Responding to historians who maintain that Hitler's personality or ideological fixations accounted for his broad acceptance, Kershaw argues that, in the early 1930s a sizeable plurality of Germans hungered for an omnipotent Führer to stand above the political disharmonies of the Weimar state. Later, foriegn policy and military victories attracted many more to the Hitler legend. However, victories were the price for popularity; and Hitler became more and more bloodthirsty as both his image and regime foundered under the blows of the Allied powers. The Hitler myth, then--a cultural phenomenon the Reich Minister Joeseph Goebbels claimed as his greatest propaganda triumph--became a fundamental cause for the collapse of the Nazi State.

Kershaw's authoritative history of political culture in Hitler's Germany forcefully demonstrates that the Führer's popularity rested less on "bizarre and arcane precepts of Nazi ideology, than on social and political values...recognisable in many societies other than the Third Reich." In our present political environment, which repeatedly features outcries for "leadership" from pundits and public servants alike, the disturbing lessons of The Hitler Myth are an urgent warning. --James Highfill --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Synopsis
Few twentieth-century political leaders enjoyed greated popularity among their own people than Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. This remarkable study of the myth that sustained one of the most notorious dictators, and delves into Hitler's extraordinarily powerful hold over the German people. In this 'major contribution to the study of the Third Reich' (Times Literary Supplement), Ian Kershaw argues that it lay not so much in Hitler's personality or his bizarre Nazi ideology, as in the social and political values of the people themselves. In charting the creation, rise, and fall of the 'Hitler Myth', he demonstrates the importance of the manufactured 'Fuhrer cult' to the attainment of Nazi political ends, and how the Nazis used the new techniques of propaganda to exploit and build on the beliefs, phobias, and prejudices of the day.

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