Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer
    Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer
    Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer
    Audiobook9 hours

    Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer

    Written by Paul Ham

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    By looking deeply into the Führer's childhood, war experiences, and early political career, this rigorous narrative seeks to answer this question: How did the early, defining years of Hitler’s life affect his rise to power?

    When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the “most stupendous experience of my life.”

    That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled.

    Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the “criminals” who had signed the armistice, the socialists he accused of stabbing the army in the back, and, most violently, the Jews―a direct threat to the master race of his imagination―on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany’s woes.

    By peeling back the layers of Hitler’s childhood, his war record, and his early political career, Paul Ham’s Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer seeks the man behind the myth. More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: Was Hitler’s rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue―a politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781978600676
    Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer
    Author

    Paul Ham

    Paul Ham is the author of many highly acclaimed histories, including KOKODA, VIETNAM, SANDAKAN, 1914 and PASSCHENDAELE. He was born and educated in Australia and lives in Paris, having spent several years working in Britain as a journalist and publisher.

    Related to Young Hitler

    Related audiobooks

    European History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      LEADERS & COMMANDERS

      Sep 2, 2021

      LEADERS & COMMANDERS
      4 min read

    • Article

      Regimental Newspaper

      Feb 14, 2023

      Regimental Newspaper
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Spectre Of Conspiracies

      Oct 1, 2020

      The Spectre Of Conspiracies
      11 min read

    • Article

      ‘Zeitung’

      Dec 1, 2023

      ‘Zeitung’
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Country That Went To The Wall

      Apr 27, 2023

      I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO CATCH the twilight years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As a Financial Times correspondent, based in Bonn, I made many trips to East Germany in 1988 and even more in 1989 as the Wall crumbled. It was easy, then, to pit

      4 min read

    • Article

      France Knows How This Ends

      Jan 19, 2021

      France Knows How This Ends
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ivo Dawnay

      Sep 21, 2022

      Oneworld £20 Hindsight is not always a fine thing – especially when it comes to wars. Widely-held opinion, aided and abetted by fictions like Julian Fellowes’s Gosford Park and Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, still caricatures the coalition

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Fog Factory

      Feb 12, 2019

      The Fog Factory
      14 min read

    • Article

      WWII in Iran & Iraq

      Jul 2, 2019

      WWII in Iran & Iraq
      11 min read

    • Article

      Agent A12

      Oct 26, 2023

      Agent A12
      9 min read

    • Article

      Before History Devolves Into Mythology: 2020’s Best Books On World War II

      Dec 2, 2020

      Historians grapple with the grimmest, toughest questions surrounding the war, about culpability, morality, and demagoguery during a fraught time.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Roots Of German Militarism

      Sep 29, 2022

      The Roots Of German Militarism
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Guillotine Mystique

      Oct 23, 2020

      The Guillotine Mystique
      19 min read

    • Article

      Anxiety-Ridden Era

      Oct 19, 2021

      Anxiety-Ridden Era
      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Young Hitler

    3.5/5

    14 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I had hoped this would be more about Hitler's early years; these are dealt with quite rapidly, and the focus is on his formative experiences in WW1 and how he got into politics and rose in the ranks. It ends in 1924, as 35-yr old Hitler is releasedon the world from jail after a derisorily short sentence for the violent Beer Hall Putsch.Well researched history; the author highlights the stand-out inconsistencies and stupidity of Hitler's manifesto (the fact that Aryans were a Vedic deity-worshipping Indo-Iranian people being one. The ridiculous scapegoating of the Jews- less than 1`% of population- for Germany's every ill, another.) He notes how Hiter's early feelings for Jews werent particularly hate-driven at all; and puts the whole evil mess down to the trashed economy of post WW1 Germany.In the epilogue, Ham tries to bring in modern day politics, arguing that an unequal society is a breeding ground for further such characters to rise in power.Not a bad book, though one feels a sense of relief at shutting it and getting away from this evil character.
    • 3/5
      Honestly, I was expecting to rate this book higher than I did. I don't feel like there's a lot out there about Hitler's formative years and the environment that shaped him into a genocidal megalomaniac; or, if there is, I haven't found it yet (part of this is due to Nazi censors, who went through and tried to get rid of all evidence that contracted the man and myth that Hitler portrayed to the German people). And the author did present a good deal of information that was new to me.My main problem with the book was that the author editorialized way too much in the text. I never felt like I could immerse myself in the history that the book covered; instead, the author insisted upon injecting his own thoughts about things, some only tangentially related to Hitler, in what felt like every other paragraph. One example: the author felt the need to denigrate Hitler's vegetarianism and made an aside comment about how poor Hitler's plate must have looked compared to his dining companions', which were loaded with slabs of meat (gross). I was much more interested in learning how Hitler could reconcile the beliefs that he obviously held that influenced him to becoming a vegetarian with the ones that made him think exterminating the Jewish people was acceptable (not to be found in this book, unfortunately).The epilogue tries to tie Hitler's early life to the current political environment. He's obviously trying to make the book relevant to today's interests, but it automatically puts the book into a more "current events" position than an enduring historical text. In ten years, this book is going to feel incredibly dated and old. If you can get through the author's attempts to continually insert himself and his opinions and beliefs into the book, it's a decent book.