The Unfathomable Ascent
How Hitler Came to Power
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The chilling and little-known story of Adolf Hitler's eight-year march to the pinnacle of German politics.
On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, bursting with joy. The moment seemed unbelievable, even to Hitler. After an improbable political journey that came close to faltering on many occasions, his march to power had finally succeeded.
While the path of Hitler's rise has been told in books covering larger portions of his life, no previous work has focused solely on his eight-year climb to rule: 1925-1933. Renowned author Peter Ross Range brings this period back to startling life with a narrative history that describes brushes with power, quests for revenge, nonstop electioneering, American-style campaign tactics, and-for Hitler-moments of gloating triumph followed by abject humiliation.
Indeed, this is the tale of a high-school dropout's climb from the infamy of a failed coup to the highest office in Europe's largest country. It is a saga of personal growth and lavish living, a melodrama rife with love affairs and even suicide attempts. But it is also the definitive account of Hitler's unrelenting struggle for control over his raucous movement, as he fought off challenges, built and bullied coalitions, quelled internecine feuds and neutralized his enemies-all culminating in the creation of the Third Reich and the western world's descent into darkness. One of the most dramatic and important stories in world history, Hitler's ascent spans Germany's wobbly recovery from World War I through years of growing prosperity and, finally, into crippling depression.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Range (1924) recounts Adolf Hitler's rise to power from 1925 to 1933 in this rigorously detailed and dramatic account. After his imprisonment following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler reentered the unstable political arena of Weimar Germany and enlisted a cadre of dedicated loyalists to reestablish authority over the Nazi Party. He traveled tirelessly across the country, delivering his nationalistic, anti-Semitic message to growing audiences in carefully staged events, and charmed wealthy benefactors, while remaining careful not to overplay his hand, as he'd done in 1923. When the Nazis won a plurality of the vote in a series of 1932 elections, establishment conservatives seeking to form a coalition government pressured president Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor of Germany, a move they thought would tame his political ambitions with "governing responsibilities." But Hitler, with the help of Hermann G ring, Heinrich Himmler, and others, exploited the 1933 Reichstag fire to suspend civil liberties and assert total control of the government. Range's lengthy and fine-grained descriptions of the clandestine meetings and palace intrigues during late 1932 and early 1933 may be daunting for general readers, but he writes with verve and expertly mines German sources for telling details about the major players involved. This exhaustive account will enlighten even dedicated readers of WWII history.
