1938: Hitler's Gamble

by Giles MacDonogh

Overview

In this masterful narrative, acclaimed historian Giles MacDonogh chronicles Adolf Hitler's consolidation of power over the course of one year. Until 1938, Hitler could be dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator, a problem to Germany alone; after 1938 he was clearly a threat to the entire world.

It was in 1938 that Third Reich came of age. The Fehrer brought Germany into line with Nazi ideology and revealed his plans to take back those parts of Europe lost to "Greater Germany" after the First World War. From the purging of the army in January through the Anschluss in March, from the Munich Conference in September to the ravages of Kristallnacht in November, MacDonogh offers a gripping account of the year Adolf Hitler came into his own and set the world inexorably on track to a cataclysmic war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465022052
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/10/2011
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,097,111
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.18(h) x 0.99(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

A graduate of Oxford University, Giles MacDonogh is the author of several books on German history and has written for the Financial Times, the Times (London), the Guardian, and the Evening Standard. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

BBC History Magazine
"A fine book.... Well-written, combining its diverse sources with elegance and skill, and painting an engaging canvas of the disaster that was developing in Germany and was soon to engulf Europe as a whole.... [Giles MacDonogh's] searing descriptions of the fate endured by Austrian Jewry -- from expropriation, casual cruelty and exile, to calculated persecution and murder -- are especially impassioned and moving.... It ably conveys the growing desperation and alarm felt by many that year, as Germany began to flex its muscles internationally and stepped up its persecution of its perceived enemies."

Literary Review
"[MacDonogh] is able to mine dozens of sources in German...[which] help us understand the roots of genocide. The book is excellent on the details of how the Nazis turned on the Jews."

Kirkus
"A chilling examination of a critical year in European history."

Edinburgh Evening News
"Adolf Hitler was a natural gambler, and this book graphically describes the critical year of 1938 when his winning streak took off.... Harrowing."

Shelf Awareness
"A powerful, disturbing and invaluable analysis of the events in 1938 that enabled Hitler to unleash the full force of his insanity and destruction on the world."

Sunday Times (UK)
"MacDonogh's narrative of the events of 1938 makes compelling but painful reading. The month-by-month format he has adopted emphasizes the improvisation that was at the heart of Hitler's strategy, and highlights more cruelly the opportunities that were lost, even a year before the start of the war, to call his bluff and thrust events onto a different path. "What if?" remains the most tantalizing of historical questions, but this absorbing book obliges us to ask it."

Spectator (UK)
"[A] compelling survey of a tumultuous year.... Giles MacDonogh has repeatedly shown himself to be in the front rank of British scholars of German history. The depth of his human understanding, the judiciousness of his pickings from source material and the quality of his writing make this a book at once gripping and grave."

Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"As Giles MacDonogh convincingly argues, 1938 was Hitler's annus mirabilis.... [His] account of the Anschluss and its aftermath is a masterpiece of extreme emotion held in check. His level tone as he reels off appalling atrocities and such chilling statistics as the steadily rising suicide rate among Jews trapped in Vienna somehow makes the tragedy of the destruction of a whole community even more telling.... Moving and searing."

From the Publisher

Might-have-beens haunt this insightful narrative of a watershed in the history of Nazi Germany. MacDonogh (After the Reich) chronicles milestones in the development of a radicalized, expansionist Third Reich in the year 1938: the forcible annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, the Kristallnacht pogrom and the purging of opposition figures in the government, army and church. He portrays these events not as an unfolding master plan but as a series of gambles by a sometimes chaotic Nazi regime plagued by infighting among Hitler’s satraps, Wehrmacht coup plots, a collapsing economy (the Anschluss was motivated partly by a need to plunder Austria’s treasury and raw materials), and jitters about foreign reaction. The Führer perseveres with theatrical bullying and nervy improvisations that are matched by the Western powers’ appeasement; a tragic theme of MacDonogh’s story is how easily a determined resistance, from within Germany or without, might have derailed Hitler’s initiatives. Another is the callousness of the international community; much of the book follows the travails of Jews who faced closed doors when the Reich was eager to expel them. This well-researched, fine-grained study sketches the moral rot that made possible Hitler’s rise. Photos. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

The year 1938 was the last before world war engulfed Europe. In reconstructing that year, MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser) here focuses on Hitler's drive to remove internal rivals, prepare for war, outmaneuver the befuddled West, and expand his empire into Austria and Czechoslovakia. He also covers the increasing efforts to remove the Jews from German life, culminating in the vicious pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, when Jewish synagogues and shops were looted and destroyed. A subsidiary theme in the book, which is told chronologically, is how people, usually at the direction of the state, continued to promote and enjoy traditional "German" culture as a desperate distraction from their tense environment. Readers will perceive how all year the pressure built for war and genocide. VERDICT This is not a traditional history based on dry archival sources or details about who said or did what and when. Instead, it deals more on the social and personal levels, adding a human flavor, quoting from memoirs and journals, and focusing less on Hitler and more on his entourage, which was always scheming to stay in the Führer's good graces. Interesting and easy to read, this is recommended for avid general readers of World War II history.—Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of Du Page Lib.

Library Journal

A chronological account of the pivotal year in which Hitler's master plan of Lebensraum and Jewish extermination was set in motion. British historian MacDonogh (After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, 2007, etc.) carefully traces the ominous events of 1938, which function as a kind of countdown to world war-from Hitler's consolidation of military power in January and February to the shameful Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht toward the end of the year. The Fuhrer had unveiled his master plan to his service chiefs by November 1937, and MacDonogh's study of the following year is especially revealing in its depiction of the reluctance to go to war displayed by both his underlings and the German populace as a whole. The German military was not prepared, the economy was weak and the country desperately needed raw materials. Before 1938 was over, though, Germany had absorbed Austria and annexed German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. With the help of avid Austrian anti-Semites and the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis were able to strip the approximately 200,000 Austrian Jews of their power and wealth, transporting the ones who didn't flee the country to Dachau and elsewhere. Hitler cozied up to Mussolini, and their Berlin-Rome axis coordinated racial and military policies. The July Evian Conference failed to find homes for Jewish refugees. In the face of Hitler's expansionist fantasies, British Prime Minister Chamberlain conceded that Czechoslovakia was not worth a widespread effort on the part of the British military. Though a public-relations disaster, Kristallnacht sealed the fate of the Jews; relief organizations run by Quakers and others helped transport Jewishchildren to safety. By his January 1939 speech in the Reichstag, Hitler had declared his "prophecy" of Germany's return to glory. A chilling examination of a critical year in European history. Agent: Georgina Capel/Capel & Land

Kirkus Reviews