Young Hitler

Paul Ham

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781681778198
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just twenty-five years old. It was a time he would later call the "most stupendous experience of my life." That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled. By peeling back the layers of Hitler's childhood, his war record, and his early political career, Paul Ham seeks the man behind the myth. More broadly, Ham asks the question: Was Hitler's rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue—a politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Prologue: A little context
• 1 ‘At the time I thought everything should be blown up’
• 2 ‘At home I do not remember having heard the word Jew’
• 3 ‘I had honoured my father, but my mother I had loved’
• 4 ‘The whole academy should be dynamited’
• 5 ‘Is this a German?’
• 6 ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven’
• 7 ‘I passionately loved soldiering’
• 8 ‘Louvain was a heap of rubble’
• 9 ‘I was right out in front, ahead of everyone’
• 10 ‘You will hear much more about me’
• 11 ‘At last my will was undisputed master’
• 12 ‘For the last time the Lord’s grace smiled on His ungrateful children’
• 13 ‘Since the day I stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept’
• 14 ‘What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?’
• 15 ‘I could speak!’
• 16 ‘The movement was on the march’
• 17 ‘The world of the woman is the man’
• 18 ‘You must fight with me - or die with me!’
• 19 ‘If fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters had been held under poison gas . . .’
• Epilogue: The making of the Führer
• Appendix: The German National Socialist ‘25-point Programme’
• Notes and References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Index
• Also by Paul Ham
• Copyright