Nobody really knows why Hitler did what he did. It's not even known if the idea of the Holocaust originated with him--though of course he must have approved of it, which is monstrous enough. I know that the theory is he became anti-semitic when he was 19 or 20, when he was rejected from art school and his mother died, cutting off his financial support, forcing him to live in the Viennese slums with ethnic minorities, including Jews.
My best guess is that Hitler was a sociopath or psychopath, incapable of feeling empathy or conscience. Many sociopaths are able to learn the social norms and live fairly normal and uneventful lives (even though they're toxic to everyone around them--they don't notice it). We'll never know what would have happened if Hitler had been accepted to art school. Sociopaths also seek positions of power because they think they're the most wonderful thing to exist, better than sliced bread, and they don't want to be subject to all the stifling social norms that "peons" have. They live to dominate others, for their own glory (although they might project that onto something like "The Glory of Our Fatherland").
Hitler's father was physically and emotionally tyrranical, and he spent many years in an all boys boarding school which meant he probably learned very early on that "the victory of the stronger is assured, might makes right."
So, in a literal sense, he was misguided, in that if a few things had been different we probably wouldn't have had Hitler the historical figure. But it's entirely possible that even if he was just a miller or a farmer or something, he still might have been an evil person, incapable of empathy or conscience, but anonymous and powerless.
Please note, this information comes from overhearing "The History Channel," taking a class on the Weimar Republic, and reading "Mephisto" by Klaus Mann. I don't know exactly how everything happened, this is just my guess.
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