Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions Into the Abyss

Acclaimed historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees examines the nature of Hitler’s appeal and reveals the role his supposed “charisma” played in his success. Here is a fascinating social, psychological and historical investigation into the formation of a personality whose determination and vision would at the outset convince a small group of like-minded political and social outcasts but would eventually win over an entire nation and plunge the rest of the world into a cataclysm unlike any that had ever been seen before. Hitler’s Charisma is a natural culmination of twenty years of writing and research on the Third Reich and a remarkable examination of the man and the mind at the heart of it all.

(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

At the age of twenty-four, in 1913, Adolf Hitler was eking out a living as a painter of pictures for tourists in Munich. Nothing marked him in any way as exceptional, but he did possess certain distinguishing characteristics: a capacity to hate, an inability to accept criticism, a massive overconfidence in his own abilities. He was a socially and emotionally inadequate individual without direction, from whence came a sense of personal mission that would transform these weaknesses and liabilities into strengths—certainties that would provide him not only with a sense of identity, but of purpose in a communal enterprise. This is the focus of Laurence Rees's social, psychological, and historical investigation into the formation of a personality whose determination and vision would at the outset convince a small group of like-minded political and social outcasts and would end up articulating the hopes and dreams of millions of Germans.

PART ONE—THE ROAD TO POWER

1. Discovering a Mission

2. Making a Connection

3. Searching for a Hero

4. Developing a Vision

5. Offering Hope in a Crisis

6. Being Certain

PART TWO—JOURNEY TO WAR

7. The Man Who Will Come

8. The Importance of Enemies

9. The Lure of the Radical

10. The Thrill of Release

11. Turning Vision Into Reality

PART THREE—RISK AND REWARD

12. The Great Gamble

13. Charisma and Overconfidence

14. False Hope and the Murder Of Millions

PART FOUR—BLOOD AND DEATH

15. Last Chance

16. The Death of Charisma

PHOTO SECTION CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

INDEX