How Hitler’s great gamble nearly paid off

Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw published his two-volume biography of the Führer 20 years ago, there have been at least a dozen similarly weighty tomes on the war by historians including Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts, Antony Beevor and Kershaw himself; not to mention more recent massive lives of the Nazi dictator by Brendan Simms and the German historians Peter Longerich and Volker Ullrich. So what is there left to say that we do not already know?

To gain attention, any new study has to have a thesis: some fresh angle that previous writers have overlooked or played down. For Simms, the overarching theory was that Hitler’s alleged obsession with the rising might of the USA led him and his people to disaster. For Longerich, it was his meddling and micro-managing in both military matters and every other aspect of life in the Reich; and for Ullrich the focus was on Hitler’s neglected ‘human’ side.