Hitler: A Biography by Ian Kershaw (PDF)

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“Magisterial . . . anyone who wishes to understand the Third Reich must read Kershaw.”—Niall Ferguson“The Hitler biography of the twenty-first century” (Richard J. Evans), Ian Kershaw’s Hitler is a one-volume masterpiece that will become the standard work. From Hitler’s origins as a failed artist in fin-de-siecle Vienna to the terrifying last days in his Berlin bunker, Kershaw’s richly illustrated biography is a mesmerizing portrait of how Hitler attained, exercised, and retained power. Drawing on previously untapped sources, such as Goebbels’s diaries, Kershaw addresses the crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust, and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively. Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Before you get this book, be aware that the author has a certain frame of reference/preferences that affects both the material included and the inferences/conclusions that he presents. The facts and events that are included are covered well. For example, I learned that Hitler (or his team) appears to have invented political barnstorming by aircraft. And the author spends an enormous amount of time on the details of how and by whom the Holocaust was authorized, if you are looking for a source on that. The book also contains many uncommon photos. But the author appears to have no interest in two factual areas and they are omitted – military weaponry/strategy and the development and implementation of the totalitarian system in Germany. The (unique) frame of reference the author brings is an apparent requirement that every action by Hitler must have a known reason/cause. The rest of this review are examples of the above. You can stop reading here if you don’t want any dreary details. The author would lead you to believe that we, or at least he, knows why Hitler did most everything. So for example, once becoming Chancellor in 1933, the author says that Hitler wanted to do nothing, just like he did in Vienna years earlier as a starving artist, and so he just watched movies, chatted with his friends, had long meals and teas, and so on. All the bad stuff was done by his staff, to summarize the author’s position. Bad stuff that does come up at Hitler’s hand – like Night of the Long Knives – is made to appear almost a necessity to maintain order and forestall a disaster. No mention that it was at this pre-territorial-grabbing time that Hitler took Guderian’s suggestion and created wholly self-sufficient mobile armored units over the strong objections of the Army. And there is no mention that while the party out of power in Britain has a “shadow cabinet”, ready to take over if the government in power falls, the NSDAP had every part of German society shadowed – political institutions, educational institutions, churches, labor unions, etc. When Hitler took power, they almost instantly took control of every part of German society. And no mention that, based on his WWI experience, Hitler demanded that Germany focus on building only offensive weapons. But also no mention of him stunning von Braun and his rocket scientists by telling them why their V-2 superweapon would not work, or telling the Army how to take Fort Eben-Emael when they were stumped. The point is, this is not the track record of an uninvolved, idle, tea-with-Hitler personality. Another example – the author claims with certainty that Hitler invaded the USSR because he wanted to force Britain to negotiate a peace treaty. I think the consensus is that the USSR invasion was a piece of Hitler’s Mein Kampf/Lebensraum core belief structure, and that having Britain cave in was just fluff tossed out by Ribbentrop that would have been a welcome side benefit to Hitler, but not a prime cause. The author gives Hitler a “logical” reason for invading the USSR rather than an idealogical one. For the last two years of the war Hitler often gave illogical, impossible, and damaging orders to his Army, and sometimes to units that did not exist. The author in many cases finds rational and logical explanations for these. You have to decide which Hitler is the most plausible. To use the dumbest possible analogous idiom, the carrot that keeps any totalitarian state together is the belief in the god-like set of miracles that the leader of the state, and only the leader, has brought and will continue to bring. The stick is the terror, the almost incapacitating fear that any perceived inappropriate action on your part will be informed upon by your neighbor, workmate, patron at an event, or your own child, and you and maybe your family will be whisked off to the (German) gulag, possibly never to return. To read this book, few of these carrots, none of the sticks, nor the totalitarian state itself, existed under Hitler. Maybe the author felt it was too much material to include, but if so, it should have been explicitly stated. At the end of the book the author inserts a paragraph noting what a nasty evil guy Hitler was. But it seems out of place with the rest of the book, which describes a person who for the most part is making reasonable decisions with all the nasty stuff being done by his staff. Toss in Himmler’s famous excuse – “Am I responsible for the excesses of my subordinates?” – and Hitler is almost in the clear, to accept this author’s version. Bottom line – this is a worthwhile Hitler book to read if it is your fourth or so. But I would not recommend it as your first.

⭐I’ve been reading about the Third Reich for most of my life, and this book stands out in a number of regards.First, it is an excellent biography. Kershaw depends on some key sources (August Kubizek’s recollections; Goebbels’s diaries; the memoirs and reports of Hitler’s secretaries; Hitler’s speeches) to craft a rise-and-fall tale worthy of the best Greek dramas or Shakespeare. I found myself being drawn into the life and thoughts of this awful protagonist, and we can see the story play out the way it did even if this anti-hero was totally incapable of doing so himself. Blind to his ever-increasing, unbounded hubris, Hitler created the conditions for his ultimate defeat, as Kershaw’s account makes crystal clear, page after page.Second, it’s a sound explanation of the Third Reich itself. Kershaw subscribes to the interpretation, which he repeats so often that it becomes a major theme, that everyone in the Third Reich was “working toward the Fuehrer.” I found this a compelling explanation of how the Third Reich came to be, and how it operated. It’s difficult for me to separate the Third Reich from Hitler, and this worked for me. I found this more convincing than the interpretation of Richard J. Evans, as demonstrated in “The Coming of the Third Reich,” which works from a mirror viewpoint: that Hitler was a product of Germany in the 1930s. For some reason, I can’t see the Third Reich without Hitler, and so Kershaw’s thesis (not original, he admits, but consistently demonstrated throughout his book) made more sense to me. As Kershaw argues, a conservative, anti-Versailles, expansionist, and even mildly anti-semitic government may have come to Germany, but Hitler seemed uniquely ready to bring his paranoid, pathological, genocidal hatred to Germany and to the world. To understand how the war and the Holocaust happened, you have to understand Hitler.Third, Kershaw’s explanations of various aspects of the regime encapsulate much about WWII in Europe that teach a lot. This book isn’t just about Hitler’s personal habits. The development of the Holocaust, the military successes and overwhelming failures, the strategies, and the foreign policy aspects, and the neglect of the home front are all related well here. Among the reasons for starting the disastrous Barbarossa campaign, Hitler hoped to force Britain to the peace table by eliminating its sole possible continental partner; the flawed logic of this and many other military decisions is well told, usually with fair-mindedness. I could quibble with some of Kershaw’s technical details (were those really the right tank types in Kursk on the northern shoulder?), but on balance, the bigger picture is stark, terrible, and transcendent.If you’ve read Goebbels’s diaries, or Speer’s or von Manstein’s memoirs, much of what’s related in this regard will seem familiar. Yet, Kershaw takes a critical stance toward those authors, and is able to weave his own fresh narrative. He maintains a historian’s distance toward his sources, but is also able to make very human judgments on the murderous, war-mongering regime. All that said, I found the last chapters not surprising, and if you’ve seen the movie “Downfall,” you’ll have the highlights of Hitler’s last days, as much as we can know.Altogether, if I had to recommend one book on the 1939-1945 war in Europe, or on the Third Reich, or on Hitler, this would be it. Kershaw delivers on all 3 angles. I was riveted with every page, and the book held my attention all the way to the end.The Kindle edition is well edited, and as my understanding of this subject doesn’t depend on maps, photos, or other images, the book translates well to the Kindle format. Also, while I would have loved to check the footnotes as I went along, they aren’t in this edition.

⭐If you’re interested in Hitler his life and the atrocities he caused this is a very good book. It has more current information in earlier biographies of Hitler. I’m a history major and I found this book fascinating. Unfortunately I had to buy another copy I never received the first one on Amazon or the seller refused to give me a refund.

⭐I read biographies like crazy, but this time, after reading all the Presidents, Military men and such, why not some of the “darker’ dictators that shaped the world? The press and the politicians say things, but as I read biographies, I knew them as distortions and down right manipulations. So I decided to read the AWARD WINNING biographies of “the dark side”Hitler’s biography was a revelation for me. It answered many questions…was he crazy? Why did he do what he did? Was it fate that we had a Hitler and a Stalin at the same time? It answered that and much more. It filled in the blanks. Reading the biographies of Roosevelt, Churchill, Patton, Bradley et al, this completed the entire scenerio. This lead the the understanding of why WWII occurred, and the web of Europe’s issues that led up to this. They do NOT teach this web in school.A difficult read at times, many times redundantly saying the same things, this single book is a consolidation of two books. To me in my opinion, it is required reading to really understand WWII, German Socialists, Fascists, and what really happened by the definitions of that time, not through the distorted lens they try to give us today.This is recommended reading. It overthrows much of the crap in social media today using reality. You can make up your own mind. Now I am reading biographies of Stalin..(if you thought Hitler was bad….)

⭐In 1871 a customs officer in the Austrian-Hungarian empire changed his surname from Schicklgruber to Hitler which proved to be fortunate for the fourth child of his third marriage, Adolf (one of only two from six who survived). The idea of thousands of arms being raised to shout ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ wouldn’t have had the same effect as ‘Heil Hitler’. Alois was ‘pompous, status-proud, strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual and devoted to duty’ in his work but at home was ‘an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, distant, masterful and often irritable father who was frequently drunk’. Klara Hitler was devoted to her children and submissive to her husband. While not a mummy’s boy Hitler was devoted to her.As a boy Hitler emerged as a leader in war games and adventure stories, which appears to have continued throughout his life. His aptitude for drawing led him to conclude he was going to become an artist. His interest in the arts extended to the anti-Semitic Wagner and his operas. His personality, like that of his father, was overbearing and opinionated. He viewed himself as the great artist of the future. He travelled to Vienna and applied for membership of the Academy of Fine Arts which he failed, although the Rector agreed he was suited to architecture rather than painting. This disappointment was followed quickly by the death of his mother. The family doctor described Hitler at the time as a boy who ‘lived within himself’. Between 1908 and 1913 Hitler lived the life of a drop out in Vienna. While he saw women as subservient and prefered them to be stupid Hitler was more of an abstainer from sex than the closet homosexual that later detractors claimed.. He experienced poverty, flirted with socialism and came to detest Social Democracy. Yet his description of his time in Vienna was doctored when he wrote Mein Kampf.Early in his career Hitler considered himself a person who considered all aspects of a problem before reaching a decision. This was not borne out in practice. After the Munich Putsch fiasco in 1923 Hitler fled and hid for two days. He had tried to emulate Mussolini’s march on Rome in the mistaken belief that he could overthrow the Weimar Republic. In 1934 he vacillated over the decision to destroy the SA and, even after the Night of the Long Knives, hesitated about killing Rohm. Shortly before the outbreak of war he sacked two generals on what were trumped up charges influenced by those amongst his cronies who wanted more power for themselves. He surrounded himself with acolytes who did not provide him with the support required, gradually reducing his ability to control the governance of the Reich itself. The government broke up into ‘the near anarchy of competing fiefdoms and internecine rivalries’. Theoretically in control Hitler rambling outpourings ‘were the purest expression of unbounded megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity’.Hitler contributed his survival from the final assassination attempt on his life in July 1944 to Providence when, according to Kershaw, it was the luck of the devil that he avoided more than a dozen attempts on his life between the outbreak of war and Operation Valkyrie. In addition, although there was widespread opposition to the Nazis it was not organised and not encouraged by the Allies who did not want to alienated the Soviet Union. Valkyrie reinforced Hitler’s belief nothing would happen to him as he fulfilled his self-proclaimed destiny. Not all those involved in the Valkyrie were executed but over 200 were. Newsreels of the show-trials were circulated as a warning. Hitler still believed in his own ability, ignoring Rommel’s warning that ‘the unequal struggle is heading for its end’.Goebbels’ declaration of ‘Total War’ was an admission that the war was not going well for the Germans. By the end of 1944 the UBoat war was lost. The Luftwaffen were ineffective and Hitler imagined his new rockets would win the war. Hitler was physically ill and mentally deranged, convincing himself that he could still win the war in the west. When things went wrong he blamed everyone but himself.Yet it was Hitler whose ideas had become fossilised which prevented effective direction of the war. He was obsessed with the war, relying less on reason and more on gambling with the fate of other Germans. It was obvious that he had grown old before his time and by 1944 was a stooped, warm out parody of the great dictator. Surviving twenty-eight pills a day he developed Parkinson’s disease and shuffled rather than walked. As all decisions required his authorisation he was unable and unwilling to delegate and effectively became paralysed in his thinking. Having lost the ability to sway the masses he stopped talking to them creating a chasm between rule and ruled. His only role was preventing the end to the war which he did by clinging to his fantasy world. Upon hearing the Russians had broken into Berlin Hitler knew the war was lost but pretended he would lead the fight for control of the city. Goring claimed Hitler was no longer head of state and said he would surrender to the Americans in the west. Hitler (under Bormann’s influence) declared him to be a traitor.The hubris of Hitler’s rise ended with the nemesis of his downfall. It was all so predictable yet it could have been different as the corporal not imagined himself to be a great general. Those who supported him proved to be more even fanatical than himself, the Goebbels murdering their children rather than live in a non-Nazi world. They were not the only ones. The Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Leipzig did the same with over a thousand attributable to propaganda about Soviet brutality, although in practice it was on a par with Nazi brutality. Kershaw’s book reads like fiction. Regrettably it is factual, specifically separating reality from myth. A must read book for everyone, five stars.

⭐A very detailed and well researched book. However, reading it is extremely difficult due to the very long sentence. Sentences of 50 words in every paragraph – with sub-sub clauses, split infinatives a plenty and many more grammar errors – is inexcusable. This is the sign of an author trying to impress but failing at basic English language skills.

⭐With hindsight, this abridged biography of Hitler was an excellent choice. Professor Sir Ian Kershaw has previously addressed the subject in two separate volumes: Hitler 1889 – 1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936 – 1945: Nemesis, however, don’t underestimate this abridged version, which according to the author, has had some of the minutiae deleted whilst retaining the critical content, which excluding the index still results in a hefty 974 page biography. Notwithstanding these aspects, this is a well-written and extremely interesting secondary source that will appeal to both the general reader and the academic. Ian Kershaw is not in any sense revisiting the subject as an apologist, quite the reverse. He makes absolutely clear throughout the narrative and the Epilogue that Hitler was the catalyst, saying ‘Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man’, (p.968, 2008, Penguin). The argument is that Hitler was totally bitter and humiliated by Germany’s capitulation, leading to the armistice on 11 November 1918 and then the subsequent impractical reparations imposed by the allies. These were deeply felt psychological factors that fuelled Hitler’s thinking and actions after he was formerly named Furher on 2 August 1934 and remained so until his suicide on 30 April 1945. So the Holocaust or Shoah was Hitler’s sole responsibility? Its not quite that straightforward, as you will discover when you read this biography, hence the initial point about not being an apologist argument. As will become clear, Hitler was lazy and certainly no administrator… but he was the Nazi party’s voice – he could talk and talk. The actual carrying-out of his intimated or in some cases verbal instructions (he wrote little down on paper) was left to those below him, which brings us to the nub of Ian Kershaw argument, which he terms ‘working towards the Furher.’ Its an argument that makes sense and ties-in with the Nazi era. This is a biography which, as you might expect of a specialist on Nazi Germany, is both thoroughly researched and well written, yet at the same time is easily understood and certainly well worth reading.

⭐Can be read as an immensely helpful account of the Nazi period, including an important account of the genesis and development of the Holocaust as well as ‘what it says on the tin’, i.e. a biography. In the process there are illuminating accounts of Hitler’s ‘gang’ members, of the Nazi satellite states, to a certain extent of the horrors inflicted on invaded populations and of the mental states and pathologies of the nominal subject (without the least descent into psychobabble; the author is a historian). An excellent book for general readers and a good preparatory read for academic students.This is a shortened version of Kershaw’s massive two-volume biography. It has a bibliography but no notes or references. It still gets on for a thousand pages. Despite the condensation it’s full of statements followed by statements of the same thing. I’m not a believer in the efficacy of this kind of repetition for emphasis or memorisation and it would in my view have been better if Kershaw had spent more time and the considerable effort to achieve terseness.If you want to know more about Nazism or its period, I recommend this book amongst others.

⭐This is an amazing piece of work which has been condensed from a massive amount of thoroughly researched historical information and records.It was painful reading at times and took me a long time to read in order to fully understand and appreciate the importance of understanding and retaining the nature of Hitler’s psychology and how these events could possibly occur.The author pulls no punches and the book represents a must read for serious scholars and all of those interested in the subject.

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