"The dramatic story of the Third Reich--how Adolf Hitler and a core group of Nazis rose to power and plunged the world into a horrific war, perpetrating the genocidal Holocaust while sacrificing the lives of millions of ordinary Germans. In The Third Reich, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the Great War, he found his voice and drew a following. As his views developed, Hitler attracted like-minded colleagues who formed the nucleus of the nascent Nazi party. The failed Munich putsch of 1923 and subsequent trial gave Hitler a platform for his views, which he skillfully exploited. Between 1924 and 1929 Hitler and his party languished in obscurity on the radical fringes of German politics, but the onset of the Great Depression provided Hitler the issues he needed to move into the mainstream of German political life. He se

University of Pennsylvania history professor Thomas Childers delivers twelve lectures tracing the factors that led to the rise of national socialism in Germany, Hitler's ascent to power, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

University of Pennsylvania history professor Thomas Childers delivers twelve lectures tracing the factors that led to the rise of national socialism in Germany, Hitler's ascent to power, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

Three lifetimes ago, Europe was a farming society ruled by families of monarchs. Modern European history began with two seismic tremors that shattered Europe's foundations: the Industrial Revolution in England introduced modern industrial capitalism, while the French Revolution of 1789-1799 threatened entrenched elites throughout Europe. For the next three generations, consider the following events that occurred in the span of one lifetime: (1) Napoleon's Empire--the greatest since Rome--rises and falls; (2) Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein publish works filled with world-shaking ideas; (3) after millions die in the Great War, the world plunges into economic depression, global war, genocide, during which time the Soviet Union rises and falls, and Europe--whose countries have bled each other for hundreds of years--creates a Common Market and unifies their currency. This astonishing parade of events--horrible and magnificent, comprehensible and even predictable--is narrated with an hist