Young Hitler

By looking deeply into the Fhrer's childhood, war experiences, and early political career, this rigorous narrative seeks to answer this question: How did the early, defining years of Hitlers life affect his rise to power?When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the most stupendous experience of my life.That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled.Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the criminals who had signed the armistice, the socialists he accused of stabbing the army in the back, and, most violently, the Jewsa direct threat to the master race of his imaginationon whose shoulders he would pile all of Germanys woes.By peeling back the layers of Hitlers childhood, his war record, and his early political career, Paul Hams Young Hitler: The Making of the Fhrer seeks the man behind the myth. More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: Was Hitlers rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagoguea politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?