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 & 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. Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his 30-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried & rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of WWI. 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 20s the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right & the Left the hysteria that accompanied Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 & then mounted in brutal attacks by his storm troopers on Jews & 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 & ultimately to the leadership of a ragtag alliance of right-wing parties fused into a movement that enthralled the German people. This volume 1st of two ends with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer fringes of society & with the march of the German army into the Rhineland Hitler's initial move toward the abyss of war.
