Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred.

In Becoming Hitler, Weber brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue.

• The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
• Little Man, What Now?
• Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields
• Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
• The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
• The Hitler Salute
• Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War
• Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
• A Concise History of the Third Reich (Weimar and Now (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
• Hitler: A Biography