Adolf Hitler was the ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Guided by concepts of elitism and racism, he established a brutal totalitarian regime under the ideological banner of National Socialism, or Nazism. His drive for empire Line resulted in the devastation of World War II, culminating in Germany’s defeat and the reordering of world power relationships. Hitler failed as a student in the classical secondary schools, a situation that contributed to his desire to become an artist. He went to Vienna in 1907 but was unable to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts. He lived a shadowy, alienated existence in multiracial Vienna until 1913. His years were characterized by melancholy, aimlessness, and racial hatred—in Vienna he developed his lifelong obsession with the er that world Jewry posed to the Aryan race.
Hitler’s rise to power paralleled the unstable course of the Weimar Republic, which replaced the fallen Hohenzollern monarchy(霍亨索伦王朝). The abortive Communist revolution in Germany and the dictated Peace of Versailles determined Hitler’s decision to enter politics. In 1919 he joined a small political faction in Munich and within the next year formed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He directed the organizations with an iron hand and used its meetings to deliver forceful rhetorical assaults on Germany’s enemies. In 1923 he led the party into the ill-fated Munich Putsch. This action resulted in his imprisonment.
While in prison at Landsberg, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf(我的奋斗)(德语), which became the standard work of Nazi political philosophy. He defined the enemy as world Jewry, international communism, effete liberalism, and decadent capitalism. Hitler offered instead pure Aryan blood and the renewal of German nationalism under a fighting elite. Germany would once more become the leading power on the Continent and gain its living space in central Europe and Russia. In paragraph 1, the word "culminating" is closest in meaning to ______.