Hitler

Ian Kershaw’s claim to fame, besides this two-volume bio generally acknowledged to be the standard life of Hitler, is his thesis of “working toward the Führer.” What he meant is that in the Nazi state Hitler didn’t have to issue orders for everything that took place. He just needed to set an ideological direction and his people, so completely enamored of his leadership, would willingly innovate and dedicate themselves in a spirit of “working toward” what they believed he would want. It doesn’t explain everything, but it captures how genuinely and comprehensively popular Hitler was at his height.

I have read a number of books about Hitler, including Alan Bullock’s early classic “Hitler: A Study in Tyranny,” and Volker Ullrich’s more recent two-volume biography (also very good), but Kershaw’s work is the best effort to explain how this complete nobody who wandered the streets of Vienna nearly penniless could have ended up the conqueror of Europe and the greatest criminal of modern times. If, like me, you are endlessly intrigued and horrified by this quintessential 20th-century saga, Kershaw’s biography is an essential read. — Chris, June 18, 2026

Synopsis from online sources:

From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in this century. Ian Kershaw’s Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I. With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the settings that made Hitler’s rise possible: the virulent anti-Semitism of prewar Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense casualties, the toxic nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the 1920s, the undermining of the Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right and the Left, the hysteria that accompanied Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 and then mounted in brutal attacks by his storm troopers on Jews and others condemned as enemies of the Aryan race. In an account drawing on many previously untapped sources, Hitler metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a “drummer” sounding an insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of an infamous failed putsch and, ultimately, to the leadership of a ragtag alliance of right-wing parties fused into a movement that enthralled the German people.

This volume, the first of two, ends with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer fringes of society, and with the march of the German army into the Rhineland, Hitler’s initial move toward the abyss of war.

The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw’s two-volume masterpiece “as close to definitive as anything we are likely to see,” and that promise is fulfilled in this stunning second volume. As “Nemesis” opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head. “[M]ore probing, more judicious, more authoritative in its rich detail…more commanding in its mastery of the horrific narrative.” — Milton J. Rosenberg, Chicago Tribune