Der Fuehrer Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) By Konrad Heiden
 
Konrad Heiden’s massive, magnificently written biography of Adolf Hitler up to 1934 has been a primary text for historians since it was published 70 years ago. It’s a page-turner that should be read by others interested in how our world was formed. Thousands of lesser books about Hitler and National Socialism have been written in the intervening decades, but this is the work they all rely on.
Heiden was a Jewish activist Social Democrat who observed and fought the Nazis in print and in person from his student journalist days in 1921 until he left Germany when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. He eventually escaped from Europe and lived in the U.S. until his death in 1966. His reportage reflects his extensive on-the-spot observations, his thorough research and his deep thought about the origins of Hitler and Nazism.

He locates the beginning of Hitler’s movement in the notorious forgery, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was produced by the Czarist secret police decades earlier. This widely circulated tract, still believed to be authentic by many deluded anti-semites, was itself based on an 1864 satirical attack on Napoleon III’s seizure of power in France. Heiden’s analysis places “Protocols’ at the center of Hitler’s ambitions, since the fuehrer’s actions in seizing power and attempting world domination closely followed the fictional Jewish conspiracy depicted in “Protocols.”

Heiden sees Hitler as both a deep planner and an inspired opportunist, a man of inflexible convictions who was capable of 180-degree tactical reversals, an electrifying personality who was also an introverted loner. Touching every base of his incredibly complicated subject, Heiden tells a sickening story, the outcome of which was still in the balance as he wrote.
 
Hard Cover
614 Pages
In Good Condition