Young Hitler
The Making of the Führer
Pegasus Books 2018
Was Hitler a freak of history? Or an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue who will do and say anything to seize power? Who thrives on chaos and who personifies, in his words and actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?
Hitler never accepted the German defeat in the Great War. He satiated his thirst for revenge on the ‘November criminals’ who had signed the Armistice, the socialists whom he accused of stabbing the army in the back and, most violently, the Jews whom he saw as a direct threat to the master race of his imagination and on whose shoulders he would pile Germany’s woes.
In this short, concise biography of the Führer’s early years, I connect the source of Hitler’s consuming hatred to his experiences on the Western Front, a defining period of his life that major biographies have underplayed. I show how the Great War forged an already deeply disturbed mind into the architect of the Holocaust.