The Hitler Years: Triumph, 1933-1939
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From historian Frank McDonough, the first volume of a new chronicle of the Third Reich under Hitler's hand.
On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government by President Hindenburg. Within a few months he had installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his leftwing opponents, terrorizing the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life. He embarked on a crash program of militaristic Keynesianism, reviving the economy and achieving full employment through massive public works, vast armaments spending and the cancellations of foreign debts. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany seemed to have been reborn as a brutal and determined European power.
Over the course of the years from 1933 to 1939, Hitler won over most of the population to his vision of a renewed Reich. In these years of domestic triumph, cunning maneuvers, pitting neighboring powers against each other and biding his time, we see Hitler preparing for the moment that would realize his ambition. But what drove Hitler's success was also to be the fatal flaw of his regime: a relentless belief in war as the motor of greatness, a dream of vast conquests in Eastern Europe and an astonishingly fanatical racism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian McDonough (The Gestapo) paints an intricate portrait of Adolf Hitler's political rise and the Nazification of Germany, culminating in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. After serving a 264-day prison sentence for the failed "Beer Hall Putsch" in 1923, Hitler courted the support of traditional conservatives and sought electoral victories for the Nazi Party. When the Great Depression decimated Germany's already weakened economy, Hitler's promises to end unemployment through massive public works projects and weaken "the perceived grip of Jewish capitalists on the nation's finances" struck a chord with middle-class voters, and he was appointed chancellor in 1933. McDonough presents Hitler as "a master of flexibility and improvisation" in his takeover of the German government, and delves deeply into his power struggles and shifting alliances with business leaders, civil service bureaucrats, and military officials. Dread builds as well-known Nazi figures including Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler enter the picture, and McDonough offers brisk and well-informed accounts of the Reichstag fire, the formation of the Gestapo, compulsory sterilization programs, the building of the first concentration camp in Dachau, the 1938 Munich Agreement, and other familiar touchstones on the road to the Holocaust and WWII. This is an accessible introduction to the rise of the Third Reich.
