Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889-1939 Paperback – 12 February 2018

Selected as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Times

Despitehis status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person- some have even declared that the F hrer had no private life.

Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to provide an explanation for the spell that he cast not only on those as regards to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the F hrer. Even as charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man at the back of the public persona- his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.

Drawing on a wealth of up to now neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler so far. Ullrich renders the F hrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile – and it’s most likely the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the cliched image of the monster.

This definitive biography will without end change the way we have a look at the man who took the world into the abyss.