The Hitler Years

April 5, 2021
Historian McDonough (The Gestapo) paints an intricate portrait of Adolf Hitler’s political rise and the Nazification of Germany, culminating in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. After serving a 264-day prison sentence for the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923, Hitler courted the support of traditional conservatives and sought electoral victories for the Nazi Party. When the Great Depression decimated Germany’s already weakened economy, Hitler’s promises to end unemployment through massive public works projects and weaken “the perceived grip of Jewish capitalists on the nation’s finances” struck a chord with middle-class voters, and he was appointed chancellor in 1933. McDonough presents Hitler as “a master of flexibility and improvisation” in his takeover of the German government, and delves deeply into his power struggles and shifting alliances with business leaders, civil service bureaucrats, and military officials. Dread builds as well-known Nazi figures including Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler enter the picture, and McDonough offers brisk and well-informed accounts of the Reichstag fire, the formation of the Gestapo, compulsory sterilization programs, the building of the first concentration camp in Dachau, the 1938 Munich Agreement, and other familiar touchstones on the road to the Holocaust and WWII. This is an accessible introduction to the rise of the Third Reich.