About this Book

"Historians today continue raising questions about the Third Reich, especially because of the unprecedented nature of its crimes, and the military aggression it unleashed across Europe. Much of the inspiration for the catastrophic regime, lasting a mere twelve years, belongs to Adolf Hitler, a virtual non-entity in political circles before 1914. He had been born in 1889 and was not even a German citizen. Moreover, during his largely 'normal' youth in Austria-Hungary, he revealed no signs of his future, and by age 20 he was a drifter with little education and socially withdrawn. He had no passionate ambitions save to become an artist of some kind, a vocation for which he had no formal training. He dabbled in painting, vaguely aspired to become a designer of the sets for the operas he adored, yet on that score, he made no progress whatsoever, and in the autumn of 1909, he hit rock bottom when he landed in a Viennese homeless shelter. In February the next year, he left to take residence in a men's hostel, where he stayed for just over three years, when in May 1913, thanks to receiving a tidy sum of money that was due from his father's inheritance, 'the artist' Adolf Hitler left for Munich, with dreams of becoming an architect. Once more, however, he made few friends, could find no work, and again had to paint postcards to get by"--