Adolf Hitler

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland’s classic, definitive biography of Adolf Hitler remains the most thorough, readable, accessible, and, as much as possible, objective account of the life of a man whose evil effect on the world in the twentieth century will always be felt.

Toland’s research provided one of the final opportunities for a historian to conduct personal interviews with over two hundred individuals intimately associated with Hitler. At a certain distance yet still with access to many of the people who enabled and who opposed the führer and his Third Reich, Toland strove to treat this life as if Hitler lived and died a hundred years before instead of within his own memory. From childhood and obscurity to his desperate end, Adolf Hitler emerges as, in Toland’s words, “far more complex and contradictory . . . obsessed by his dream of cleansing Europe Jews . . . a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.”

“The first book that anyone who wants to learn about Hitler or [World War II] in Europe must read. . . . A marvel.” —Newsweek

“Toland weaves the epic tapestry of popular history, meshing together thousands of details into monumental narratives of wartime drama.” —Chicago Tribune

“An unusually revealing picture . . . highly detailed . . . marvelously absorbing  . . . must be ranked as one of the most complete pictures of Hitler.” —The New York Times

“A significant contribution.” —Houston Chronicle

John Toland, the author of fifteen works of history and fiction, including Infamy: World War II and Its Aftermath, received the Pulitzer Prize for his magisterial Rising Sun: The Decline of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945. Mr. Toland died in 2004.