The Hitler Years
2 primary works
Book 1
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government by President Hindenburg. Within a few months he had installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his leftwing opponents, terrorising the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life.
He embarked on a crash programme on militaristic Keynesianism, reviving the economy and achieving full employment through massive public works, vast armaments spending and the cancellations of foreign debts. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany seemed to have been reborn as a brutal and determined European power.
Over the course of the years from 1933 to 1939, Hitler won over most of the population to his vision of a renewed Reich. In these years of domestic triumph, cunning manoeuvres, pitting neighbouring powers against each other and biding his time, we see Hitler preparing for the moment that would realise his ambition. But what drove Hitler's success was also to be the fatal flaw of his regime: a relentless belief in war as the motor of greatness, a dream of vast conquests in Eastern Europe and an astonishingly fanatical racism.
In The Hitler Years, Frank McDonough charts the rise and fall of the Third Reich under Hitler's hand. The first volume, Triumph, ends after Germany's comprehensive military defeat of Poland in 1939.
Book 2
At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat.
Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust.
In The Hitler Years ~ Disaster 1940-1945, Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich, and challenges long-held accounts of the Holocaust and Germany's ultimate defeat.
Despite Hitler's grand ambitions and the successful early stages of the Third Reich's advances into Europe, Frank McDonough argues that Germany was only ever a middle-ranking power and never truly stood a chance against the combined forces of the Allies.
Praise for Frank McDonough:'Superbly scholarly and just as readable' Dan Snow
'The Hitler Years ~ Disaster and its companion volume, The Hitler Years ~ Triumph, are not just informative on a nearly encyclopaedic level, they are well-researched, well-structured, and well-written. What's more, they are relevant and challenging. Through questioning the myths that still exist, they encourage the reader to think in a new way, not just about the past, but about the present and the future' Get History
'McDonough has provided fascinating insights into the experiences of Germans in a fickle and frightening world' The Times, on The Gestapo