Word: hitlering
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Slothful. There is also more in the endless procession of campaign histories, represented this season by a capable but rather specialized volume, Nazi Victory: Crete 1941. And of course, one genuine clunker, priced at $6.95, from Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Called Hitler's Last Days, it is the brief but mesmerizingly dull memoir of a minor staff officer named Gerhard Boldt, who, as it turns out, constructs Hitler's very last days from already published sources-since he was not there...
...insignia, the swastika.* Here he comes, voraciously reading the latest sauerkraut western by Bavarian Author Karl May, whose genocidal hero Old Shatterhand was busy exterminating the insidious "Ogellelah" Indians. From Payne's researches in the New York Public Library come telling excerpts from the unpublished memoirs of Hitler's sister-in-law, Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, especially tantalizing glimpses of the impoverished, slothful future Führer in his early 20s, frittering away six months in Bridget's Liverpool home...
...Payne's book has any special value, it is as a sort of two-inch shelf of Hitleriana, including slightly disproportionate swatches of material from August Kubizek, Hitler's youthful friend in Linz, the usual excerpts from Mein Kampf, and a selection of good illustrations, among them some of the drawings done by Adolf the failed artist. Life and Death is overburdened with amateur psychoanalysis-especially vulnerable from a writer who sometimes seems not to have read the important wartime Office of Strategic Services report, part of which was published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler...
Another new Hitler book, to be published in June, is Horst von Maltitiz's scholarly The Evolution of Hitler's Germany (McGraw-Hill; $12.50), which examines the whole narcissistic era of German history bracketed by the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II. The epoch was one of paranoiac suspicion, which turned Germany inward toward its own bravado traditions and Ubermensch philosophy...
Something far more banal was also at play, however-an invincibly ignorant pride. One of the saddest of the new books is called Against Stalin and Hitler (John Day; $8.95). The author, a former Eastern Front officer named Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt tells how the advancing Germans failed to enlist the struggling Russian Liberation Movement in their assault on Stalin's forces...