Life and Death of Adolf Hitler

by Pierre Stephen Robert Payne and Robert Payne

Book Overview

"In THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER, biographer Robert Payne unravels the tangled threads of Hitlers public and private life and looks behind the caricature with the Charlie Chaplin mustache and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566198402
• ISBN13: 9781566198400
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Dorset Press
• Length: 623 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Flawed --and Fabulous

I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see all the negative reactions here to Robert Payne's fine work on Hitler - in my opinion the most readable and enjoyable of the English-language biographies on that infamous tyrant. I respectfully submit that some of my fellow readers were too busy taking issue with its flaws to see its intrinsic genius. It is of course undeniably true that there are several glaring errors in Payne's research on Hitler which were exposed by subsequent biographers; it is equally true that he relied very heavily on source material of dubious authenticity to fill in various gaps in Hitler's life. Payne devotes an entire chapter to Hitler's visit to England in the early 1900s, a visit which apparently never happened; he also writes extensively on secret negotiations between Germany and the USSR which supposedly took place in 1943 and which also may never have occurred. These mistakes (and others) are glaring and embarrassing, but readers would do well to remember that Payne was writing in 1968, long before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and had much more restricted access to documents than did, for example, Ian Kershaw. He was also trying much harder to paint a picture of Adolf Hitler, the human being, than was Kershaw, Bullock, or Toland, who were more concerned with trying to weave Hitler's life into the fabric of his times - i.e. to tell the "whole story" of the Nazi era. It is in this last category - Hitler the person - that Payne succeeds where the others often falter. If his details occasionally stray into the erroneous, his reconstruction of Hitler's youth in Braunau and Linz, his self-imposed misery in Vienna, his life as a soldier during the Great War, and the tumultuous early days of the National Socialist movement are all brought to life with the vividness of a novel. Payne may only be a second-tier historian, but he has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms the dramatic. He brings to life in vivid terms the beer-hall brawls, the back-room deals, the raucous political rallies, and the frequent moments of despair which often gripped the movement as it struggled for power, never letting us lose sight of the man who was behind it all. Kershaw is a masterful researcher, but like many historians he lags in the writing department, and his massive two-volume work on Hitler (which has become the standard in English-speaking countries) while exhaustive, never really put me in Hitler's shoes. Bullock had advanced writing and researching skills, but he was more interested in mapping out the era than in understanding the man. And Toland offered nothing more than a detailed timeline that never once attempted to penetrate Hitler's soul. The defects in Payne's work are indeed serious, but so long as one doesn't use THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER as the sole source of his knowledge on the subject, I would recommend it highly for peopl

Inaccurate, outdated but good!

I agree with some of the reviews: the book IS outdated, and I jumped when I read about his trip to Liverpool. We know almost from day to day his movements in Vienna, and that he never was so down and out as Hitler himself and the author want us to believe. But as I read on, the book started to fascinate me. I understood the atmosphere in Germany in the 20's and 30's better than in any other book I've read about Hitler and the Nazi Germany. So I give the book a 5 star for that reason.

A great biography

I've read both "The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler" and Joachim Fest's "Hitler," both of which are cited by historians as among the best Hitler biographies. I must give the nod to this book as the better of the two. It is more readable and gives a better overall account of the tortured mind that led many millions to their deaths. Payne's account is particularly strong in following Hitler's Vienna period, when he ended up as a homeless vagabond. He eventually spent several years in a men's shelter where he earned a living painting postcards and spent time entertaining his companions with his occasional ranting outbursts. Particularly surprising is that Hitler displayed no documented traces of anti-semitism before World War I. Don't expect detailed portraits of other Nazis. This is Hitler's story and his alone. As Payne points out, without him there would have been no other Nazis.

An excellent and fair review of Hitler's Life

I have read many books on NAZI Germany and specifically Adolf Hitler. I find this book by Robert Payne to be an honest account of Hitler's life, from childhood to his death. It seems to me that the author goes to great pains to be fair and objective, often citing actual transcripts from Hitler's adjutants who recorded his comments during war meetings, etc. The author often states that "the majority of this transcript survives, and says...". This is the kind of objective writing I prefer to read. Allow me to form my own opinions of how and why these events occurred. Payne does a good job of this in his book, unlike some other, "less objective, more subjective" accounts of Adolf Hitler and his rise to ultimate power in Germany.