A history of Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of democracy in Nazi Germany explains why Nazism's ideology of hatred flourished in a country embittered by military defeat and economic disaster following World War I.

" Eric Hobsbawm's works have had a nearly incalculable effect across generations of readers and students, influencing more than the practice of history but also the perception of it. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of second-generation British parents, Hobsbawm was orphaned at age fourteen in 1931. Living with an uncle in Berlin, he experienced the full force of world economic depression, and in the charged reaction to it in Germany was forced to choose...