This is the first part of a two-part biography of Hitler. It takes him up to his 50th birthday in 1939, a few months before he started World War 2. I came away with a much clearer understanding of who he was and what his goals were (although the book covers German politics in more detail than I needed).

In a sense, therefore, the book “humanizes” or “normalizes” him. For example, he could be charming. He wasn’t an ignoramus. He could be a spellbinding speaker. He doesn’t appear to have been monstrous or even especially anti-Semitic from the beginning. He was certainly a ruthless demagogue even in the 1920s and 1930s as he gained power. Maybe being worshiped by millions of Germans helped turn him into a monster.

I guess what I’m saying is that if he had become a dictator; seized the Rhineland; negotiated Germany’s absorption of Austria and the Sudetenland (the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia) without a shot being fired; and brutally forced the emigration of millions of Jews from Germany, he might have been considered an especially ruthless but successful leader. There have been dictators in the past and will be more in the future. It seems that he descended into the absolute abyss in the six years not covered by Hitler: Ascent 1889 – 1939. Presumably, Ullrich’s second volume will be called Hitler: Descent 1939 – 1945.