The failed painter from the Habsburg provinces who found his voice in Germany's defeat: a corporal who made a nation's humiliation into a programme, and the programme into the most destructive war in history. He is not a demon outside history. He is what happens when a modern state puts its machinery in one man's hands.
The fork
1918–1919. A gassed soldier in a military hospital hears of the armistice and decides the war was lost by betrayal. In Munich the army sends him to watch a tiny party; he takes it over. Without defeat, revolution and inflation he is a lodger with opinions.
What they wanted
Living space in the east, a Europe without Jews, and a Germany that never surrenders again. He said so in print in 1925, and most of the people who read it assumed he could not mean it.
What it cost
The war and the Holocaust: six million Jews murdered, and millions of others, a continent in ruins, and a Germany he ordered destroyed rather than surrendered. He shoots himself in the bunker on 30 April 1945.
The fight
Was he the will that drove everything, or the centre of a system that worked towards him? Ian Kershaw's answer is both, and it changed how the whole regime is studied.