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The Hitler Years, Volume 1: Triumph 1933-1939

by Frank McDonough

'One of the books of the year' DAN SNOW.

'This year's Christmas No.1' PETER FRANKOPAN.

'A masterclass in the history of Nazi Germany, with an internationally renowned expert as the teacher' GET HISTORY.

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government by President Hindenburg. Within a few months he had installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his leftwing opponents, terrorising the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life.

He embarked on a crash programme on militaristic Keynesianism, reviving the economy and achieving full employment through massive public works, vast armaments spending and the cancellations of foreign debts. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany seemed to have been reborn as a brutal and determined European power.

Over the course of the years from 1933 to 1939, Hitler won over most of the population to his vision of a renewed Reich. In these years of domestic triumph, cunning manoeuvres, pitting neighbouring powers against each other and biding his time, we see Hitler preparing for the moment that would realise his ambition. But what drove Hitler's success was also to be the fatal flaw of his regime: a relentless belief in war as the motor of greatness, a dream of vast conquests in Eastern Europe and an astonishingly fanatical racism.

In The Hitler Years, Frank McDonough charts the rise and fall of the Third Reich under Hitler's hand. The first volume, Triumph, ends after Germany's comprehensive military defeat of Poland in 1939.

Head of Zeus, an Apollo book * History

14 Nov 2019 * 488pp * £4.99 * 9781784975913

REVIEWS

'McDonough's approach is genuinely new: his exact focus and his strict adherence to a chronological narrative reveal interesting insights and a different view of the regime ... It is a masterclass in the history of Nazi Germany, with an internationally renowned expert as the teacher. It is clever, it is refreshing, it is convincing. It is also essential reading for any history student intending to study the Third Reich at any level'

Get History

'Triumph is the more interesting for pushing back against the cartoon of Hitler as all-conquering monster-supermensch. Instead it demonstrates the slow creep of the Nazi state takeover, the caution with which Hitler had to move, the resistance that he often faced and his surprising, instinctive flexibility'

Oldie

'McDonough points to the starker reality. In Nazi Germany, citizens worked more hours for less pay. Nor was there any great altering of class consciousness or redistribution of wealth as there had been in, say, the Soviet Union. The other central claim this excellent book makes is that Hitler's road to power was one where flexibility co-existed in tandem with shifting political events in real time. The historian insists that Nazi Germany was not a totalitarian society in the way that Stalinist Russia was. Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, after all, was both legal and constitutional. There was no violent revolution as there had been in Russia in 1917 or France in 1789'

Irish Independent

'What makes this volume really stand out is its stylish design and more than 80 coloured photographs, punctuating the account of Hitler's slow but inevitable march to war'

Military History

'The book unfolds like a thrilling Scorsese-directed gangster movie. It could certainly form the basis of a blockbuster. McDonough treats his readers to all the fascinating insights one would expect from a rich career of study as he dedicates an entire chapter to each year of Adolf Hitler's evil rule in the 1930s'

History of War Magazine

'This first volume of McDonough's mega two-volume history is aptly subtitled, 'Triumph', for that is what it is. Everybody even remotely interested in Nazi Germany should have an empty space on their bookshelf, waiting to be filled by volume 2. McDonough's prose matches the rigour of Kershaw, the wit of Evans and the fluency of Shirer. But he brings a new and distinctive clarity to this subject which is all too often lost in the thematic or obscured by the overly academic'

Luke Daly-Groves

'A very well-written and lavishly illustrated history on the rise of Hitler (from 1933 to 1939). With an eye for telling detail, McDonough tells the monstrous but well-known story in an attractive fresh way'

Andrew Roberts

'I've read every book written about the 2nd Word War, I think. Frank McDonough's latest is the clearest, most brilliant writing on the drumbeat to conflict I've ever absorbed. Cannot wait for volume 2'

Danny Baker

Author

Frank McDonough

Professor Frank McDonough is an internationally renowned expert on the Third Reich. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford and gained a PhD from Lancaster University. Now based in Liverpool, McDonough has written many critically acclaimed books, including The Gestapo, Sophie Scholl and most recently The Hitler Years, a two-volume history charting the rise and fall of the Nazi regime.

ALSO BY Frank McDonough

The Hitler Years, Volume 2: Disaster 1940-1945

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