Hitler - I. Kershaw

The end of the postwar European order which was the legacy of the Third Reich provides a fitting moment to reassess the foundations of Hitler's calamitously destructive power. This interpretative study makes no claim to offer a new biography of Hitler. In some ways its approach is indeed quite non-biographical. It focuses directly upon the nature and mechanics, the character and exercise of Hitler's dictatorial power.;It asks why Hitler of all the nationalist-racist fanatics with roughly similar views in Germany after the First World War should find such mass appeal, how such an unlikely candidate could gain control of the machinery of a complex modern state, why - contrary to expectations - his power was not curtailed by the traditional ruling classes but broke all constraints, what his personal role in the shaping of policy amounted to, and whether he was indeed personally directing policy and taking the key decisions down to the very end.;It finds the underlying answers, to these questions in the peculiar form of personalized "charismatic" rule which became attached to Hitler as the embodiment of a wide range of social expectations and resentments. It examines the way in which all forms of legality and rationally ordered government were inexorably undermined through a readiness to "work towards the Fuhrer" - towards Hitler's presumed intentions. It sees Hitler's power in large measure as the product of the collaboration and tolerance, miscalculations and weakness of others in positions of power and influence. It suggests that the progressive extension of Hitler's power was mainly the consequence of the concessions and capitulations which others were prepared to make. It attempts, in short, to explain Hitler through the social motivations, governmental disorder, and international disarray which made his catastrophic exercise of power possible.