Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis

by Ian Kershaw

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393049949
• ISBN13: 9780393049947
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 1113 Pages
• Weight: 3.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The Hitler biography for this generation.

Was he great? asked Joachim Fest in his own Hitler biography. Fest allowed Hitler a 'botched greatness', a sort of monstrous parody of what we expect greatness to be. Other writers have given depth to this portrayal - John Keegan called Hitler's leadership style 'False Heroic', in contrast to the 'Heroic' Alexander the Great, the 'Unheroic' Welllington and the 'Anti-Heroic' Ulysses S. Grant.As far as I can see Kershaw does not contradict the Bullock or Fest biographies, rather he complements them, and further explains the malignant 'working towards the Fuhrer' by which Hitler's will rather than his spoken orders were carried out. Kershasw gives an in-depth description of the chaotic Third Reich in which Hitler became the spider in a vast web of intrigue, in-fighting and betrayal. Out of this nexus grew the Final Solution and the Second World War, two of the most fateful events that ever befell the human race.Kershaw has been critised in not giving more credence to Hitler's 'military genius'. It has been pointed out that the portrait of 'Hitler the military blunderer' is a self serving one painted by his generals who liked to talk as if they were prevented from winning the war by the mistakes of a rank amateur.True, Hitler was not the clumsy blunderer of legend who by accident won a war against France, and by sheer guile almost pulled off the defeat of the Soviet Union. Yet, his successes can also be exaggerated. While there will always be arguments about the success (or otherwise) of Barbarossa, yet by Christmas 1941, it was clear that Barbarossa has been no more successful than the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. Yet Germany persisted in the same course as it had then, struggling against lengthening odds until final defeat.Similarly, all his diplomatic and political victories were against weak opposition - Hugenberg, von Papen, Dollfuss, Chamberlain, Daladier, the hapless Hacha, even Benes, were not of the calibre of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. Yet Hitler behaved as if they were. For all his emphasis on 'will', his own will failed him in 1940 during the critical struggle with Churchill, on which so much turned (This was recently given a brilliant analysis in John Lukacs' 'Five Days in London').Hence I think Kershaw's portrayal of Hitler is accurate - for example, he gives Hitler the credit for saving the German army in the winter of 1941 when a precipitate retreat might have turned into a rout. However, if the Germans had been forced to withdraw closer to their borders, they would have been able to repel the Red Army for quite a long time.Hitler's style was therefore richly suited for circumstances which were in his favour. Failing that, he made mistakes, and his emphasis on his 'will' only compounded his errors.Let me add there is little comfort here for those English 'revisionist' historians who argue that Churchill betrayed Britain's interests by not making a deal with the Nazis in 1940. They fail to say which part of the British Empire (whose

Springtime for Hitler 2

The two part Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolph Hitler are separate but equal portions of the life of Adolph Hitler, not the most popular, attractive or marketable of personages to dedicate a two volume biography. Though each volume is capable of standing on its own, both should be read in sequence.The first volume, Hubris 1889-1936, deals with Hitler's origins, various incarnations, and initial rise to power in 1936. This volume ends with Hitler's controversial invasion of the Rhineland. The second volume, Nemesis: 1936-1945, immediately picks up where the first leaves off, and takes us through the escalating war to its inevitable conclusion just outside a bunker in Berlin within range of the Soviet's artillery. Throughout both, we walk uncomfortably close to Adolph Hitler, and his minions.The overall work takes us through Hitler's full life in astonishing and carefully researched detail, clarifying and confirming what we knew, but more importantly debunking myths and leaving open to speculation events still without a definitive resolution. Where the author doesn't know and is forced to guess based upon what he does know, the reader is clearly informed. This is not often the case in many biographies and is a credit to this work.Throughout, the reader will come away with a sense of the "history as close-call," as Hitler approaches total failure and obscurity several times only to move on to what will become his fateful destiny for both himself and the world. Like a good novel the author allows us to speculate on our own on what might have been if for example, Hitler had been admitted to the school of architecture in Vienna. The author builds suspense and drama throughout.The second longer volume is a quicker and easier read, despite the occasionally gruesome subject matter. Nemesis takes us methodically through World War II. We are there for every decision, every triumph, and every failure. The slow unfolding of the war and the eventual turn of the tide against Germany is developed again with a keen sense of drama. The author develops the narrative as if we don't know what's going to happen next or how it will all end and does a fine job of it.As one might expect, both volumes require a large emotional investment. But it is worth it if you are to understand much about where we are today and how we got here. If you were to ask yourself before you read these works and after, what shaped the twentieth century, you might very well arrive at two very different answers. It is often interesting to speculate on how the world would look today if there had been no Hitler. Fortunately the author spares us that speculation.Many biographies to detriment stray from the subject matter to dwell on the peripheral matters with only remote ties to the subject matter. Not so here, the author rarely cuts way from his Hitler himself and even then only briefly. Very quickly we are back at Hitler's side watching over his shoulder or through the eyes of those around him.

Brilliant Biography Of Hitler At His Zenith Of Power!

Most simply put, this, the second of two superb books by British historian Ian Kershaw on Hitler's life and times, quite successfully draws the reader closer to an understanding of this historically enigmatic and often bizarre human being who so changed the world of the 20th century. Although there are a myriad of such books that have appeared in the half-century since Hitler's demise in the dust and rubble of Berlin, this particular effort, which draws from hundreds of secondary sources, many of which have never before been cited, paints an authentic and masterful portrait of Hitler as an individual. This is an absolutely singular historical work; and it will almost come to occupy a central place on the shelves of serious World War Two historians. Most fascinating for me is the way in which Kershaw grows an incredibly fertile appreciation for Hitler's personal characteristics into a sophisticated appreciation for what unfolded historically. A good example is his fetish for secrecy, which left both Hitler himself and those around him incredibly poorly informed of many of the details of what their policies were doing to the society around them.Author Ian Kershaw takes a quite different and novel approach, and it is one I enjoyed. Here, by carefully locating and fixing the individual in the context and welter of his times, it yields a much more enlightening approach toward painting a meaningful comprehensive picture of how this criminally twisted psychopath became such a fatefully placed politician and leader of post-World War One Germany. Thus, in Volume One we saw the boy grow and change in whatever fashion into a man, tracing the rise of this troubled malcontent from the anonymity of Viennese shelters to a fiery and meteoric rise into politics, culminating in his ascent to rule Germany. Kershaw memorably recreates the social, economic, and political circumstances that bent and twisted Hitler so fatefully for the history of the world. In this volume, Kershaw concentrates masterfully on how this single human being then fatefully pushes Nazi Germany, Europe, and the rest of the world into the most horrific bloodbath in modern history.Hitler was, in Kershaw's estimation, a man most representative of his times, reflecting a widespread disaffection with democratic politics, steeped in the virulent anti-Semitism of his Viennese environment, twisted and experienced in the cruelties and absurdities of the First World War, thrust by circumstance and disposition into the sectarian, dyspeptic, and rough & tumble politics of the 1920s, and rising by finding himself the most unlikely of politicians with an unusual ability to orate and emote. It is also interesting to discover that Hitler had an unusually acute (though uneven) intellect, is rumored to have possessed a 'photographic memory', and was said to have an amazing ability to discuss and quote facts and figures and then subsequently casually weave them into a conversation that witnesses found spellbin

Good book but not fun to read

This is the second and concluding volume of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler. It takes up the story in 1936 when Hitler started a policy of rearmament followed by territorial expansion. The major problem in reading this book is nothing to do with the author who writes with considerable skill. It has nothing to do with the material in the book that includes updated material and a perspective, which is more in line with reality than earlier books. The problem is that Hitler was such a boring self centered and self-pitying person. After 1943 when Germany started to suffer defeat after defeat he withdrew from most social intercourse with other people. He suffered paranoid delusions that he was being continually betrayed and would eat by himself and bore anyone senseless about what a raw deal he was getting. By this time Hitler spent most of his time directing the German military. He was not involved as was Stalin with day to day control of his part or directing industrial production. The others dealt with in the book are generally military commanders. Most of them have the moral depth of a dried out puddle and their main complaint with Hitler was that he seemed a bit common and low class. Early biographies of Hitler were influenced by the memoirs of German Generals. In addition early histories of Nazism were influenced by the times. After Hitler had gone the west faced a far more serious opponent in Joseph Stalin. There was an urgent need to incorporate West Germany into European Defence. It thus became convenient to shelve off responsibilities for what had happened in the war to Hitler and the SS. Books written by German Generals had the aim of white washing thier reputations and placing the blame on Hitler for the defeat of Germany and its racist policies. These memoirs led to earlier histories of Germany absolving Germans for crimes of the time. More recent books such as Hitler's Willing Executioners have sought to show that the crimes of the regime were broadly embraced. That every little village in Germany was willing to put up signs insulting Jews and to force them out. Kershaw's book spares no punches and shows how the German military totally embraced Hitler's plans for the destruction of Russia reducing it to a rural appendage of Germany. Since the war has become more distant the phenomena of revisionism has come into being. That is suggestions that the genocide of the Jews did not take place and that Hitler had a limited role in it. Kershaw's tries to rebuff these theories and discusses the Holocaust in the light of there allegations. The book clearly shows that the destruction of the Jew's was Hitler's responsibility. It does however suggest that the policy was arrived at in a different way than normally was thought to be the case. That is that rather than they're being a specific order at a certain point that the Jews be eliminated the policy evolved. The background to the policy was Hitler who never seemed to make a speech that did not

Hitler on the dissecting table

Not surprisingly, this is a splendid follow up to Ian Kershaw's biography of the younger Hitler to 1936. The author has not set out to provide a new thesis, still less a revisionist stance, but provides a meticulously researched account of Hitler's successes followed by his slide into total defeat. He has used recently available source material, especially Goebbels, and livens up his narrative by pertinent statements of ordinary Germans who lived through the second world war. Kershaw's judgments are always sane. We learn that the British escape at Dunkirk was Hitler's military blunder, not some halfbaked attempt to encourage the peacemakers in London. The author is rightly suspicious that the Russians found and performed an autopsy on the Fuhrer's corpse. What comes across strongly in this book is Hitler's obsession with secrecy which probably explains why massacres and atrocities were rarely debated in Hitler's presence. At the end, Hitler was totally obsessed by treason and betrayal. Even Goebbels, it appears, tried to persuade him to make peace with Stalin. The index to the book is excellent and makes specific inquiries that much easier to track down. Some of the lesser known photographs appear to be stills from Die Deutsche Wochenshau. This volume is a thorough and up to date investigation of what made Hitler tick and how and why he ultimately failed to achieve his military goals.