PHitler 1889-1936: Hubris (Hoogmoed)
From his 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..In an account drawing on many previously untapped so u r c e s - including Joseph Goebbels's diaries, recently discovered in Moscow - Hitler metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a 'drummer' sounding an insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of the infamous failed putsch , to t he l e ad ership of a ragtag alliance of right-wing bullies and fanatics whose fusion created the Nazi party - the movement that would enthrall and invigorate a disillusioned people desperate to be rescued from the economic privation of pos tw ar Ger man y. W ith nuanced care, Kershaw assesses the response of ordinary Germans to Hitler the man and to his message of a new dawn for a country hemmed in by old foes, a message shot through with racist fantasies. This volume, the first of tw o, ends wit h t he prom ulgation 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 first steps toward the abyss of war. Fascinating and d istu rbi ng, r ich w ith ins ight and analysis whose implications remain all too relevant as we near the end of Hitler's century."
