konrad heiden hitler a biography

We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Bookreader Item Preview

Share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

492 Previews

17 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Tracey Gutierres on August 26, 2013

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

• All Articles
• Books & Reviews
• Anthologies
• Audio Content
• Author Directory
• This Day in History
• War in Ukraine
• Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Artificial Intelligence
• Climate Change
• Biden Administration
• Geopolitics
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Vladimir Putin
• Volodymyr Zelensky
• Nationalism
• Authoritarianism
• Propaganda & Disinformation
• West Africa
• North Korea
• Middle East
• United States
• View All Regions

Article Types

• Capsule Reviews
• Review Essays
• Ask the Experts
• Reading Lists
• Newsletters
• Customer Service
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Subscriber Resources
• Group Subscriptions
• Gift a Subscription

Browse book reviews by:

• Magazine Issue

Select your cookie preferences

We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie notice . We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements.

If you agree, we'll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie notice . Your choice applies to using first-party and third-party advertising cookies on this service. Cookies store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. The 96 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Click "Decline" to reject, or "Customise" to make more detailed advertising choices, or learn more. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences , as described in the Cookie notice. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy notice .

• Countries & Regions

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Hitler : A Biography . Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1938

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Constable & Co.
• Publication date 1 Jan. 1938
• See all details

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0008B4JX0
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Constable & Co. (1 Jan. 1938)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages

About the author

Konrad heiden.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 100%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

Top reviews from other countries.

• UK Modern Slavery Statement
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Associates Programme
• Fulfilment by Amazon
• Seller Fulfilled Prime
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• The Amazon Barclaycard
• Credit Card
• Amazon Money Store
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Payment Methods Help
• Shop with Points
• Top Up Your Account
• Top Up Your Account in Store
• COVID-19 and Amazon
• Track Packages or View Orders
• Delivery Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Amazon Mobile App
• Customer Service
• Accessibility

• Conditions of Use & Sale
• Privacy Notice
• Cookies Notice
• Interest-Based Ads Notice

Spartacus Educational

Konrad heiden, konrad heiden and hitler, geli raubal, konrad heiden expelled from nazi germany, adolf hitler's biographer, primary sources, (1) konrad heiden, history of national socialism (1932).

His utterly logical way of thought is Hitler's strength. There seems to be no other German politician of the present day who has the moral courage that he possesses to draw the inevitable conclusions from any given situation, to announce them despite the mockery of those who think they know better, and above all, to act on them. It is this gift of logic which makes Hitler's speeches so convincing.

(2) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

Hitler had sent word to his hostess that he had to attend an important meeting and would not arrive until late: I think it was about eleven o'clock. He came, none the less, in a very decent blue suit and with an extravagantly large bouquet of roses, which he presented to his hostess as he kissed her hand. While he was being introduced, he wore the expression of a public prosecutor at an execution. I remember being struck by his voice when he thanked the lady of the house for tea or cakes, of which, incidentally, he ate an amazing quantity. It was a remarkably emotional voice, and yet it made no impression of conviviality or intimacy but rather of harshness. However, he said hardly anything but sat there in silence for about an hour; apparently he was tired. Not until the hostess was so incautious as to let fall a remark about the Jews, whom she defended in a jesting tone, did he begin to speak and then he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave. The rest of the company, who apparently had not pleased him, were only vouchsafed a curt bow from the doorway.

(3) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

Suddenly this man, who looked awkward while he was standing around, has begun to speak, filling the room with his voice, riding over interruptions or contradictions by his domineering manner, sending cold shudders down the backs of everyone present by the savagery of his manner.... Awed, the listener feels that something new has come into the room. This thundering demon was not there earlier; this is not the same shy man with contracted shoulders.

(4) Konrad Heiden, Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944)

The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses. The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration. In forever setting new and contradictory assertions before his audience, Hitler is tapping the outwardly shapeless substance of public opinion with instruments of varying metals and varying weights. When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind. The mass, however, is a phenomenon of deepest world importance - this levelled conglomeration of fools and wise men, heroes and cowards, proud and humble, the unusual and the average. This mass, with its anonymous intellectual pressure, its unexpected moods and unconscious desires, mirrors and echoes the commanding force of prevailing conditions; it embodies and personifies the necessities and resistances of the objective world; it expresses the silent command of Fate in a mysterious murmur. It is the art of the great propagandist to detect this murmur and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action. If he can do this, his utterances and actions may be full of contradictions - because the contradictions lie in the things themselves; they may be deceptive and misleading. The lies of propaganda reveal the deeper truth of the whole world's cynicism and dishonesty. By his lies the great propagandist involuntarily shows himself to be an honest, self-revealing prophet of the Devil. Hitler's profound, rapacious, avid eye for the weakness of this intellectual age, awaiting only the man who can master it, is revealed in the natural affinity between a depersonalized soul and a depersonalized world. The more passionately Hitler harps on the value of personality, the more clearly he reveals his nostalgia for something that is lacking. Yes, he knows this mass world, he knows how to guide it by "compliance". He is like the crafty dope addict who manages to get his poison despite all efforts of his physicians and guards to prevent him. Hitler's mind directs a personality without centre, a restlessly pulsating force without constancy and firmness, oscillating like the needle of a magnet, trembling and dancing, but always finding the - momentary - north.

(5) Ron Rosenbaum , Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (1998)

Konrad Heiden, the highly respected though somewhat Suetonian biographer of Hitler who had contacts within Hitler's Brown House demimonde, will only go so far as to say that Hitler entertained perverse fantasies about Geli: only Otto Strasser goes so far as to suggest they were consummated, although he claims he heard the details from Geli herself. Heiden places the moment of change in the relationship at a point sometime before Hitler moved into his princely new residence with Geli. Indeed, Heiden believes Hitler's approach to Geli led to an elaborate hushed-up scandal that became "one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings." Here, then, in Heiden's words is the locus classicus of the Hitler perversion legend. The story Heiden tells has had a remarkable longevity and influence; it echoes in the subcurrent of Hitler rumor and gossip that was picked up by the OSS's Walter Langer, who gave it the imprimatur of official intelligence. It's a story gloated over "like some gardener with a rare and lovely bloom" (as it was said Hitler gloated over Geli) by psychohistorians and psychoanalysts who have felt that here must be the dark, hidden, repressed truth about Hitler's psyche. It's been picked up and mythologized in the fictions of Thomas Pynchon (his Geli-like figure in Gravity's Rainbow) and Steve Erickson (Geli, the veiled central figure in Tours of the Black Clock, is a kind of Scheherazade of pornography for Hitler).

(6) Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936)

One day parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side ... simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected "Uncle Alf" to make things easy for her. Her uncle's affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler's ancestry in its borderline incestuousness. At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away: it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls "undinism" (the desire to be urinated upon for sexual gratification)... The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady's son, a certain Doctor Rudolph; perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler's change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication: it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason. Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph's intention to make it public.

(6) The New York Times (20th July, 1966)

Until other scholars began their work on Nazi documents after World War II Mr. Heiden was the best-known authority outside Germany on the party and its leaders.... To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One ofthe Nazis' acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books. Mr. Heiden is sometimes given credit for popularizing the word "Nazi." The National Socialists were known in their earliest days by the conventional abbreviation "Naso" until Mr. Heiden, it was said. began using "Nazi"-Bavarian slang for "bumpkin" or "simpleton" in his articles.... The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision.... As a writer for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung ... his special assignment was the Nazi party. It was said that Hitler sometimes refused to start meetings until Mr. Heiden arrived. In 1930 he left the paper to manage an anti-Nazi newspaper syndicate in Berlin. In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over... In 1933, he fled.

$0.00 ( 0 Items)

Hitler: a biography.

By: Heiden, Konrad

Price:   $995.00

Quantity: 1 available

Condition: Good

• Description

viii, 416 pages. Heiden "has drawn on a large quantity of information obtained over a period of 15 years from the men closest to Hitler, besides the confidential records of the authorities in Munich and Berlin and a mass of pamphlets, books and obscure newspapers stored in public libraries and archives. It can safely be said that this is the most authoritative account of Hitler's life that has reached the public." - from dust jacket (not included). Contents clean and unmarked with mild age-toning. Average wear to original brown cloth, lettered orange on spine. Binding intact. Includes replica dust jacket copied from a heavily-worn original. Bibliographic References: Kehr and Langmaid 671, Madden pp 68.; 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall; Adolph Hitler Biography Nazi Germany History Fuehrer Schicklgruber Genealogy

Title: Hitler: A Biography

Author: Heiden, Konrad

Edition: First English Edition

Location Published: London, Constable & Co Ltd: 1936

Binding: Hardcover

Categories: History , Biography

Seller ID: 322h1131

Keywords: adolph hitler biography nazi germany history fuehrer schicklgruber genealogy

Other Magazines You Might Enjoy

Hitler's Secret Book - Recently Discovered And Now Published For The First Time - The Long-Suppressed Sequel to Mein Kampf

By: A.H.; Taylor, Telford (Introduction); Attanasio, Salvator (Translator)

Price:   $950.00

Secret Germany - Claus Von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler

By: Baigent, Michael; Leigh, Richard

Price:   $69.95

The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April (Apr.) 1922 - August (Aug.) 1939: Volume II (2 / Two) Only

By: Baynes, Norman H.; Hitler, Adolf

Films and Filming Magazine, June 1978 - Cover photo of Bud Cort in 'Hitler's Son'

By: Bertolucci, Bernardo; Sutherland, Donald; Wlaschin, Ken; Gay, Ken

Price:   $99.95

Rare Book Cellar

HITLER A BIOGRAPHY

London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1936. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Item #304124 Good+ in boards. Library stamps on front pastedown, FEP, and title page. Front flap glued to front pastedown. Spine cocked. Toning throughout. Bumping on spine crown and heel. Light shelfwear on panels and spine.

Price: $1,149.95

Join Our Mailing List

I'd like to be notified of new arrivals in the following categories., check all categories that are of interest to you..

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

The Fuhrer: Hitler's Rise to Power Paperback – October 14, 1999

• Print length 624 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Carroll & Graf
• Publication date October 14, 1999
• Dimensions 5.25 x 1.75 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 078670683X
• ISBN-13 978-0786706839
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Carroll & Graf; Reprint edition (October 14, 1999)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 078670683X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786706839
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.75 x 8 inches
• #10,107 in German History (Books)
• #31,226 in World War II History (Books)
• #334,162 in Biographies (Books)

About the authors

Ralph manheim.

Ralph Frederick Manheim (April 4, 1907 – September 26, 1992) was an American translator of German and French literature, as well as occasional works from Dutch, Polish and Hungarian. He likened translation to acting, the role being "to impersonate his author".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Konrad Heiden

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 52% 20% 10% 4% 13% 52%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 52% 20% 10% 4% 13% 20%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 52% 20% 10% 4% 13% 10%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 52% 20% 10% 4% 13% 4%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 52% 20% 10% 4% 13% 13%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Inner Lives of the Nazis

Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, and the author of the definitive three-volume account of German history from 1918 to 1945. A professor emeritus of history at Cambridge, Evans has just released his latest book, “ Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich ,” an examination of the lives of individual Nazis, from leaders, such as Himmler and Goebbels, to lower-level servants of the regime.

I read Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich in 2016, between Donald Trump’s election victory and his Inauguration, out of some combination of morbid anxiety and perhaps the need to be reminded that things could always be much worse than they seemed at the time. And indeed, in the introduction to this latest book, he asks, “How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” and makes clear that the project was motivated by a desire to understand the rise of right-wing politicians across the world during the past decade.

I recently spoke by phone with Evans. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different ways in which historians have tried to make sense of Hitler’s personality, how changing trends in German history have altered our understanding of the Nazis, and why many of Hitler’s closest associates have been misunderstood.

You say in the book that the idea for it arose in part because of new scholarship on the Nazis that’s come out since you finished your trilogy. What was that new scholarship, and why did it make you think that you wanted to do this?

Well, there was some real resistance against biographies, especially among German historians, up to around the turn of the century. Obviously, the great-man theory of history, the cult of the individual under Nazism, all of that made the idea of taking a biographical approach rather unfashionable. After I’d written my three-volume narrative history of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich, I moved on to other subjects. But involvement in a couple of television series which took a biographical approach made me realize that, despite all my work, I didn’t actually know a lot of the leading figures, not to mention others further down the chain of command in the Nazi movement. And in the meantime, historians had got much less allergic to the idea of biography, so a whole raft of biographies had appeared.

Notably, of course, there was Ian Kershaw’s wonderful two-volume biography of Hitler. But also a terrific biography of Ernst Röhm by Eleanor Hancock, biographies of Goebbels and Himmler by Peter Longerich, and a whole series of others, concluding with Volker Ullrich’s big, German, two-volume biography of Hitler, which added more detail to Kershaw. And on top of that there were also a lot of new documents, amazingly actually. You’d think everything had been released, but that was not true at all. So, thirty-two volumes of Goebbels’s diaries. Himmler’s appointments book came out in two volumes, with the second volume only a couple of years ago, after it had been discovered in an obscure Russian archive. I wrote a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, just a few years ago, so that also made me interested in writing biographies, and in biographical approaches to Nazism.

You said there was some skepticism about the idea of biography and the great-man theory of history from Germans. I know there had been some German biographies of Hitler, like the famous one by Joachim Fest, in the early nineteen-seventies. But you’re saying that because of the experience of Nazism, there was some resistance to pursuing biographies within Germany of the leading Nazi figures?

That’s right. Joachim Fest was a conservative journalist, not an academic historian, and he produced this book which was one of the first general histories of Nazism, in 1970, called “The Face of the Third Reich,” which did actually base itself on biographical chapters of leading Nazis, and a few representative figures. And nothing like that had been done since. And so, in a way, my book is based on Fest’s book, which is why I subtitled it “The Faces of the Third Reich.” But of course we know vastly more now than Fest did. And as I said, the real turning point came at the turn of the century—so fairly recently.

The turning point of more people willing to engage with this in Germany, you mean?

That’s right. When I began working on modern German history, the leading historians in Germany at the time, people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, had this wonderful phrase of condemnation for people who took the biographical approach, which was “ personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung ,” meaning “personalizing historiography.” And indeed, the great classic works of modern history produced in the eighties and nineties had hardly any people in them at all, and certainly did not use quotations from individuals. They took a much more lofty approach, and used social-science approaches, and functionalist sociology in particular. We’ve moved away from that.

This is interesting because it’s not obvious that that would be the German response to the crimes of the Third Reich. You could have easily said, “Well, if you’re a country that perpetrated this, you want to blame it on the personalities of a few deranged individuals rather than looking for broader approaches.”

You have to switch back to the immediate postwar period, when there were numerous war-crimes trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. But most small fry, as it were, got away, and there was a national amnesia, particularly in West Germany. And it wasn’t really until after 1968 and the generational change that came about then with the student revolts and so on that things began to change—particularly after the reunification of Germany, in 1990, where you had more war-crimes trials. You’ve got the Holocaust coming to the center of historical approaches, particularly in the United States, but elsewhere, too. So the focus was on individual responsibility and on prosecuting those remaining war criminals who had survived, most of them now fairly elderly. But there was a long period in which that approach was not really adopted.

How did writing this book change your view of Hitler specifically?

Well, I decided to go back to the original sources, which was something my old tutor in Oxford, Martin Gilbert, said. I was his last undergraduate pupil before he became the official biographer of Winston Churchill. And he always sent me to the sources, and said, “Hey, don’t bother about arguments and about reading other historians.” So, in this instance, I followed his advice and plowed my way through a new, big, annotated, scholarly two-volume edition of “Mein Kampf,” multivolume editions of his speeches, and his writings, and declarations, and so on, and a number of new things emerged.

I hadn’t realized before the importance of what he emphasized in his speeches of the last years of the Weimar Republic. So, 1929 to 1932, when Hitler and Nazism really became popular. His emphasis was on restoring unity to the German people, on overcoming divisions he thought were hampering Germany.

I found an extraordinary speech given to Party members in 1930 before he came to power, about how Germany was going to rule the world. He used the word “ Weltherrschaft ,” which is “dominating the world,” essentially. And he said Germany had missed out in the first division of the world, as it were, a division of the spoils in the so-called scramble for Africa, and the era of colonialism in the eighteen-eighties. There’s going to be a war, he says quite openly to his followers in the Party, And we are going to win, and we’re going to take control of the world. It’s quite extraordinary. Of course, once he was in power, he wasn’t so open about it because a lot of his foreign-policy speeches in the thirties are designed to deceive other countries. But what he says to his followers is very revealing.

And so what did that tell you about him? What did you take from that?

A lot of historians and other observers have wanted to portray the scale of his ambitions as limited. There was no limit of time or space to his ambition for Germany as he saw it.

I read Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, and I read the first two volumes of Stephen Kotkin’s life of Stalin. And I know some historians have tried to compare and contrast Hitler and Stalin, Alan Bullock most famously. What stuck out to me about it—and this is not a moral comment because they’re two of the most hideous men who have ever lived—but Stalin very much in Kotkin’s book is interacting with the world. He’s writing letters to people that seem sane. He’s commenting on art and culture and literature. He’s interacting with his wife in a sort of, I won’t say normal way, but he’s interacting with her in a sort of human way, at least part of the time. Whereas Hitler seems much less human.

Well, historians and biographers, including Ian Kershaw in those books, which I hugely admire, have tried to portray Hitler as a “man without qualities,” to quote the title of a very famous novel at the time. And I think they’re accepting Hitler too much at his own valuation of himself. Hitler would always say, I don’t have a private life. I’ve sacrificed everything for Germany. When people said, Why aren’t you married? He said, I’m married to Germany. In bios by Peter Longerich and others, it is very much the same portrayal. But, in fact, if you look closely, he did have a relatively normal, if you like, personal life. He fell in love. He had girlfriends. He eventually settled for Eva Braun, a much younger woman, but that’s not unique. I was struck by his medical records—his personal doctor, Theodor Morell, kept a very detailed log of what he prescribed, what drugs he gave, and all the rest of it, in case Hitler died suddenly. It’s very striking that before he spent a night with Eva Braun, he took a Viagra-like preparation made from bull’s testicles.

I thought your portrait of many of the high-ranking Nazis in this book was interesting because you don’t shy away from saying that at some level they were charlatans and cranks, but you do try to present them as being more complex than foaming-at-the-mouth monsters, talking about their interest in culture and so on.

Historians tended to write off the leading Nazis as psychopaths, as individually disturbed, or as marginal to German society in some way or another. And I think that’s a very worrying way of looking at them because it’s to detach them from the rest of us. It’s a way of saying, “They’re not human beings, so we don’t have to worry about the characteristics they would share with us.” And I try to present them as human beings. It’s clear, and this is another thing I learned, that they come, the leading Nazis—so Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Hitler himself—from the center of German society. They were solidly middle-class. They are not criminals, outcasts, marginal people. Joachim Fest, in his book “The Face of the Third Reich” was quite fond of describing them as petits bourgeois, but that’s a real kind of snobbery. Most were entirely respectable middle-class, not one single ex-communist or ex-socialist, nobody from the working class.

There’s actually a controversy going on in Germany at the moment about whether it is legitimate to “humanize” the Nazis. It’s around a film, a movie about Hitler and Goebbels, “Führer und Verführer,” leader and seducer, if you like. And I’m with those who defend that movie by saying, Nazis, yes, they were human. It makes it more difficult for us, of course, but we can’t just write them off as not being human. I was quite surprised to find the kind of bourgeois cultural accomplishments of some of them.

Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, the governor general of Poland, was apparently an accomplished pianist. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most ruthless implementers of the Holocaust in the S.S., was almost a professional-level violinist. These were often cultured people. There’s a fantastic movie made during the war for American troops to tell them what they’re fighting against, called “The Hitler Gang.” It portrays the story of Nazism in the style of a nineteen-thirties gangster movie. It was very funny, but it’s very misleading. This was not a gang of criminals in occupation of Germany; these are people who came out of the middle of German society.

How much did you think in looking at these men as individuals—I’m talking about Hitler and other high-level Nazis—that they were driven by antisemitism specifically?

I was not surprised by the extent to which they were all driven by antisemitism. It’s very rare in the Nazi leadership to find someone who is not driven by antisemitism. Albert Speer, who came relatively late to the Nazi leadership, claimed not to have been, but that’s not true at all. He bought into the ideology of Nazism. Others, such as Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, were fanatical antisemites. I think for some of them it was a personal, visceral hatred, while for others it was more a political imperative. But whatever the reasons, it spreads. It’s common across the Nazi leadership.

You also talk in this book about some people who were not high up in the regime, and whose roles have been debated by various scholars. What do you feel you learned in studying them?

Well, we’ve got two very different debates. One debate, from the nineteen-eighties, is about intentionalism versus functionalism. One side said Hitler was lazy, didn’t issue precise instructions, and so people had to guess what he would want. And when they guessed, they would always guess the most radical measure. And so that’s a self-radicalizing system, against so-called intentionalism, which is that everything happens because Hitler orders it to happen. And my view on that is in the middle. Hitler laid down the ground rules and the basic ideological parameters. And of course people sometimes had to fill in the details, but their guesses were always informed guesses. It’s Hitler who’s driving them on; it’s not a self-radicalization from below.

And then there’s a second debate, which took place in the nineties and two-thousands, about the motivation or conduct of what you might call low-level mass murderers, ordinary S.S. men, ordinary policemen, and even soldiers who massacre Jews—men, women, and children—in the course of the war. Is that a situation in which anybody in any time in history could have been impelled to operate, as Christopher Browning argues in his classic book “ Ordinary Men ”? You put people in a particular situation where there’s a war, their lives depend on the support of their comrades in the same unit, they have orders to kill, and so they carry them out?

Or is it, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen— who criticized Browning’s view —argued, a matter of the German national character? Goldhagen said that from the very beginning of German national consciousness—remember, Germany was not united, did not become a nation-state, until 1871—the whole drive toward a German nation-state had antisemitism as a key part of it. I disagree with that very strongly.

I guess I’m wondering how looking at more ordinary people changed the way you viewed German society and its complicity with the Third Reich.

Well, there’s been a huge body of work on ordinary perpetrators, partly sparked by the Browning-Goldhagen debate. We can now see the whole gamut of reasons why people carried out criminal orders, and it’s very interesting. I cite a journalist who, well after the war, in the sixties, attended a trial of former S.S. guards in Auschwitz who committed the most horrendous, sadistic, brutal crimes: murder, torture, and so on. And he said as they filed into the courtroom, and he saw these men, that they looked like kind of harmless bureaucrats, and many of them had fitted into postwar German society seamlessly. It was difficult to imagine how they committed these terrible crimes.

It’s rather reminiscent of what the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. These weren’t raving monsters. You have a Third Reich, which is constantly pumping out from every source—education, propaganda, newspapers, newsreels—hatred of Jews, blaming Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and for everything that went wrong in Germany in the nineteen-twenties. You have along with that a moral system of Nazi Germany that upends most what you might call normal moralities. So words like “brutal,” “ruthless,” and “barbaric” become positive words of approbation in the Nazi propaganda apparatus. So that’s the context within which you have to see ordinary individuals in Nazi Germany. But it doesn’t excuse them in any way.

We make our moral decisions within a context. Marx said, “People make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.” So to refer to that context doesn’t absolve people of the bad moral choices that they made. One of the things that Browning points out very effectively is that the policemen he studied were given the chance to say no when they were ordered to shoot Jews behind the Eastern Front during the war. And a number of them did, and they didn’t suffer any consequences.

About that Marx quote: one thing from your three-volume history that really struck me when I finished it was that there’s barely a page that went by where you’re not aware of the impact of the First World War and what it did to every aspect of German society.

Yes, there’s no change in my view. So right through these biographies I have just written in this book, the First World War emerges as a kind of massive social and psychological trauma. You can’t understand Nazism without beginning at the First World War, and that’s really absolutely crucial. One of the things that surprised me and I hadn’t been aware of before was how much Hitler, Himmler, and a lot of the other leading Nazis went through some kind of personal trauma, or family trauma. Some kind of dissent or loss of social status, loss of income, and so on.

And Hitler’s narrative, his central narrative, which he repeated endlessly in his speeches, was that he himself personally had suffered badly, was rescued by military service, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps in the twenties.

And he draws a parallel between that fate and the fate of the nation, which had suffered this terrible defeat in 1918, and then the Treaty of Versailles, and the humiliation of that, and then how he was going to rescue it. And indeed, how he did. He said, I rescued it from division, trauma, military humiliation, collapse, loss of international reputation, all the rest of it. And you can read that through the personal stories of many of the men who decided to follow him, and ended up playing crucial roles in Nazi Germany. ♦

More New Yorker Conversations

Naomi Klein sees uncanny doubles in our politics .

Olivia Rodrigo considers the meanings of “Guts.”

Isabel Allende’s vision of history .

Julia Fox didn’t want to be famous, but she knew she would be .

John Waters is ready for his Hollywood closeup .

Patrick Stewart boldly goes there .

Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today .

New Times, New Thinking.

Inside the court of Adolf Hitler

Richard J Evans’s group biography of the Third Reich’s enforcers provides a revelatory account of the Nazi mind.

By William Boyd

Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Röhm, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The roll-call is still grimly familiar some 80 years on from this motley and deeply unsavoury crew’s heyday. And I have to confess to a disquieting familiarity with these monsters’ lives as I spent many months in 2000 and 2001 researching and writing a six-hour TV drama series about Hitler’s astonishing rise to power over the years between 1913-33 – an unparalleled transformation from a homeless, mentally unstable, penniless vagrant in Vienna to the all-powerful chancellor of Germany in Berlin. I have shelves full of memoirs, histories, diaries and biographies of all the key Nazi players. The series was commissioned by the BBC and 20th Century Fox but was never made (Fox lost its nerve), but its conception – it wasn’t based on any book – absorbed and educated me in the history of the Third Reich and its noxious denizens. So, to open Hitler’s People was to renew acquaintances I thought I had left far behind. Scales fell from my eyes.

The premise behind Richard J Evans ’s utterly absorbing book is that a biographical approach to the history of the Third Reich will tell us more about the perverse culture and power struggles of those key personages who made up Hitler’s inner circle – and whose influence extended further down the food chain – than the overarching, geopolitical historical studies would. He presents us with 22 short biographies, or “portraits”, of the players he considers as crucial. They are congregated under four headings: the Leader, the Paladins, the Enforcers, and the Instruments. The result is an extraordinary rogues’ gallery of the Nazi elite and its more menial jobsworths. Intriguingly, although the Nazi programme was overwhelmingly male-driven, Evans identifies similarly enthusiastic cruelty among women in the lower ranks: Ilse Koch, Irma Grese and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink are among those he includes under the “Instruments” rubric. This top-to-toe analysis is as shocking as it is surprising.

Evans is a magisterial presence in the history of Hitler’s Third Reich. His three influential books – The Coming of the Third Reich , The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War – make him pre-eminently suited to assess the significant personalities in the court of Adolf Hitler and, of course, Der Führer, himself, the “Boss”.

Evans starts his brilliant hundred-page biography of Hitler with the sentence: “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody.” Here lies the utterly compelling paradox. As Evans reminds us, without Hitler there would have been no Third Reich, no Second World War and no Holocaust. How could this deranged young man, selling his mediocre postcards in 1913 Vienna, wearing a yellow cycling cape that failed to disguise his rank body odour, end up as chancellor of Germany 20 years later and, through his crazed ambitions, have plunged the Western world into war and brought about the deaths of millions of people?

There are many possible answers and Evans judiciously analyses all the more recent historical interpretations. We know far more about Nazi Germany today than ever before. The catastrophe and humiliation of the 1918 Armistice; the revolutionary movements and social unrest that then ensued in Germany; the debilitating depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash are all useful pieces of evidence that might explain the rise of the Nazi party (the highest vote the Nazis ever achieved was 37 per cent in the 1932 elections) and its drawn-out, bloody, disastrous denouement. But it seems to me that Evans’s biographical approach to understanding this phenomenon is perhaps the new route to some sort of enlightenment.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Of all the “Paladins” that Evans examines, the one that fascinates me most – and who played a significant role in my doomed TV series – is Albert Speer. Speer – tall, handsome, cultured, educated – was an architect, and the youngest member of the Nazi inner circle, only 40 years old at the end of the war. Hitler saw him as a putative son and Speer returned the “love”. It was Speer who first articulated the power of Führerkontakt – that bizarre charisma that Hitler, the most insignificant and undistinguished of men, seemed to possess in his pomp. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, an urbane, sophisticated American-German who was briefly a kind of PR official to the embryonic Nazi party in the 1920s described Hitler as having all the allure of a “suburban hairdresser on his day off”. And yet Hitler’s singular presence to his acolytes, and the German population, miraculously grew as his power grew. It seemed almost messianic – and he knew absolutely how to cultivate it.

Hitler promoted Speer to become the minister of armaments and munitions in 1942, supervising a vast population of forced labour of some 14 million, which kept the Nazi war machine working to its best ability. Hundreds of thousands of slave-labourers died under Speer’s watch yet, at his trial in Nuremberg after the war, he claimed to be ignorant of every aspect of the Nazi’s ruthless extermination process.

Speer’s “get-out-of-jail” ruse was to assert that, at the very end of the war, he had tried to gas Hitler in the bunker, and those in the bunker with him, and bring about an end to the conflict. Ironies abound – gassing Hitler? He failed, he said, because the ventilation towers of the bunker were too high. However, Speer’s intellectual, classy, soigné manner was persuasive in court. He wasn’t to be executed – he was sentenced instead to 20 years imprisonment. Another brutal irony – Speer’s number two, Fritz Sauckel, was executed for the crimes Speer’s organisation committed. Speer’s incarceration ended in 1966 and his memoir, Inside the Third Reich , became a bestseller and made its author an international celebrity, continually interviewed about his unique familiarity with the Hitlerian court. He spun his story extremely well. Speer died in 1981, after having a stroke in a London hotel while on a visit to his mistress.

Evans is unsparing about Speer, calling him out as a clever, manipulating, unscrupulous liar who finessed his way to avoid his justified execution as one of the mass murderers of the Nazi regime. However, his portraits of the other significant figures in the Hitler entourage are far more nuanced. Evans rejects the knee-jerk depiction of Himmler, Göring and Goebbels, et al, as sociopaths, deviants and losers. His short biographies weigh up all the new evidence and present these ghoulish, mythic personas as rounded, three-dimensional figures. They were, by and large, middle class, and from normal, happy families. They had clearly delineated personalities. Röhm was an accomplished pianist; Goebbels had earned a doctorate; Göring was an enthusiastic if erratic art collector. But all of them owed their ascent to power to one man, Adolf Hitler.

So what about the “Boss”? Evans says that, despite the mass of new material about Hitler, “opinion among historians and biographers remains deeply divided”. But it is clear that this ordinary, disturbed man was transmogrified into a sort of semi-deity that the German populace readily identified with. Evans argues that:

“Constant adulation further corrupted Hitler’s already narcissistic mentality. His arrogance and overconfidence, based on crude racial stereotypes, led him into fatal misjudgements during the war. The Americans, he declared, were “as stupid as chickens”. “The Russian colossus is collapsing under its immobility”. The “English” were “decadent”… From the very beginning, misled by the memory of World War I, Hitler grotesquely overestimated the ability of Germany, a medium-sized European power, to confront and defeat three vast empires, the British, American and Soviet, any one of which possessed resources that far exceeded its own. But for Hitler, economic statistics were irrelevant: what counted in his mind was strength of will, a reflection above all of what he supposed to be the Germans’ racial superiority.”

My conclusion, after spending many months reading and writing about Hitler and his “people”, was that the most cogent interpretation of his behaviour and abhorrent values, from the outset of his rise to power, was that he was insane. This was to be the message of my aborted TV series. “Deluded”, “narcissistic”, “egomaniacal” – similar interpretations don’t do enough to explain his actions. To me, Hitler’s fraught endgame in the bunker in April 1945 was the moment the veils were stripped away. The rambling, thought-disordered, drug-abusing, Parkinson’s-diseased, weirdo-nutter was, writ large, the man he had always been.

Martin Amis , in the afterword to his 2014 novel about the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest , would appear to agree with me. He wrote about Hitler that “we are continuing to beg an enormous question: the question of sanity… And madness, if we impute it (and how can we exclude it?) is bound to frustrate our investigation – because of course we will get no coherence, and no legible why, from the mad.” If you only read one book about Hitler and the short, bleak, horrendous life of Nazi Germany, then this is the one for you. Richard Evans’s superb and important account – with its dark and chilling narrative of Hitler’s eagerly compliant associates, underlings, servants and enforcers – establishes that evil, apocalyptic regime as the most potent warning to our contemporary world.

William Boyd’s novel, “Gabriel’s Moon”, is out 5 September

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich Richard J Evans Allen Lane, 624pp, £35

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

[See also: The scandal that rocked the London art world ]

Content from our partners

Unlocking investment in UK life sciences through manufacturing

Data defines a new era for fundraising

A prescription for success: improving the UK’s access to new medicines

Janet Frame’s asylum dreams

Long live the low life

Why Sherwood matters

This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback

• Sign in
• My Account
• Basket  

Seller Image

View Larger Image

Hitler A Biography (First edition)

Konrad heiden.

From BoundlessBookstore , Wallingford, United Kingdom

(5-star seller) Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars

AbeBooks Seller since February 12, 2013

View this seller's items

Quantity: 1 available

30 Day Return Policy

About this Item

1st edition. Boards have little wear with a few minor surface marks. Content is clean with light tanning to pages and some spotting. Small gift message and previous owners signature to front end page. DJ is in good condition for age with toning, tears and some small loss to edges. Seller Inventory # 9999-9990323346

Contact seller

Report this item

Bibliographic Details

Title: Hitler A Biography (First edition)

Publisher: Constable and Co

Publication Date: 1936

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Edition: 1st Edition

Store Description

Visit Seller's Storefront

Seller's business information

Customers may return books within 30 days of the original sale. Please get in touch with any queries/problems, we are always on hand to help.

Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required.

Payment Methods accepted by seller