Hitler's Charisma Leading Millions into the Abyss

by REES, LAURENCE

• ISBN13: 9780307377296
• ISBN10: 0307377296
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-16
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

Uniquely comprehensive and compelling: an historian's effort to explore the inexplicable amalgam of circumstances and events that transformed a lost individual into one of the most famous/infamous historical figures of our time. At the age of twenty-four, in 1913, Adolf Hitler was eking out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Nothing marked him in any way as exceptional, but he did possess certain distinguishing characteristics: a capacity to hate, an inability to accept criticism, a massive overconfidence in his own abilities. He was a socially and emotionally inadequate individual without direction, from whence came a sense of personal mission that would transform these weaknesses and liabilities into strengths-certainties that would provide him not only with a sense of identity, but of purpose in a communal enterprise. This is the focus of Laurence Rees's social, psychological, and historical investigation into the formation of a personality whose determination and vision would at the outset convince a small group of like-minded political and social outcasts and would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.

Author Biography

Laurence Rees is the writer, director and producer of the BBC TV series The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler. The former head of BBC Television History programs, he has specialized for the last twenty years in writing books and making television documentaries about the Nazis and World War II. Previous projects that were both series and books include Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution and World War II Behind Closed Doors.
 
In 2006 Rees won the British Book Award for History Book of the Year for Auschwitz. Educated at Oxford University, he was appointed in 2009 a senior visiting fellow in the International History Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2010 he launched the multimedia website WW2History.com, which won best in class awards in the education and reference categories at the 2011 Interactive Media Awards. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
PART ONE—THE ROAD TO POWER
1. Discovering a Mission
2. Making a Connection
3. Searching for a Hero
4. Developing a Vision
5. Offering Hope in a Crisis
6. Being Certain
PART TWO—JOURNEY TO WAR
7. The Man Who Will Come
8. The Importance of Enemies
9. The Lure of the Radical
10. The Thrill of Release
11. Turning Vision Into Reality
PART THREE—RISK AND REWARD
12. The Great Gamble
13. Charisma and Overconfidence
14. False Hope and the Murder Of Millions
PART FOUR—BLOOD AND DEATH
15. Last Chance
16. The Death of Charisma
PHOTO SECTION CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
INDEX