Hitler's first war [electronic resource] : Adolf Hitler, the men of the List Regiment, and the First World War / Thomas Weber.

ISBN:

9780191604232

Title:

Author:

Weber, Thomas, 1974-

Personal Author:

Weber, Thomas, 1974-

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 450 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

pt. 1. A Crowd in Odeonsplatz: I August-20 October 1914 -- Baptism of Fire: 21 October-Early November 1914 -- Two Tales of One Christmas: Early November 1914-31 December 1914 -- Dreams of a New World: I January-May 1915 -- Of Front-Line Soldiers and 'Rear Area Pigs': May 1915-31 December 1915 -- Occupation: January-July 1916 -- Collapse: July-October 1916 -- In the Shadow of the Somme: October 1916-13 July 1917 -- Blinded: August 1917-II November 1918 -- pt. 2. Revolution: II November 1918-Early 1919 -- Hitler's Kampf against the List Veterans: Early 1919-1933 -- Private Hitler's Reich: 1933-1939 -- Hitler's Second War.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Personal Subject:

Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945.

Corporate Subject:

Germany. Heer. Bayerisches Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment 16 -- Biography.

Subject Term:

Heads of state -- Germany -- Biography.

Soldiers -- Germany -- Biography.

World War, 1914-1918 -- Biography.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2010

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
943.086092 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Hitler claimed that his years as a soldier in the First World War were the most formative years of his life. However, for the six decades since his death in the ruins of Berlin, Hitler's time as a soldier on the Western Front has, remarkably, remained a blank spot. Until now, all that we knew about Hitler's life in these years and the regiment in which he served came from his own account in Mein Kampf and the equally mythical accounts of his comrades.Hitler's First War for the first time looks at what really happened to Private Hitler and the men of the Bavarian List Regiment of which he was a member. It is a radical revision of the period of Hitler's life that is said to have made him. Through the stories of the veterans of the regiment - an officer who became Hitler's personal adjutant in the 1930s but then offered himself to British intelligence, a soldier-turned-Concentration Camp Commander, Jewish veterans who fell victim tothe Holocaust, or of veterans who simply returned to their lives in Bavaria - Thomas Weber presents a Private Hitler very different from the one portrayed in his own mythical account. Instead, we find a Hitler who was shunned by the frontline soldiers of his regiment as a 'rear area pig' and who was stillunsure of his political ideology even at the end of the war in 1918.In looking at the post-war lives of Hitler's fellow veterans back in Bavaria, Thomas Weber also challenges the commonly accepted notion that the First World War was somehow a 'seminal catastrophe' in twentieth century German history and even questions just how deep-seated Nazi ideology really was in its home state.

Author Notes

Thomas Weber teaches European and international history at the University of Aberdeen and directs the Centre for Global Security and Governance. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships or has taught at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. His first book, The Lodz Ghetto Album, won a 2004 Golden LightAward and a 2005 Infinity Award. His second book, Our Friend "The Enemy" is the recipient of the 2008 Duc d'Arenberg History Prize for the best book of a general nature, intended for a wide public, on the history and culture of the European continent.

Reviews (1)

Library Journal Review

Weber (modern European, international & global political history, Univ. of Aberdeen, Scotland) challenges Hitler's claim, mostly expressed in Mein Kampf (1924) and generally accepted by later historians, that his experiences in World War I shaped both his ideology and subsequent Nazi policy. While little specific information about Hitler's wartime experiences is available, it is possible to reconstruct the history of his unit, the List Regiment, in some detail. Weber by necessity focuses on the men who served with Hitler, but he uses their experiences to assess the impact of the war on the postwar radicalization of German soldiers. His conclusion: it radicalized relatively few soldiers of the List Regiment, and Hitler's postwar claims about his wartime service are largely false. Weber is strongest in re-creating the actual experiences of List Regiment members and in challenging some of the conventional wisdom about the war's long-term impact. His argument that Hitler did not develop his radical ideas until after the war is less convincing, however, as the fact that Hitler's comrades were not radicalized en masse does not necessarily prove that Hitler fit into the same mold. VERDICT Recommended for all general and specialist readers seeking further study of Hitler.-Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.