Ted Fox reviews Paul Ham's Young Hitler: The Making of The Führer, published by Random House.
"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think'' - an apposite quote from Adolf Hitler sets the tone of Paul Ham's disquieting portrait of arguably the twentieth century's most infamous dictator.
Young Hitler: The Making of The Führer aims to show how Hitler's personal experiences in the WWI trenches turned him to genocidal revenge.
By peeling back the layers of Hitler's childhood, his war record and his early political career, Ham seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitler's life affect his rise to power?
Ham acknowledges writing about Hitler is notoriously difficult, because of the attempts to amend or erase his past.
But he says the unsettling truth is that Hitler was all too human, personifying the feelings of millions, then and today.
As a child, Hitler was indolent and quick to anger. He failed to perform well in any discipline except drawing and the only teacher he admired, Dr Leopold Poetsch, detected the child's nascent pride in a Greater Germany, seeding the idea of Jews and Slavs as not only undesirable aliens, but also inferior races.
In his teenage years, Hitler pursued a life of leisure, painting, writing and reading, retreating into fantasies and imagining himself a genius, with the power to change the world.
He became passionate about Wagner whose Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes made a lasting impression, Hitler closely identifying with the "hero'' and perceiving the opera as a psychic message sent only to him.
By 1909, having been rejected a second time by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he was a down and out, dirty, dishevelled and unrecognisable, queuing at a shelter for homeless men.
A year later he was sketching postcards for a living and still living in a doss house, subjecting his fellow inmates to furious interjections and bombastic speeches about the value of propaganda.
Those speeches were later expanded in Mein Kampf where he described how propaganda should banish the truth through threats or violence, filling the empty space with falsehoods, and reinforcing those falsehoods over and over until the people not only believed them, but wanted to believe them.
Hitler chose the tabloids for his news, squirrelling away snippets of political, religious and racist theory that supported his own views and rejecting or ignoring as useless, hard evidence that contradicted his ideas, perhaps regarding that evidence as "fake news''.
Ham suggests Hitler's notion of racial purity, an Aryan Master Race, was planted in Vienna before he fled to Munich to avoid Austrian military service, mainly because he wanted to fight in German uniform.
Contrary to popular belief, Hitler performed a dangerous job in WWI.
As one of ten messenger runners, he crossed ground exposed to heavy artillery and flying shrapnel, delivering typed orders from headquarters to the front.
By 1915 he was the only surviving runner of his unit, earning himself the sobriquet "Lucky Linzer''.
He was awarded the Iron Cross (Second Class) in 1914, then in 1918, the Iron Cross (First Class), the latter at the recommendation of Hugo Gutmann, the List Regiment's most highly ranked Jew.
Nazi propagandists later erased Gutmann's name from the record.
Hitler was in hospital recovering from temporary blindness caused by mustard gas when he learnt of Germany's surrender in 1918.
He was disgusted by the German army's massive capitulation. His early political allegiances were confused and chaotic. He was convinced that a Jewish conspiracy, involving an alliance of international finance and Bolshevism was determined to crush Germany and dominate mankind.
By stoking Bavaria's latent anti-Semitism, Hitler drew accolades to himself and carved out a new life as a propagandist, an organiser, perhaps even a politician.
Hitler's Jewish "scapegoat'', writes Ham, relied on lies, disinformation and appeal to the baser instincts of hatred, xenophobia and fear.
One of the high-points in his early political career was in Munich in 1920, when he unveiled his "25 Point Programme'', working the party faithful into a frenzy with his attacks on Jews and Versailles.
Ham describes Hitler's mind as resembling a junk yard of ideological clutter. Packed with conspiracy theories, pseudo science, hated enemies and methods of revenge. Facts and truth were useful to Hitler only insofar as they fed his propaganda machine.
In 1924, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf which he dictated to disciple Rudolf Hess.
The core text of the Nazi Party's ideology and Hitler's philosophy of life, it was a book branded by many as bombastic, banal, derivative and pretentious.
Even Hitler's Nazi editors despaired of their Führer's draft.
Much in Mein Kampf is derived from other works without attribution or care for their author's intent or context but it all culminated in his ideology of the Master Race; Aryan, blue-eyed and blonde.
"Aryan'' (the true representative of all humanity) is referred to many times in Mein Kampf but the race never existed and the word derives from the Vedic Indo Iranians, a world apart from "ordinary, pot-bellied, beer-swilling Germans''.
Ham suggests the Nazis acted as they did, because they genuinely believed in the word of the Führer.
The rule of force, party propaganda, European appeasement and the will of a charismatic leader normalised Hitler's Germany.
Were Hitler alive today, writes Ham, he would find millions of brawling adherents in the world.
He points to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as an example, suggesting the supremacists are more repellent than the ordinary members of Hitler's movement because they are aware of Hitler's genocidal acts.
And he highlights the assassination of Jo Cox MP by Thomas Mair and the murder of worshippers at the Emanuel African Episcopal Church, South Carolina by Dylann Storm Roof as other examples of repugnant neo-fascism.
Both Mair and Roof were Hitler fantasists.
These days we see how easily it could happen again, Ham suggests.
And he says the solution in part means finding Western leaders and governments of quiet strength, honesty and surpassing vision who are determined to preserve our way of life, by reinforcing, not merely defending, the values of freedom of thought and speech.
Young Hitler: The Making of The Führer is a book every politician, of whatever colour or stripe, should read.
Ted Fox is an online marketing and social media consultant.
