Hitler

Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, IanKershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. Hitler here emerges from obscurity to uncontested rule over a disillusioned people desperate to escape from political and economic chaos. Hitler's path to power leads from the anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna through the First World War, the nationalism of Bavaria in the 1920s, and the undermining of German democracy by extremists of the right and left that opens the door for his seizure of the state in 1933. Drawing on previously untapped sources—including Joseph Goebbels's diaries, recently discovered in Moscow—this volume ends with the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the fringes of society and the march of the German army into the Rhineland, Hitler's first step toward the abyss of war. Horrifying, unstoppably readable, rich with analysis whose implications remain all too relevant as we near the end of Hitler's century, this is "biography of profound importance" (Thomas Childers, Boston Globe).