Becoming Hitler

A brilliant and essential work for understanding how National Socialism rose under the rule of a tyrant.

Becoming Hitler is a fundamental book for understanding the tyrant and National Socialism. Renowned historian Thomas Weber brings together a stunning body of new information and documents to show when, how, and why Hitler's worldview was shaped, and where the intellectual, emotional, and social origins of the genocide and the Holocaust lie.

The author recreates the atmosphere of Munich in the early 1920s—a city shaken by civil war and its aftermath—and recounts details of Adolf Hitler's life there between 1918 and 1926, years in which he underwent a radical transformation. By abandoning his weak and clumsy personality and opportunistically fluctuating between left- and right-wing ideas, he emerged as a surprisingly flexible political leader, presenting himself above all as a kind of messiah for a Germany in crisis.

In this brilliant work, Thomas Weber leads us to rethink everything we thought we knew about Hitler's rise and the process of metamorphosis, beginning with the First World War, that took him from an unknown, self-proclaimed hero to a powerful National Socialist leader and lethal demagogue.