Hitler

This was excellent. Highly informative, and so well written that it was like baiting a favorite and very cool professor into rambling about the topic of his dissertation for a long, lazy class period.

I knocked off a star for two reasons. One is that there were times that the book assumed that I knew things that I didn???t. There were phrases like ???by this time, of course, Mussolini had been captured.??? Um. Ok, when, how, and by whom? If it was important enough to mention, it was important enough to explain.

The other is that this telling was largely military history. There were lots of discussions about this operation or that battle, which is necessary. But I felt like I was missing the things that Hitler and his functionaries were involved in on a day to day basis. Propaganda? Politics? General management? There were people who warranted a death sentence at Nuremberg who were mentioned for the first time in that context. So I felt like I learned a lot about World War II but very little about Nazi Germany. Which is fine, but it wasn???t the book I was looking for.

So basically I???d say that I would absolutely recommend this book to someone interested in embarking on a serious study of Nazi Germany and World War II. I would not recommend that this be the first book they read in pursuit of that project

Hitler's often shown as this uniquely evil figure, but Kershaw portrays him as a bit of a buffoon who wasn't especially good at anything—except making speeches. He was a great public speaker.

I think this approach is good, actually. The demonic version of Hitler lets everyone off the hook. After all, how can we resist a demon? But when you consider Hitler the loser, Hitler the unlikable oddball, Hitler the guy who sounds like a lot of guys down the pub, and you ask yourself "How did a guy like this cause all of that?", you're forced to ask some very difficult questions.

Anyway, a great book and a nicely detailed, impartial history.