May 2011, 240 pages
A biography of Hitler concentrating upon his role as a war leader, by acclaimed historian Kersaudy. With an abundance of illustrations, many of them heretofore unpublished.
Hitler was a strange autodidact gifted with an extraordinary memory, an unshakeable will, unlimited confidence in his own intuition and a complete absence of scruple.
His officers often predicted disaster, and for a long while, they were wrong. Faced with divided, demoralized, and poorly-led enemies who were ill-equipped, their materiel often obsolete, Hitler’s blitzkrieg obliterated everything in its path, stunningly reinforcing his own faith in his military genius. His own generals no longer dared counter his decisions, even the craziest ones.
Hitler let ideology color his strategy, thus he allowed himself to be blinded by his own propensity to perceive his wishes as reality. After six years of merciless war, the facts had to be faced: Hitler would lose this war without ever having understood or admitted the entirety of his errors. Kersaudy invites the reader to follow this ascension and the equally dizzying fall, in a work where illustration and narrative are intimately combined.
François Kersaudy is a remarkable biographer, uncontested specialist of the Second World War, and author of several related biographies, including De Gaulle et Churchill, De Gaulle et Roosevelt, L’Affaire Cicéron and Goering. His biography of Winston Churchill was awarded four prizes, including one for political biography. He is also the translator of Churchill’s MEMOIRS of the Second World War.
