The Hitler Years

Bestselling historian Frank McDonough tackles the subject in the same way as his brilliantly reviewed and bestselling titles in this series. The penultimate title in the Hitler’s Germany series, the book marks the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Nazi regime, offering the reader a sweeping narrative tackling the major characters, significant events of this horrific period of Nazi doctrine formed in their early years of the 1920s, that would evolve into full-blown genocide of a race of people by the end of World War Two.

The Hitler Years: Holocaust 1933–1945 describes in detail the development of early persecution formulated by Adolf Hitler from as far back as the early 1920s, placing in context what was to come once the Nazi Party gained power in 1933; the Nuremberg Laws to constrain the German-Jewish population. It covers the country’s slow slide into a pre-war policy of intimidation that would culminate in the murderous attacks on ‘Kristallnacht’ (the ‘Night of Broken Glass’). As Europe marched into another global conflict in 1939, tens of thousands of German Jews had fled the country only to be swept up as Hitler’s armies conquered all Western Europe. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the secret meeting in early 1942 (the Wannsee Conference) would utilise the war in the east to plan in intricate detail the annihilation of the Jewish population on the continent – known to all now as the ‘Final Solution’.

The fully illustrated book draws together and engages with the latest scholarly research, makes extensive use of primary research, presenting a vivid and shocking narrative. A tragic and deadly period in German and European history is brought to life by one of the country’s premier scholars.

Author Biography

Professor Frank McDonough is an internationally renowned expert on the Third Reich. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford and gained a PhD from Lancaster University. He has written many critically acclaimed books on the Third Reich, including: The Gestapo (2015), Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party (2012), Sophie Scholl: The Woman Who Defied Hitler (2009). More recently, Holocaust 1933–1945 completes Frank’s best-selling trilogy on Germany history from 1918 to 1945, having already published The Hitler Years and the period when he rose to power – The Weimar Years.