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How did an Austrian tramp named Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany, in a position to launch the most infamous reign of terror experienced in the 20th century? Why Hitler? explains the Nazi rise to power in captivating prose and uncompromising detail. Why Hitler focuses on the issue of why and how Hitler and his party attained power in Germany, a question asked by all reflective Americans. Author Samuel Mitcham presents new information, dispensing with the hackneyed theory--presented by Hitler in Mein Kampf and repeated by historians as illustrious as William Shirer and Alan Bullock--that the heroic young Fuehrer struggled to survive against poverty and incredible odds, working as a day laborer and living in a flop house, hunger his constant companion. In fact, Hitler's income from his father's pension was higher than that of a junior postal employee, a teacher with less than five years' service, or a court lawyer with one year's salary. Hitler attained power in 1933 as the result of a complex set of factors, including the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I; the German's lack of faith in democracy and the reasons behind it; the corruption and mismanagement which characterized the Weimar Republic; the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, during which the German currency lost 99.3% of its value in just 12 weeks and the cost of eggs soared to 80 billion marks each; the Great Depression, during which nearly a quarter of the German work force was unemployed; the political and economic instability of the times, in which the Nazis thrived; and the evil genius of Adolf Hitler, master politician. Why Hitler? transports the reader back to the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, to a time when a country and a civilization began its apocalyptic descent.
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