Hitler

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE 2020

A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019

A revelatory new biography of Adolf Hitler from the acclaimed historian Brendan Simms

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simmss major new biography shows, Hitlers main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the living space necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States.

Drawing on new sources, Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitlers ideology emerged after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were, in his view, models for Germanys own empire, similarly founded on appropriation of land, racism and violence. Hitlers aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany - a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but, through emigration and foreign influence, to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called the Anglo-Saxons. In the end only dominance of the world would have been enough to achieve Hitlers objectives, and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the entire world to defeat him.

Brendan Simmss new book is the first to explain Hitlers beliefs fully, demonstrating how, as ever, it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most murderous behaviour.