Ian Kershaw - Hitler 1889 - 1936: Hubris

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention. (Photographic acknowledgements are given in brackets.)

1. Adolf Hitler in his Leonding school photo (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
2. Klara Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)
3. Alois Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)
4. Karl Lueger (Hulton Getty, London)
5. August Kubizek (The Wiener Library, London)
6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, 2 August 1914 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
7. Hitler with Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann (Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
8. German soldiers on the Western Front (Hulton Getty, London)
9. Armed members of the KPD Sektion Neuhausen (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
10. Counterrevolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
11. Anton Drexler (Hulton Getty, London)
12. Ernst Rhm (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
13. Hitlers DAP membership card (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
15. NSDAP mass meeting, Munich, 1923 (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)
16. Paramilitary organizations on German Day, 1923 (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)
17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, Friedrich Weber and Christian Weber (Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
18. Armed SA men manning a barricade (Sddeutscher Verlag, Munich)
19. Armed putschists from the area around Munich (Stadtsmuseum, Landeshaupstadt Munich)
20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
21. Hitler immediately after his release from imprisonment (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
22. Hitler in Landsberg (Bibliothek fr Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)
23. Hitler in Bavarian costume (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
24. Hitler in a raincoat (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
25. Hitler with his alsatian, Prinz (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)
26. The Party Rally, Weimar, July 1926 (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)
27. The Party Rally, Nuremberg, August 1927 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
28. Hitler in SA uniform (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
29. Hitler in rhetorical pose (Karl Stehle, Munich)
30. Hitler speaking to the NSDAP leadership (Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
31. Geli Raubal and Hitler (David Gainsborough Roberts)
32. Eva Braun (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
33. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg (AKG London)
34. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brning with Benito Mussolini (AKG London)
35. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen with State Secretary Dr Otto Meissner (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)
36. Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
37. Ernst Thlmann (Hulton Getty, London)
38. Nazi election poster, 1932 (AKG London)
39. Candidate placards for the presidential election (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)
40. Discussion at Neudeck (AKG London)
41. Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher (AKG London)
42. Hitler in evening dress (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
43. Hitler bows to Reich President von Hindenburg (AKG London)
44. SA violence against Communists (AKG London)
45. The boycott of Jewish doctors (AKG London)
46. An elderly Jew being taken into custody (AKG London)
47. Hindenburg and Hitler on the Day of National Labour (AKG London)
48. Hitler with Ernst Rohm (Sddeutscher Verlag, Munich)
49. Postcard designed by Hans von Norden (Karl Stehle, Munich)
50. Postcard: The Fhrer as animal-lover (Karl Stehle, Munich)
51. Hitler justifying the Rhm purge (Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)
52. Hitler, Professor Leonhard Gall, and architect Albert Speer (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
53. Hitler with young Bavarians (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
54. The Mercedes-Benz showroom at Lenbachplatz, Munich (Stadtarchiv, Landeshauptstadt Munich)
55. Hitler with Karl Krause, Albert Vgler, Fritz Thyssen and Walter Borbet (AKG London)
56. Hitler in his Mountains: Heinrich Hoffmann publication (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
57. New recruits at the Feldherrnhalle, 1935 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)
58. German troops entering the Rhineland (AKG London)

I had never thought, until a few years ago, that I would write a biography of Hitler. For one thing, a number of biographies of the Dictator which I rated highly already existed. I had read as a student, with endless fascination, Alan Bullocks early masterpiece. And on its appearance in 1973 I immediately devoured Joachim Fests new biography, admiring as all did its stylistic brilliance. It was only with initial reluctance, and due sense of modesty in the light of the achievements of Bullock and Fest, that I allowed myself in 1989 to be persuaded to undertake the present work.

Another reason for hesitation was that biography had never figured in my intellectual plans as something I might want to write. If anything, I was somewhat critically disposed towards the genre. From the early part of my scholarly career onwards, first as a medievalist, I had been much more drawn to social history than to a focus on high politics, let alone a focus on any individual. These tendencies were enhanced when I encountered the prevalent trends strongly anti-biographical in German historiography in the 1970s. When changing course at that time to undertake research on the Third Reich, it was the behaviour and attitudes of ordinary Germans in that extraordinary era that excited my attention, not Hitler and his entourage. My early works, arising from my involvement in the pioneering Bavaria Project and profiting from the enormous stimulation offered by a brilliant mentor, Martin Broszat, pursued those interests by exploring popular opinion and political dissent under Nazi rule, and by examining Hitlers image among the population. The latter work certainly exposed me to the historiographical debates raging in Germany in the 1970s about Hitler. But as a non-German, primarily interested in the reception of Hitlers image and the reasons for his popularity rather than Hitler himself, in his actions and role, I remained essentially an outsider to the debates.

This I felt to be less so after participating, as little more than a novice at the scene, in an important conference at Cumberland Lodge near London in 1979, attended by most of the German big guns writing on the Third Reich, and revealing in graphic and startling force the chasmic divisions of interpretation among leading historians on Hitlers role in the Nazi system of rule. Experiencing the conference was a spur to immersing myself much further in the differing approaches in German historiography, prompting the publication of a survey in which my sympathies for the structuralist approaches to Nazi rule, looking beyond and away from biographical preoccupation with the Nazi Dictator, were evident.

There is no little irony, therefore, in my eventually arriving at the writing of a biography of Hitler in that I come to it, so to say, from the wrong direction. However, the growing preoccupation with the structures of Nazi rule and with the gulf in the divides on Hitlers own position within that system (if system it can be called) pushed me inexorably to increased reflection on the man who was the indispensable fulcrum and inspiration of what took place, Hitler himself. It drove me, too, to considering whether the striking polarization of approaches could not be overcome and integrated by a biography of Hitler written by a structuralist historian coming to biography with a critical eye, looking instinctively, perhaps, in the first instance to downplay rather than to exaggerate the part played by the individual, however powerful, in complex historical processes.