Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler led Germany from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and directed the Holocaust, the systematic murder of about six million Jews, along with Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and many others. Tens of millions died in the war he began. No account of his chart can soften that record, and astrologers who study it generally treat it as a warning about how little a horoscope alone can reveal.

He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small town on the border between Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, at 6:30 in the evening, the time recorded at his birth. That hour gives a Libra Ascendant. Libra is usually associated with diplomacy, manners and a wish for balance, and nothing in his public life fits that description well, which is one reason his chart is often used to show that a rising sign is not a verdict on character.

His Sun had just moved into Taurus, and Venus and Mars sit together later in the same sign, all three across from the Ascendant in the seventh house, where astrologers read alliances and declared enemies. Taurus is stubborn and fixed, slow to change course once committed. Hitler's rigidity became notorious during the war, when he refused retreats his generals urged and ordered armies to hold positions that could not be held.

His father, Alois, was a customs official, and the family moved several times before settling near Linz. As a young man Hitler hoped to be a painter, but the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna rejected him twice, in 1907 and 1908. He drifted through Vienna in poverty, absorbing the antisemitic politics of the city, and moved to Munich in 1913.

He served in a Bavarian regiment in the First World War and was decorated with the Iron Cross. Afterward he joined a small nationalist party in Munich, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and he discovered a talent for rousing, furious speeches. A failed coup attempt in 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, put him in prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf.

Saturn in Leo stands high in the chart, in the region where career and public standing are judged. Saturn there is often read as power gained through long effort and lost through it as well. He was appointed chancellor in January 1933 and within months had dismantled German democracy. The Moon and Jupiter sit together in Capricorn, the sign of hierarchy and control.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The regime built a network of ghettos, killing squads and extermination camps across occupied Europe, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. As Allied armies closed in on Berlin, Hitler killed himself in his bunker on April 30, 1945.

His chart has been studied for a century by astrologers looking for something that would have predicted him. Most conclude that it does not, and that the choices of a person and a society, not the planets, account for what happened.