This gripping, eminently readable book is the second half of the
best life of Hitler, the 20th century's principal villain. (The
first half, 'Hubris', came out two years ago). It runs from his
political high point in 1936 when he got away with remilitarizing
the Rhineland, through his military peak when in six weeks in 1940
he wiped out France as a great military power, to his suicide in
the ruins of his capital in 1945. Kershaw presents the troubled
diplomacy of the late 1930s primarily through Hitler's eyes, and
shows how Hitler and Chamberlain misjudged each other at Munich
with fatal consequences for European peace. He has a thorough grasp
of the lack of system with which the Nazis ran Germany, and often
shows how 'working towards the Fuehrer' had disastrous results. He
demonstrates that Hitler had his eye on eventual domination of the
world by Germany, and meanwhile was determined to rid the world of
Jews. No one can be left in any doubt that the massacre of millions
of Jews by the Nazis derived from Hitler's own wishes, though he
was sly enough never to sign an order enforcing it. Many of
Hitler's decisions, such as the one to attack Russia before he had
defeated Great Britain, now seemed absurd; at the time they seemed
to him obvious and necessary. He was a tremendous self-deceiver, as
well as a spellbinding orator. Kershaw shows also that the blame
for atrocities belongs not only to Hitler, nor to his SS killing
squads: the army was to blame too, and the bulk of the population
either approved, or did nothing to interfere. He has plenty of
graphic detail as well, for instance on the intricacies of the 20
July 1944 plot, from which only the devil's own luck preserved
Hitler, or the final bonfire - unwitnessed, because the shelling
was so heavy - which used so much petrol that all was left of the
Fuehrer fitted into a cigar box. (Kirkus UK)
It is impossible to offer an adequate parallel to Hitler's
situation in 1936. With the peaceful resolution of the Rhineland
crisis, Hitler became both the adored object of the vast majority
of Germans and an international symbol of modernity and dynamism.
He managed this while in reality being the dictator of a system of
single-minded viciousness new to human experience. In this book,
drawing on a vast range of material, Ian Kershaw allows us to
understand both the dictator himself and the society that made him.
Perhaps this book's greatest achievement is to make clear the often
conflicting dynamics that led from the seemingly stable, successful
Germany of 1937 to the brutalised military state of the 1940s. By
concentrating on the figure of Hitler, Kershaw both gives an
immediate texture to these terrible events and shows the options
available to Germany and its ruler at each point in the unfolding
disaster. At the heart of the book lies Hitler's decision to
unleash annihilatory war in the East and the terrifying new moral
universe this brought into being: the degradation of enemies into
"beasts" and the hatching of the "Final Solution". This is the
story of a poisoned world and of
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