Hitler wasn’t a monster. He was a human who did unimaginably monstrous things. And if we are to have any hope of avoiding such horrific history repeating, what with swastika-wearing Nazis marching openly on US streets and far-right politicians back in Germany’s Bundestag, we must interrogate what made him.
That’s the confronting premise behind Australian historian and author Paul Ham’s Young Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer, a startling new biography that attempts to uncover how Hitler became the genocidal dictator who tore the world asunder.
“Those who would rather demonise Hitler as a monster, as a freak, as an outlier in human nature, that he wasn’t one of us somehow, this is really dangerous way,” Hamm insists over the phone from Paris, where he lives, dividing his time between there and Sydney.
Read the full review by Stephen A Russell at The New Daily.