HITLER, A biography, by Ian Kershaw, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2008, 1030 pages, 39.95$.

HE lived like some kind of vampire, staying up most of the night and sleeping during daylight hours. He had an adversion to sunlight and spent much of his adult life living underground, and his appetite for blood was insatiable: he had his closest followers and political opponents murdered then ordered the killing of the mentally and physically disabled. The war he began in 1939 allowed him to kill with public approbation. And although he never, reportedly, killed anyone himself--not even as a soldier in World War I--he urged a group of unsavory minions to annihilate the Slavic UTERMENSCHEN, and later, the "Jewish-Bolsheviks" to the East. Ostensibly a war to acquire living space for the VOLK of his adopted country, his real aim seemed the annihilation and subjugation of races whom he deemed inferior to his own. Toward the end of his life, when encircled by his enemies, it became clear to some of those around him that he not only wanted to annihilate the so-called inferior races but, ultimately, to annihilate the human race. Contemptuous of existence, and believing death to be somehow redeeming, he destroyed himself, and, with relative impunity for a number of years, millions of others.

The life of this 20th century Vlad the Impaler is laid out in detail in HITLER, A Biography, by Ian Kershaw, a well-known scholar of the Nazi period and a professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield.

Kershaw's Hitler is not the demonic political genius portrayed by some earlier biographers, but an extremely limited man, almost a cipher in his personal life, unable to form intimate relationships with anyone and remaining unknown to even his closest associates, and obviously talented in only two areas: as propagandist and, through his oratory, mobilizer of the masses. Kershaw's Hitler is the antithesis of the unshakable young Siegfried that Hitler presented himself as. The Hitler of HITLER, A Biography--a monumental, judicious, and highly readable political biography--is a weak-willed figure and opportunist without plan or vision who seized the main chances as they presented themselves. In his early life Hitler was a drifter, at odds with himself, who shunned serious or difficult work. Only the cataclysm of the first world war pulled him out of his lethargy and gave him purpose and meaning. The four years Hitler spent as soldier fighting on the Western front were, personally, the most momentous of his life.

In the war's aftermath, a time of revolution, Hitler developed, according to Kershaw, his philosophy, the two main tenets being antisemitism (a racial interpretation of history) and LEBENSRAUM (acquisistion of living-space for the German people). In MEIN KAMPF Hitler claimed the "granite foundation" of his WELTANSCHAUUNG was built during his early years of struggle in Vienna, 1908-1913, but Kershaw disputes the claim, tracing Hitler's antisemitism not from the doss houses of Vienna but from the end of the First World War to Hitler's political awakening in Munich in 1919, and thereafter "congealing in the early '20's." Hitler had known friendships and business dealings with Jews in Vienna and was also known to have made remarks complimentary to Jewish culture. Hitler's hatred of Jews, Kershaw claims, was then a "personalized hatred" rather than part of a thought out worldview, a view that came to Hitler during his days as beerhall demagogue of Munich.

Hubris developed in Hitler through a narcissistic self-infatuation which grew bigger following each triumph in the Nazi's march to power. Before 1923 Hitler clearly saw himself as the drummer for the volkish movement. Not until after the abortive beerhall putsch, while he was in Landsberg Prison, did Hitler begin to see himself (and not General Erich Ludendorff) as leader of the volkish right. Hitler's developing megalomania grew reciprocally to the adulation of his followers. After 1926, when Joseph Goebbels broke with Nazi strongman of the north Gregor Strasser to stand at Hitler's side, the Fuehrer Cult began to blossom, with Goebbels as its hight priest. It is Kershaw's contention that Hitler bcame victim of his own cult, succumbing to it completely at its apogee--following President Hindenberg's demise in '34--and thereafter living on an Olympian plane which doomed him to isolation and, eventually, disaster.

How, we might ask, did this near-cipher and weak-willed artistic dilettante and political agitator, become Chancellor of Germany? Besides the unique set of conditions in Germany (post-war revolution and inflation--without which "Hitler would have been nothing") kershaw points to three groups who were most instrumental in Hitler's rise.

Rural voters, Kershaw tells us, had been a mainstay for the Nazi Party from 1928 onwards. From 1930 onwards the Nazis, through sub-organizations like Walther Darre's "Agrarian Apparatus," began to replace traditional parties like the German Nationalists in rural areas. A crises following a collapse of world food prices "at least two years before the stock market crash" urged the agricultural sector toward the extreme right. In the national election of 1930, the Nazi landslide (a 15% jump for '28 totals) "was the greatest in the Protestant countryside of northern and eastern Germany." In big cities and industrial areas NSDAP gains were "below average." Workers, for the most part, remained on the left, but now, in the heady days of success, "respectable" citizens began to join the NSDAP.

The army was involved in Hitler's political fortunes from the start of his career. In 1919, when lance corporal Adolf Hitler, undercover agent for Munich military intelligence bureau Abteilung I b/P, joined the nascent German Worker's Party he brought with him funds from Reichswehr coffers supplied by his commanding officer. In 1920 when the party wanted to purchase a newspaper, the purchase was made possible by Reichswehr General Ritter von Epp's provision of marks from Reichswehr funds. After Hitler became Reich Chancellor, 1933, General Werner von Blomberg joined the Hitler cabinet as Minister of Defense. Blomberg and the Chief of his Ministerial office Colonel Walther von Reichenau were eager to join the Reichswehr ("Wehrmacht" in '34) to the Hitler dictatorship. Blomberg introduced the NSDAP swastika emblem into the army; he also accepted the notorious Aryan Paragraph written into the '34 "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Service" to exclude Jews and other "undersirables" for the officer corp. Blomberg and Reichenau devised the oath of unconditional loyalty to the person of the Fuehrer, taken by the armed forces in '34.

The cabal of German elites, Franz von Papen, Otto Meissner, Alfred Hugenberg, Paul von Hindenberg and his son Oskar, Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, and others with regular access to the corridors of power made an obvious miscalculation when they placed Hitler in the Reich Chancellor's seat. For although the elites believed they had, in Papen's words, "hired him (Hitler) for our act," Hitler soon enough was running the show.

During the last nine years of his life Hitler strode across the world's stage, moving armies with a command and making the vulnerable bow to his will. He was, as Kershaw points out, a high stakes gambler who won decisively when playing against weaker opponents. Against opponents as strong or stronger then he, his deficiencies as leader, commander, and human being became glaring and his "go-for-broke" gambler's methodology, which served him well during the "bloodless" conquests of the 1930's, backfired.

For as long as the war that Hitler began went in their favor, most of the German nation celebrated their Fuehrer to the point of adulation and beyond. Through an inexplicable myopia much of the German population refused to acknowledge the criminality of Hitler's reign, or else exonerated him of responsibility, ascribing blaim instead to Nazi underlings who, presumably, acted without Hitler's knowledge. ("If only the Fuehrer knew!" they exclaimed.)

Of course Hitler did not only know but initiated--often indirectly rather than overtly ("authorizing more than directing")--state policies. In the Fuehrer state nothing was done, for long, against the expressed wish of the dictator. All decisions pertaining to the state were made, ultimately, by Hitler himself, who, for reasons of his own, sometimes refused to decide or else gave contradictory orders or ambiguously worded decisions that were open to interpretation by subordinates whose organizing, planning, and execution within guidelines drawn by Hitler--done in the hope that their, the subordinates, effords would meet with Hitler's approval--was called "working toward the Fuehrer." Kershaw dismisses the idea that Hitler was a weak dictator with little control over his paladins. Hitler was in control, but due to his governing style--irregular hours; setting competing functionaries against one another; creating bureaus with overlapping jurisdictional authority; and impulsive decisions--the state sunk into bureaucratic chaos. The style was deliberate; the anarchic free-for-all below the level of Fuehrer insured that Hitler remained unchallenged. It also insured that when Hitler was unable or unwilling to come to a decision the governing apparatus of the state became paralyzed.

Kershaw's biography is eminently judicial in consideration of Hitler's competency as military commander. The errors and misjudgments attributed to Hitler were often as much "those of the professionals in Army High command" Kershaw writes, "as of the former First World War corporal." The work also traces, step by step, the progressive evolution of Nazi genocide. Kershaw's "functionalist" interpretation of the Holocaust (as opposed to an "intentionalist" interpretation) fits his view of Hitler as opportunist ready to seize the main chance as those chances presented themselves. The Hitler of Kershaw's book did not plan to kill the Jews--he originally favored deportation to some place like Madagascar. When the "Madagascar Solution" became nonviable he turned to resettlement of Jews in far reaches of Russia. When fluctuations in the war in the East made resettlement improbable he penned the Jews in concentration camps in the General Government area of the Reich. Sometime around the beginning of 1942--coincidentally or not, when the war began to go against Germany--he instigated the liquidation of the Jews. When he found that he could get away with the murder of the Eastern Jews he called for a Final Solution to the Jewish "problem" and ordered deportation of Europe's Jews to the killing centers. No written orders were needed to begin the mass murder: Hitler's implied wishes--and he made plenty of public statements about eliminating the Jews--were enough to set his henchmen "working toward the Fuehrer." Without Hitler there may have been a second world war, Kershaw writes, but without Hitler the Holocaust is "unthinkable."

This soberly objective and stylishly written biography--beautifully presented by W. W. Norton, after earlier publication of the book in separate volumes (HUBRIS, 1998, and NEMESIS, 2000)--surely deserves to stand beside the other classic accounts of Hitler and his times.

Wayne F. Burke, Barre City