Erwin Rommel is the best-known German field commander of WWII. Repeatedly decorated for valour during the First World War, he would go on to lead the German Panzer divisions in France and North Africa. To his British opponents - admirers of his apparent courage, chivalry and leadership - he became know by the sobriquet `Desert Fox'. His death, in October 1944, would give rise to speculation for generations to come on how history should judge him. To many he remains the ideal soldier, but as Reuth shows Rommel remained loyal to his Fuhrer until forced to commit suicide, and his fame was largely a creation of the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Stripping away the many lays of Nazi and Allied propaganda, Reuth argues that Rommel's life symbolises the German tragedy: to have followed Hitler into the abyss, and to have considered that to be his duty.

Hitler's tyranny is still difficult to understand today. In this book, Ralf Georg Reuth examines ten aspects of this catastrophe. Among other things, he asks: Was anti-Semitism more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere? Was Versailles responsible for Hitler's rise, and why did the Germans follow a racial fanatic like him? How did his war differ from all others before it? The disturbing answers provide an overall picture that shows: Hitler was not just the consequence of German history, but the result of chance, deception, and seduction. This thought-provoking new study takes aim at several of the 'sacred cows' of Hitler scholarship from the past forty years. Reuth interrogates and challenges a range of orthodox views on such topics as how mainstream politicians facilitated Hitler's rise to power, the Fuhrer's infamous pact with Stalin, and the complicity of ordinary Germans in his genocidal tyranny. Eschewing a conventional chronological approach in favour of a forensic analysis of Adolf Hitler's mainsprings of action both as chancellor and military commander, Reuth portrays Hitler as the apotheosis of a specifically German strain of militarism and imperialism, shifting the focus firmly back on to the mindset and modus operandi of Hitler himself. The portrait that emerges is one of a murderous fantasist and political opportunist driven by an all-embracing ideology of racial superiority. Reuth's account courts controversy on a few points but offers a fascinating counterpoint to much recent scholarship.