Word: hrer
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...youth movement in the 1930s; in Krov, West Germany. Son of a German aristocrat and an American mother, Von Schirach declared that "the lives of all German youths belong solely to Adolf Hitler," and undertook to train his charges ("physically, spiritually and morally") to follow the Führer unquestioningly. After the Anschluss (annexation of Austria), Hitler farmed him out to be Gauleiter (district leader) of Vienna, where he remained till war's end. At Nuremberg in 1946, Von Schirach was convicted of complicity in the murder of 50,000 Austrian Jews and spent 20 years at Berlin...
Role Playing. Such self-conscious role playing was the very fabric of Hitler's life, says Fest. The book, not surprisingly, often presents the Führer in the ebb and flow of rich personal melodrama. Early on, the reader meets the "idling student, promenading in Linz with his cane and kid gloves," and the proud, self-pitying, angry young would-be artist in Vienna, suing his dealer over an imagined embezzlement. After the abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich in 1923, Hitler scurries to safety-and to despairing Hamletesque thoughts of suicide. After he had won the Reich...
...chronological drama with a kind of intermission-"interpolations," he calls them-in which he examines such historical topics as the "great dread" that afflicted Germans during the chaotic Weimar era. Hitler's foolish and criminal rush into war ("War is life," he said), and the Führer's relationship to the forces of German history. The author rejects the line of thought that explains Hitler by tracing the Führer's philosophical antecedents back through centuries of Teutonic mysticism and blood-dimmed sense of divine mission. He also rejects the simple-minded apologists...
...take a wife was transformed into an almost wedded passion for the crowd. Fest subscribes to the idea that Hitler's speeches were a conscious wooing of the masses-to the point of emotional orgasm. The adoration of the crowd in turn would send the Führer into rapture. "What would my life be without all of you!" he once shouted at a meeting, like a rock star stirring up his fans. Indeed, without a crowd to please, he often sank into the kind of moody lassitude that sometimes plagues out-of-work actors. At Berchtesgaden...
Serious Issue. The new magazine's detractors fear that such nostalgia could ignite latent neo-fascism today. The liberal weekly Die Zeit attacked it as a slickly packaged Making of Der Führer. Conservative readers are already complaining that Reich maligns and distorts Nazism's objectives. The magazine's advance promotional blitz was particularly upsetting. It featured decorative political posters of the '30s, tiny swastika flags, and throwaway recordings of Nazi party speeches. That tactic, charged a West Berlin court prosecutor, tended to glorify the era, suggesting that Hitler's Reich was fun. After...