Hitler Hardcover - 2001

From the publisher

Front Flap In this now classic account, Ian Kershaw takes an innovative approach to the Hitler story. By putting forward the idea of Hitler as a 'charismatic leader' Kershaw tries to find answers to the questions of why Hitler of all the nationalist-racist fanatics with roughly similar views in Germany after the First World War should find such appeal, how such an unlikely figure as Hitler could come to wield such extraordinary personalised power, what his personal role in the shaping of policy amounted to, and whether he was indeed personally directing policy and taking the key decisions down to the very end. Hitler is portayed by Kershaw as a social product, not a demonic figure. He is depicted as the product of a society at a particular conjuncture - a society gripped by an extraordinary and comprehensive crisis of values, an overwhelming cultural as well as political, social and economic crisis. In the fourteen years that follwed the end of the First World War, he gradually emerged as the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses and eventually transformed himself into what over thirteen million Germans saw as the hope of national salvation. Ian Kershaw offers original insights into