Word: hitlered
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...Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the two most powerful personifications of evil in this century, are still impossible to explain fully. They shouldered their way into politics as resentful, hate-filled egoists, but so did thousands of their contemporaries. To anyone scrutinizing the young Hitler or Stalin, writes Alan Bullock, the Oxford University historian, "a suggestion that he would play a major role in twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible." At 30, Hitler was a street-corner speechmaker in Munich, and Stalin was in prison for plotting an oil workers' strike in Baku...
...They developed over time," says Lord Bullock -- he became a life peer in 1976 -- so he decided to study that process in a comparative, parallel biography of the two, something no one else has done. Bullock is the author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first great postwar biography of the dictator. "I'm a narrative historian, and in the course of the narrative," he says, "it comes clear" precisely how Hitler and Stalin rose to supreme power in Germany and Russia...
...Though Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Knopf; 1,081 pages; $35) runs a densely written thousand pages, detailing the two lives stage by stage, not everything comes clear. Most readers willing to take the long journey will hope that Bullock's exhaustive analysis of the biographical literature and newly opened archives might somehow explain what caused Hitler and Stalin. There was something inhumanly dark and cold in both leaders that made them willing to do literally anything to fulfill what they felt was their mission...
MacDonogh convincingly argues that the Kreisau plot against Hitler could have succeeded if the Allies had lent more support to the resistance. Instead, when approached through secret channels, both the English and American governments ignored Trott's pleas for help...
...attempt at a coup was thus a failure. In July of 1944, a few days after the attempt on Hitler's life, most of the leaders of the resistance were arrested. Trott went to his execution on August 26. A month before, he had told a friend that the English must bear some guilt for the failure of the plot against Hitler...