Almost unavoidably, this book is to a large extent a biography of Hitler, who after all was Nazism personified and without whom it could never have been more than a fringe rightist group in Bavaria. His rise from an obscure "de mobbed" corporal to leader of an all powerful party has been told before, but it still makes strange, almost compulsive reading. Since the identity of Hitler's paternal grandfather is unknown (his father, Alois Heidler, was illegitimate) there has been speculation that he may have had some Jewish blood, though most of this can be traced to a story set afoot by one of his former ministers, Hans Frank, who was then awaiting execution after the Nuremberg trials. (Two months after Hitler seized Austria, the native village of his peasant ancestors was evacuated, then blown up and bulldozed out of existence - allegedly to make it suitable for war manoeuvres, since it was close to the Czech frontier.) The infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934 is seen mainly as a manoeuvre to get rid of the Leftist, social revolutionary wing of his followers, now that Hitler was bidding for entry into government and wanted to convince businessman and conservative politicians of his new found respectability. Racial atrocities apart his record as a civilian ruler and warlord shows huge gaps and inconsistencies - according to Albert Speer, "amateurishness was one of Hitler's dominant traits". His "inspirational" conduct of the war, especially in the East, was sometimes genuinely brilliant, at other times arbitrary and almost irrational, and he was always inclined to walk roughshod over expert or professional advice - the hallmark of the parvenu and self made man. The weakest sections of this book are the rather shallow, one sided account of Bismarckian Germany and its slightly per functory treatment of the ultra complex Weimar era.
Some final chapters deal with the troubled question of German guilt and German awareness, areas which are well trampled over already and seem likely to be even more so in the future.