The goal of these books, and thousands of others, is - in the words of the title of Ron Rosenbaum’s fascinating study - “explaining Hitler.” Hitler cries out for explanation, and perhaps always will, because even when we know all the facts, his story remains incredible, unacceptable. Hitler’s very face has become a universally recognizable icon of evil, along with the swastika, the symbol of his Nazi Party.Įver since Hitler came to power in 1933, writers have been trying to fathom him, and he is already the subject of major biographies by Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest and Ian Kershaw. Extraordinary, too, was the amount of destruction and suffering for which he was responsible: the tens of millions of soldiers and civilians killed in World War II, the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust, the countless prisoners tortured and murdered in his concentration camps. In the sheer unlikely speed of his rise - and then of his catastrophic fall - Hitler was a phenomenon with few precedents in world history. At 43, Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and by 52 he could claim to be the most powerful man in the history of Europe, with an empire that spanned the continent. Yet within a few years, large crowds of Nazi supporters would be hailing this anonymous failure as their Führer.
He was never promoted, the regimental adjutant explained, because he “lacked leadership qualities.” When war broke out in 1914, he entered the German Army as a private, and when the war ended four years later, he was still a private. He had never held a job during his years in the Austrian capital before World War I, he survived by peddling his paintings and postcards, and was sometimes homeless. As a young man, he had dreamed of being a painter or an architect, but he was rejected twice from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.
He had no close friends and was probably still a virgin. When Adolf Hitler turned 30, in 1919, his life was more than half over, yet he had made not the slightest mark on the world. HITLER Ascent 1889-1939 By Volker Ullrich Translated by Jefferson Chase Illustrated.