transparencies into 12 glass jars and buried them on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his multiple caches, digging them up, repacking, and reburying them. He finally retrieved the collection for good in 1955 -- 2,000 transparencies, all of them, amazingly, still in good shape -- stored them in a bank vault, and in 1965 sold them to LIFE. To date, only a fraction of the Jaeger collection has been published. (Pictured: Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials attend a Christmas Party in 1941, at the height of the second World War.)

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Hitler's Extravagant Birthday Gifts In the late '30s, very few photographers were using color. Hugo Jaeger was an early adopter and Hitler liked what he saw. "The future," Hitler once said to Jaeger, "belongs to color photography." (Pictured: A hand-worked castle inlaid with precious stones, given to Hitler for his 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.)

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Hitler and the Totalitarian State Hitler observes military maneuvers in St. Polten, Austria, in the spring of 1939. "The great strength of the totalitarian state," Hitler once said, "is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it."

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Commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch, 1938 Hitler speaks in Munich on the 15th anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which Hitler and other Nazi party members attempted to overthrow the German government. Hitler, jailed for a year for his part in the coup attempt, was a master at swaying large crowds. "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belong to one category," he said.

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A Dark Day in Munich: 'Peace in Our Time' British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (front row, second right) walks past a Nazi honor guard on the way to a meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1938. After the meeting, Chamberlain famously declared that the agreement he had struck with the German Fuhrer meant "peace in our time" -- but subsequent events showed that he had merely whetted Hitler's appetite by handing over a strategically critical part of Czechoslovakia during their negotiations. See the room where the Munich Agreement was signed, and other public and personal places central to the Reich, in Hitler's Private World.

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Hitler Among the Cars, 1939 Adolf Hitler tours the 1939 International Auto Exhibition in Berlin. Three years before, at another Berlin auto show, Hitler announced that Porsche would design the "People's Car," or Volkswagen, an affordable, practical vehicle for the working German family.

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Hitler Talks Cars Hitler was enthusiastic about cars, but didn't like to drive. For years, he had his chaffeur race down German roads at 80 mph. But once the war started, he became increasingly paranoid about his own safety, and forbade his driver to exceed 35 mph.

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Hitler's Birthday Beetle Ferdinand Porsche (left, in dark suit) presents a newly designed convertible VW to Adolf Hitler in celebration of the Fuhrer's 50th Birthday, Berlin, Germany, 1939.

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Hitler's Aide, Julius Schaub Julius Schaub, Hitler's personal aide and adjutant, observes those around him at a party. After the 1944 bomb attempt on Hitler's life, Schaub is said to have falsely claimed to have been injured in the blast so he would be awarded a special badge by the Fuhrer. Schaub had actually been in another building at the time of the explosion.

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Hitler on a Cruise, 1939 Adolf Hitler chats with several young women on a promenade of the German cruise ship Robert Ley (named after a prominant Nazi labor leader) on its maiden voyage in April, 1939.

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Hitler and Goebbels With Rhineland Girls Hitler demonstrates his popularity with the women of Germany in 1943. Hitler refused to marry while Führer because he felt it would distract him from what he saw as his destiny, i.e., leading the Nazi Party and Germany to greatness. Hitler's chauffeur, meanwhile, called the Führer's longtime girlfriend, Eva Braun "the unhappiest woman in Germany." Braun and Hitler did finally marry in a bunker under Berlin in 1945 as the Reich was collapsing and the Allies were advancing—she was 33, he was 56—but two days later they were both dead by suicide.

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Hitler With Gertrud Forster Hitler dines with the wife of Albert Forster, Nazi governor of a large region of Poland. British and U.S. intelligence speculated at one time that Albert Forster and Hitler were homosexual lovers. After the war Forster hid out in Berlin's British Occupation Zone, but the British handed him over to the Poles, who hanged him in Warsaw in 1952. His wife learned of the hanging in 1954.

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Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler Winnie Wagner and Hitler tour Wagner's home in 1938. The English-born daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner was a devoted friend to and admirer of Hitler until her death in 1980. Rumors circulated in the early 1930s that the two might even marry.

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Archetype of Evil: Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler poses in 1932, shortly before he becoming German Chancellor. Used as the modern world's measure for evil, the Austrian-born failed artist took over Germany using its own laws, kept an iron grip on it with a repressive police state and an ideology based on fear and hatred, and proceeded to engulf the world in war for six years, a conflict that claimed an estimated 70 million lives, military and civilian. Under his reign, he purged the lands under his control of Jews and other "undesirables" in what came to be known as the Holocaust, claiming some 17 million lives.