Product Description

The book covers the whole of Hitler's life, from his obscure beginnings through his advance to supreme absolute power and then his final decline and suicide in the bunker as Russian shells fell around him. Bullock divides the narrative into three main sections. The first deals with Hitler's early life, his rise to party leader in the years following the First World War, and his gaining of the Chancellorship in 1933. The second part describes how he consolidated his position and extended his power once he was in office. The third and final part is about his actions in the Second World War.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81078 in Books
• Published on: 1990-11-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 pages

About the Author
Alan Bullock, Baron Bullock, was born in 1914. He studied at Oxford University and served as a research assistant to Winston Churchill while writing his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He was a history fellow at New College, Oxford, helped found St Catherine's College, Oxford, and was Vice-Chancellor for the university. A renowned modern historian, Bullock was made a life peer in 1976. He died in 2004.

Customer Reviews

A superbly researched and highly readable biography.
Bullock's achievement is one of demystiftying Hitler. One by one, the onion-skin layers of Hitler mythology are stripped away. Simple demonization makes way for an intelligent character study of a massively complex character, and simplistic Neo-Nazi whitewash is debunked.

Hitler was a political genius who skillfully outwitted the powers of Europe, and on the other hand, a moral and intellectual cretin who needlessly drove his country and most of Europe to destruction through his ugly egotism and strident nationalism. In The Holocaust Hitler prepetrated a crime unparalleled in history, and yet, until the end continued to believe that he had been wronged and that history would vindicate him.

Bullock brings out these contradictions in a detailed and intelligent biography, which takes us from the beer-halls of Munich, to a shallow grave at the Fuhrerbunker in exquisite detail. A meisterwerk.

Good introduction for anyone new to Nazi/Hitler studies.
The original edition of this book was published in 1952,just seven years after Hitler's suicide in the Berlin bunker.What is astonishing is that it has stood the test of time and is still one of the best Hitler biographies around.
It is not a history of Nazi Germany,and so some topics that you may have expected to be covered in depth(the Holocaust,for example)are skimmed over in favour of the life and times of Hitler.
I would recommend,for new readers,reading the middle chapter first.This is an attempt to sum up his personality-the man,rather than the history maker.It's judgements are so well put("Pity and mercy he regarded as humanitarian claptrap")that it will set you up for the chronological chapters that precede and follow it.
Even though there are now veritable libraries of works about both Hitler and the Nazi era published since this(only four years after the Nuremberg trials,remember),Bullock's book holds up remarkably well,except for it's smoewhat slender bibliography.
if you want to dig deeper,try the 1970s biography by Joachim Fest,or the 1990s two-volume Ian Kershaw effort.

Surely the definitive work on this subject
World War 2 was such a horrific experience, bringing with it an unprecedented series of atrocities, that it is hard to imagine that a book about one of its main perpetrators could be a good read. Yet this really excellent work manages it. The depth of its detail and research is breathtaking, yet the writing presents the material in a highly readable manner. Thoroughly recommended.