Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis

A very impressive continuation. I didn't find it quite as fascinating as Part One, though. I think the problem is that there's no real distinction to be made between a biography of Hitler after 1936 and a narrative history of the German role in the Second World War. To a first approximation, Hitler is "the causes of World War II". Even with Kershaw's detailed examination of the primary sources, there's not very much we can learn about Hitler-as-a-person that isn't already part of what we know about Hitler-as-a-diplomat or Hitler-as-a-general.
Kershaw's main concern seems to be to defuse the myth of Hitler as a master-strategist or a Machiavellian leader. The most Kershaw is prepared to allow him is a gift for timing his attacks. Kershaw stresses that Hitler only had one real strategy: to put himself into a situation where the only way out was forwards. Once he had overstretched himself and was facing defeat (from 1943 on) he had no response left, and simply went to pieces. Another thing that comes out very strongly is the chaotic way Hitler ran his administration. He seems to have been morbidly suspicious of any sort of collective decision-making process, so he tended to delegate vaguely-defined, overlapping powers to individuals and leave them to fight it out between themselves. As Kershaw points out, one consequence was that the most ruthless, radical policies tended to dominate, and another that Hitler himself was always at arm's length from any policy decision (hence people could say "if the Führer only knew..." and his individual popularity survived far longer than that of his party). ( )

This was assigned for a graduate seminar on fascism, and I must say I did not at first look forward to having a two-volume biography of Hitler on my shelves. But Kershaw's magnum opus is a keeper. Not only is it a sensitive, convincing, readable biography of Hitler; this second volume encloses a good, useful narrative of the Second World War in Eurasia and Africa.

Looking for insight as to the who, what and why for this person. Kershaw didn't let me down . His two volumes are excellent . Recommed you read Mein Kampf before reading this . Either way you won't be disappointed. ( )

The second and last volume of Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler. This work is indeed a masterpiece. Some of its parts are truly vertiginous, such as the descriptions of the Anschluss with Austria, the frantic diplomatic activity over Czechoslovakia, and the very last chapter ("Extinction"). Other chapters are a lot less fast paced but this is hardly surprising considering that the book is a Hitler biography, and from the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 the German dictator spent most of his time in his headquarters in Eastern Prussia. Independently of the pace of the individual chapters, this is an overwhelmingly brilliant study of an obscenely repulsive man that brought untold misery and destruction to the world, and personified the zenith of nationalist militarism and racism in Germany and in Europe. ( )

The strength of this book is that Kershaw achieves two tasks, first constructing a comprehensive but readable history of the Third Reich, and secondly telling the tale of its defining figure. His great strength is that the second task never becomes bogged down in the first. ( )