The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler

The biography begins with a recounting of Hitler’s birth on April 20, 1889. The fourth out of six children, he was born to Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl. During childhood, Hitler fought frequently with his father, who was unempathetic and emotionally abusive. Alois rejected most creative and humanistic pursuits, and would later disapprove of his son’s desire to become an artist. Shortly after Hitler turned 10, his brother Edmund died, inaugurating an era of detachment and introversion in Hitler’s personality.

Giblin notes the evidence that from an early age, Hitler was interested in themes of German nationalism. He rejected the authority of the union between Austria and Hungary, and his emotional resistance to political power outside his control colored his future motivations. In 1903, Hitler’s father suddenly died. Hitler’s mother struggled to take control of the parenting of her children, allowing Hitler to drop out of school in 1905. She died in 1907, orphaning Hitler just as he transitioned into adulthood. After her death, Hitler moved to Vienna, working as a laborer and taking up watercolor painting. In the meantime he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and was rejected several times. Subsisting only on his orphan’s pension and money from selling postcards, he lodged in homeless shelters. He would later note these experiences as formative to his development of anti-Semitism.



Hitler relocated to Munich shortly before the beginning of World War I. He applied and was accepted into the German army in 1914 despite retaining Austrian citizenship. He spent little time on the battle lines, but was present at certain critical ones including the Somme, where he was wounded and thereafter decorated for bravery. As the war effort dissolved in Germany, he became bitter, retaining a strong sense of German patriotism. He was enraged when Germany surrendered in 1918, blaming citizen revolutionary leaders and Marxist ideology for what he saw as a betrayal. Most of all, he denounced Germany’s acceptance of responsibility for starting the war.

Hitler returned to Munich after the war, resuming work for the German military, this time an intelligence officer. He watched the activity of the German Workers’ Party. At the same time, he began to adopt most of his anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist, and strong nationalist impulses, many of them from the DAP’s leader Anton Drexler. He joined in 1919, just as it changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated to the common term Nazi.
Hitler designed the Nazi icon and banner, taking the inverted swastika symbol from other historical uses. He soon became well known for delivering heated speeches against Marxists, Jews, and various European politicians.

By 1921 Hitler had risen to chairman of the Nazi party. Delivering his famous speeches in beer halls, he recruited many people who would ultimately become his political confidants. He was arrested in 1924 for stirring a coup attempt and sent to prison for nine months, where he wrote his biography, Mein Kampf.



After leaving prison, Hitler recognized the political opportunity available in the midst of Germany’s Great Depression. He ran for president and came in second behind Paul von Hindenburg, who reluctantly appointed him as chancellor to create political balance. Hitler exploited this power to rapidly form a dictatorship, negating basic human rights and allowing for the internment of people without a fair trial. Eventually, he gained control over all branches of government, intimidating other parties to disband. In 1933, the Nazi Party was declared the sole legitimate party in Germany. He began to regulate the lives of Jewish people, instituting a exclusionary regime that treated them as subhuman, boycotting their businesses, and excluding them from public life and many essential German rights. In late 1938, the Nazi Party enabled violent uprisings against innocent Jewish people, in which hundreds were murdered and thousands sent to concentration camps. This inaugurated what Hitler called the “Final Solution,” an extermination policy for groups including Jews, Roma, the disabled, and other people seen as threatening Aryan supremacy.

Giblin notes that Hitler most likely never visited his concentration camps, and chose not to speak about the genocide he endorsed. Yet an abundance of evidence collected by soldiers and Jewish survivors provides insight into his atrocity. In 1938, he signed the Munich Agreement in collaboration with other countries, reversing the Versailles Treaty. A year later, he invaded Poland, officially beginning World War II.

Formally allying with Japan and Italy to form the Axis powers, Hitler deterred the United States’ involvement in the war. His judgment became progressively more unhinged as the war evolved, and he overreached his own powers. In 1942, the German army suffered various defeats, which cascaded until the defeat of Germany in 1944. Many organized plots to assassinate Hitler developed but all failed. Unable to bear defeat, Hitler committed suicide with his partner, Eva Braun, in 1945, after a brief marriage ceremony.



Giblin’s novel articulates a deep emotional picture of Hitler’s formative experiences in order to demonstrate how they eventuated into the monstrosity he became before his death. Though it does not by any means endorse or validate his experiences, the novel asserts that there are innumerable conflicting valences in the character of any person; and that to assume that the dictator was a one-dimensional villain would be a disservice to history.