Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
'Working Toward the Führer'
By Gordon A. Craig
Germans into Nazis
by Peter Fritzsche
Harvard University Press, 269 pp., $24.95
Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris
by Ian Kershaw
Norton, 845 pp., $35.00
Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Appenticeship
by Brigitte Hamann, translated by Thomas Thornton
Oxford University Press, 482 pp., $35.00
Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich
by David Clay Large
Norton, 406 pp., $32.50
In the introduction to his book about the popular appeal of National Socialism, Peter Fritzsche tells how in 1930, in a café in Munich, the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann showed Adolf Hitler the pictures he had taken of the excited crowd that had assembled before the Feldherrnhalle on the first day of mobilization for war in 1914. Hitler leafed through them and then said abruptly, 'I, too, stood in this crowd.' An ardent Nazi himself, Hoffmann was excited by the thought of the political advantage that might be made of this if it could be proved and subjected his prints to painstaking examination, finally discovering the face of his Führer, disheveled and intensely excited, near the bottom edge of the last photo.
Review, 5344 words
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