Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness.

From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery  death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler  left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with  self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils  that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without  equal in this century. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than  ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year  ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over  the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the  crippling aftermath of World War I.

With extraordinary vividness, Kershaw recreates the settings that  made Hitler's rise possible: the virulent anti-Semitism of prewar  Vienna, the crucible of a war with immense casualties, the toxic  nationalism that gripped Bavaria in the 1920s, the undermining of the  Weimar Republic by extremists of the Right and the Left, the hysteria  that accompanied Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and then mounted in  brutal attacks by his storm troopers on Jews and others condemned as  enemies of the Aryan race.

In an account drawing on many previously untapped sources, Hitler  metamorphoses from an obscure fantasist, a "drummer" sounding an  insistent beat of hatred in Munich beer halls, to the instigator of an  infamous failed putsch and, ultimately, to the leadership of a ragtag  alliance of right wing parties fused into a movement that enthralled the  German people.

This volume, the first of two, ends with the promulgation of the  infamous Nuremberg laws that pushed German Jews to the outer fringes of  society, and with the march of the German army into the Rhineland,  Hitler's initial move toward the abyss of war.