While recognizing the dangers in presenting a lot of information into the record that might be inaccurate, twisted, or fanciful, he also wants us to hear the whole story from all of the participant's viewpoints so we can make our own informed judgment.

This sometimes makes him err on the side of presenting personal and perhaps subjective opinions of others as fact, and this is typical of the Toland approach. Yet Toland makes a painful effort to be non-judgmental, and carefully presents all the facts as he can best determine them. From his early days in Austria, to his school boy experiences and the discouraging failures of his early adulthood, through the heady but painful days as a volunteer in the front lines during World War I, Toland faithfully traces the rise and growth of this strange young man as he falls prey to a variety of venomous and unfortunate ideas and prejudices that mark him for life, and set the path to the kind of pathological aberrances that characterized his beliefs and behaviors from that point on. This is a book much like Toland's previous efforts in that it concentrates heavily on interviews with a literal torrent of people who had significant contact and knowledge of Hitler, from those who surrounded him in his rise to power, and who followed him into the ash and ruins of the embattled and besieged Third Reich. Toland spent several years researching this book with intensive interviews by surviving principals, and had access to a wide range of archival data and previously unpublished data and facts. Although there is no single volume that adequately explains the mysterious truth of Adolph Hitler the phenomenon, author John Toland delivers a most informative and exhaustively researched manuscript that does help us to understand Adolph Hitler the man.

This work is at once carefully documented and scholarly yet is also eminently readable and entertaining. For anyone truly interested in finding and reading a definitive biography of Adolph Hitler, this is the book.

Adolf hitler by john toland