Hitler: An Illustrated Life - Softcover

Cross, Robin

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9781848660328: Hitler: An Illustrated Life

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848660324 ISBN 13: 9781848660328

Publisher: Quercus Publishing, 2009

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[From Foreword] These pages follow the grim career of Adolf Hitler from his modest origins to the pinnacle of power, and trace the downward curve of the descent to his death and that of the Nazi Party, recording the havoc and destruction that was heaped on Russia and Europe by the Fuhrer's armies - and on Germany itself as a result of his rule. However, the principal task which confronts any attempt to explain Hitler's early life and thought is that of disentangling the would-be politician of the early 1920s from the penniless dilletante ranting to his cronies in pre-war Vienna. In 1912 Hitler was a nobody, whose fantasies of fame had been rudely shattered. Twelve years later he was a rising politician, a man with a following, whose world view reached many more than his audience of idlers klling time in the reading room of a Men's Home to which his poverty had driven him. Adolf Hitler had a story to tell, and few would emerge in later years to challenge him on the facts. The pre-1914 Hitler was, seemingly, a man with no political ambitions but with a mind nevertheless attuned to the turbulent cross-currents threatening to swamp the ailing Austro-Hungarian ship of state: Pan-Germanism and its antagonism towards the empire�??s Slav population; anti-Semitism, sometimes casual, often deep-dyed, which was part and parcel of nationalist politics; and a deep suspicion of both the Catholic Church and of Social Democracy. The post-1918 Hitler, however, nationalist, xenophobe and zealot, was possessed by high ambition and greed for absolute power. With absolute determination and a gift for oratory, he watered the seeds of hatred that would result in a catastrophe for millions. Adolf Hitler, contradictory and mercurial, was in the end a destroyer who left only chaos and misery behind him. In the early twenty-first century we are still living with his toxic legacy.

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