Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi

by Thomas Weber

Overview

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred.

In Becoming Hitler, Weber brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465032686
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Thomas Weber is a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The award-winning author of several books, Weber divides his time between Aberdeen, Scotland, and Toronto, Ontario.

Editorial Reviews

"A well-researched and insightful examination of Adolf Hitler's political awakening in the early 1920s... extremely thought provoking.... Becoming Hitler offers timely lessons, the first and most obvious is to underscore the striking parallels in political psychology between Hitler and Donald Trump."—Forward

"This comprehensive work should become the standard text on Hitler and the origins of the Nazi party." —Library Journal

"[An] intensively researched account.... A satisfying, nuts-and-bolts account of the six-year span during which an obscure ex-soldier became a demagogue the German establishment should have taken more seriously."—HistoryNet

"Carefully tracking [Hitler's] life from 1918 to 1926, Weber documents the transformation that turned this rudderless opportunist into a fiery orator enjoying the support of millions who hailed him as a political genius, even a messiah.... An unflinching inquiry."—Booklist

"Compelling research and original insights bring a fuller understanding to the mind and motives of the demagogue."—Kirkus Reviews

"In his brilliant Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber offers an original, well-documented, and enthralling account of the how and why of Hitler's rapid metamorphosis from zero to self-defined hero in the where of 1919 Munich-a city ripped apart by a short civil war and its vengeful aftermath. Weber's book makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about the emergence of Hitler as a political leader."
—Robert Jan van Pelt, University of Waterloo, Canada

"A splendid account of a vile subject."
—Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War

"Thomas Weber showcases Hitler's terrifying originality as an extremist thinker: committed, from the beginning of his meteoric ascent, to the restoration of German greatness and to the destruction of the Jews. An absolutely compelling and original portrait of a wicked genius in all his grandeur and horror."
—Michael Ignatieff, President, Central European University, Budapest

"Thomas Weber is one of the foremost world authorities on Hitler. He refuted the mantra that there was nothing more to say about the German dictator and no new sources to be found with his path-breaking study of Hitler's First War."—Brendan Simms, author of Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present

"This is the most important book on Hitler and National Socialism since Ian Kershaw's monumental biography. It is amazing how much new information and documentation Thomas Weber has used to show precisely when, how, and why Hitler's world view was shaped, and precisely where the intellectual, emotional, and social origins of genocide and of the Holocaust lay."
—Harold James, professor of history, Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University

From the Publisher

10/15/2017
Similar to Hitler's First War (2010), Weber's (history, Univ. of Aberdeen) latest argues that historians should not assume that any of Adolf Hitler's autobiographical statements, whether they appear in Mein Kampf or elsewhere, contain any iota of truth. The author argues that when World War I ended, Hitler was not a traumatized war veteran whose ideology could be considered to be Nazism in a nascent form. Instead, the author asserts that in 1918, Hitler was a political opportunist—almost an empty vessel—who engaged with postwar Bavarian political culture and eventually crafted an image of himself as a self-made genius with a destiny to save Germany from a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. Weber mines contemporaneous sources to re-create the physical milieu, including the city of Munich, along with the intellectual movements that fed Hitler's evolving political identity as he transformed from a relatively apolitical loner to a right-wing demigod. By 1926, Hitler had assimilated, and genuinely believed, racialist and anti-Semitic ideas. VERDICT While the details can become cumbersome at times, creating a narrative that is sometimes difficult to follow, this comprehensive work should become the standard text on Hitler and the origins of the Nazi party.—Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

Library Journal

2017-09-14
Challenging the notion that Hitler was "merely an empty canvas that had been filled with the collective wishes of the Germans."German-born historian Weber (History and International Affairs/Univ. of Aberdeen; Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War, 2010, etc.) turns many assumptions on their heads in this incisive study of Hitler's improbable evolution and rise from 1918 onward. Contrary to his own narrative created in Mein Kampf about his war experience, as well as assertions by later historians, Hitler returned from the Western front in World War I with "still fluctuating political ideas" that "oscillated between different collectivist left-wing and right-wing ideas" and no real stance against the left-wing revolutionary movement gripping Munich, where he then was living. Refusing to be demobilized from the army that essentially took care of him, he actually served in the new revolutionary regime of Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated in early 1919, thus accelerating the city's radicalization and further move from democratization. Weber describes Hitler then as "a drifter and opportunist who quickly accommodated himself to the new political realities." The office of Vertrauensmann ("soldiers' representative") of his company was his first-ever leadership role, giving him "a raison d'être for his existence." After the fall of Munich's "Soviet Republic" in April 1919, he became a "turncoat" and informant, rewriting his previous involvement with the revolutionary movement. Weber finds that the ratification of the Versailles Treaty on July 9 became "Hitler's Damascene experience," as he (and most other Germans) did not fully realize they had lost the war. Attending anti-Bolshevik training classes, and then becoming a propaganda lecturer himself, sparked the beginning of Hitler's political career, during which he emphasized questions of why Germany lost the war and how the country "had to reorganize itself to be safe for all times." Weber astutely examines how Hitler took anti-Semitism to its virulent "biologized form."Compelling research and original insights bring a fuller understanding to the mind and motives of the demagogue.

Kirkus Reviews