From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his
fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin,
Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales
and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the
sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made
him a demonic figure without equal in this century. Ian Kershaw's
Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the
bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter
for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that
had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of
World War I. With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the
settings that made Hitler's rise possible: the virulent
anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense
casualties, the toxic nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the
1920s, the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the
Right and the Left, the hysteria that accompanied Hitler's seizure
of power in 1933 and then mounted in brutal attacks by his storm
troopers on Jews and others condemned as enemies of the Aryan race.
In an account drawing on many previously untapped sources, Hitler
metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a "drummer" sounding an
insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of
an infamous failed putsch and, ultimately, to the leadership of a
ragtag alliance of right-wing parties fused into a movement that
enthralled the German people.
This volume, the first of two, ends with the promulgation of the
infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer
fringes of society, and with the march of the German army into the
Rhineland, Hitler's initial move toward the abyss of war.
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