SHORTLISTED FOR THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE 2020A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019A
revelatory new biography of Adolf Hitler from the acclaimed historian Brendan SimmsAdolf Hitler
is one of the most studied men in history and yet the most important things we think we know
about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms's major new biography shows Hitler's main preoccupation
was not as widely believed the threat of Bolshevism but that of international capitalism and
Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the
'living space' necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United
States. Drawing on new sources Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitler's ideology emerged
after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were in his view models
for Germany's own empire similarly founded on appropriation of land racism and violence.
Hitler's aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany - a country seemingly doomed
otherwise not just to irrelevance but through emigration and foreign influence to
extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as
the clash between German and Jews or German and Slav but above all that between Germans and
what he called the 'Anglo-Saxons'. In the end only dominance of the world would have been
enough to achieve Hitler's objectives and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the
entire world to defeat him. Brendan Simms's new book is the first to explain Hitler's beliefs
fully demonstrating how as ever it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most
murderous behaviour.
