Hitler's Charisma

by REES, LAURENCE

• ISBN13: 9780307389589
• ISBN10: 0307389588
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2014-01-28
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

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, and 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 a personality that would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.

(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

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.