When he first became a historian, Thomas Weber never imagined writing at any length about Adolf Hitler. So many great works of scholarship had been published about the leader of the Third Reich, he found it difficult to imagine that there was anything new or worthwhile left to say. However, as his research took him through archives and private collections in attics and basements on three continents, he started to see the flaws in our understanding of Hitler. Most notably, at a time of new authoritarian populism, new threats to democracy, and an unraveling of the globalization of our own times, he was no longer sure that we really knew how Hitler had become a Nazi.
