Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis - Softcover

Kershaw, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322521 ISBN 13: 9780393322521

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

The climax and conclusion of one of the best-selling biographies of our time.

The New Yorker declared the first volume of Ian Kershaw's two-volume masterpiece "as close to definitive as anything we are likely to see," and that promise is fulfilled in this stunning second volume. As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head. "[M]ore probing, more judicious, more authoritative in its rich detail...more commanding in its mastery of the horrific narrative."―Milton J. Rosenberg, Chicago Tribune 48 pages of black and white illustrations

About this title

Review:

George VI thought him a "damnable villain," and Neville Chamberlain found him not quite a gentleman; but, to the rest of the world, Adolf Hitler has come to personify modern evil to such an extent that his biographers always have faced an unenviable task. The two more renowned biographies of Hitler--by Joachim C. Fest ( Hitler) and by Alan Bullock ( Hitler: A Study in Tyranny)--painted a picture of individual tyranny which, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, left Hitler guilty and every other German innocent. Decades of scholarship on German society under the Nazis have made that verdict look dubious; so, the modern biographer of Hitler must account both for his terrible mindset and his charismatic appeal. In the second and final volume of his mammoth biography of Hitler--which covers the climax of Nazi power, the reclamation of German-speaking Europe, and the horrific unfolding of the final solution in Poland and Russia--Ian Kershaw manages to achieve both of these tasks. Continuing where Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936 left off, the epic Hitler: Nemesis 1937-1945 takes the reader from the adulation and hysteria of Hitler's electoral victory in 1936 to the obsessive and remote "bunker" mentality that enveloped the Führer as Operation Barbarossa (the attack on Russia in 1942) proved the beginning of the end. Chilling, yet objective. A definitive work. --Miles Taylor

About the Author:

Ian Kershaw is a professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield and the author of numerous works of history, including Hitler: A Biography, Fateful Choices and Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. He lives in Manchester, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393322521
• ISBN 13: 9780393322521
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1168