Hitler Biographies
2 total works
Selected as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Times
Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Fuhrer had no private life.
Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Fuhrer. While charting in detail Hitler's life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.
Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Fuhrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile - and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the cliched image of the monster.
This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.
'Meticulous... Probably the most disturbing portrait of Hitler I have ever read' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'There will never be a definitive life of Hitler. The subject is too vast, the man too contradictory and the sources unmanageable. But Volker Ullrich's biography comes as close as we can reasonably expect' Jonathan Sumption
In the summer of 1939 Hitler was at the zenith of his power. The Nazis had consolidated their authority over the German people, and in a series of foreign-policy coups, the Fuhrer had restored Germany to the status of a major Continental power. He now embarked on realising his lifelong ambition: to provide the German people with the living space and the resources they needed to flourish and exterminate those who were standing in the way - the Bolsheviks and the Jews.
Yet despite the initial German triumphs - the quick defeat of Poland, the successful Blitzkrieg in the west - the war set in motion Hitler's downfall. With the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the entry of the United States into the war later that year, Nazi Germany's fortunes began to turn: it soon became clear that the war could not be won.
As in the earlier volume, Volker Ullrich offers fascinating insight into the personality of the Fuhrer, without which we fail to understand the course of the war and the development of the Holocaust. As Germany's supreme military commander, he decided on strategy and planned operations with his generals, involving himself in even the smallest minutiae. And here the key traits - and flaws - of his personality quickly came to the fore. Hitler was a gambler who put everything on one card; deeply insecure, he was easily shaken by the slightest setback and quick to blame his subordinates for his own catastrophic mistakes; and when he realised that the war was lost, he embarked on the annihilation of Germany itself in punishment of the German people who had failed to hand him victory.
In September 1939, Hitler declared that he would wear a simple military tunic until the war was won - or otherwise, he would not be there to witness the end. On 30 April 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on his bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide; seven days later, Germany surrendered. Hitler's murderous ambitions had not just destroyed Germany: they had cost the lives of tens of millions of people throughout Europe.
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020*