HITLER’S FIRST WAR: ADOLF HITLER, THE MEN OF THE LIST REGIMENT, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Book ID/图书代码： 00200010B37493

English Summary/英文概要： Perhaps no individual in modern history has received more intensive study than Adolf Hitler. His many biographers have provided countless conflicting interpretations of his dark life, but virtually all agree on one thing: Hitler’s formative experience was his service in World War I. Unfortunately, historians have found little to illuminate this critical period. Until now.
In Hitler’s First War, award-winning author Thomas Weber delivers a master work of history--a major revision of our understanding of Hitler’s life. Weber paints a group portrait of the List Regiment, Hitler’s unit during World War I, to rewrite the story of his military service. Drawing on deep and imaginative research, Weber refutes the story crafted by Hitler himself, and so challenges the historical argument that the war led naturally to Nazism. Contrary to myth, the regiment consisted largely of conscripts, not enthusiastic volunteers. Hitler served with scores of Jews, including noted artist Albert Weisberger, who proved more heroic, and popular, than the future Führer. Indeed, Weber finds that the men shunned Private Hitler as a "rear area pig," and that Hitler himself was still unsure of his political views when the war ended in 1918.
Through the stories of such comrades as a soldier-turned-concentration camp commandant, veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, an officer who became Hitler’s personal adjutant in the 1930s but then cooperated with British intelligence, and the veterans who simply went back to their Bavarian farms and never joined the Nazi ranks, Weber demonstrates how and why Hitler aggressively policed the myth of his wartime experience.
Underlying all Hitler studies is a seemingly unanswerable question: Was he simply a product of his times, or an anomaly beyond all calculation? Weber’s groundbreaking work sheds light on this puzzle and offers a profound challenge to the idea that World War I served as the perfect crucible for Hitler’s subsequent rise.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 希特勒曾一再对外界鼓吹，一战中的参战经历对其之后的人生带来了巨大的启示和深远的影响。
现今，二战的烟云早已散去，距离这位纳粹枭雄命丧柏林，也已足足过去了六十多年的时间。尽管如此，萦绕在希特勒身上的种种谜团却依旧显得是扑朔迷离；有关于他在一战期间的所作所为，有关于他在西线战场上的服役经历，种种这些都充满了悬疑，仍旧代表了历史上的一块盲区。
令人遗憾的是，至今为止，围绕着那段深埋已久的历史真相，世人只能凭借《我的奋斗》之中希特勒本人的片面之词，以及出自其当年战友们或含糊不清或模棱两可的回忆追述，努力一瞥其事实背后的原貌。
「希特勒的一战」，为我们真实还原了时为二等兵的阿道夫.希特勒，跟随其所在的巴伐利亚步兵团在一战战场上的真实经历。而文中所述之内容将与早先的众多版本大相径庭。
从当年希特勒众多的战友那里，作者托马斯.韦伯向我们首次挖掘出了一个截然不同的希特勒。这批人中，有的曾于上世纪三十年代长期担任希特勒的私人助手，后又转而向英国情报机关投诚；有的则继续仕途，从一名原先的普通士兵，最终升至纳粹集中营的最高监管；又有的，则其后不幸沦为了犹太大屠杀的牺牲者；而更多的一些人则在一战结束之后，选择了卸甲归田，纷纷返回巴伐利亚的乡土。
事实上，当年的希特勒曾被部队内其他的战友蔑称为“后方的笨蛋”，并且直到1918年一战结束，年轻的希特勒对于自己的政治理想和野心也缺乏明确的方向，表现的不置可否。
有关于希特勒的史学研究可谓是恒河沙数，而沉淀其中至今悬而未决的一个问题便是：这个纳粹德国的缔造者，是否是其所处时代背景之下的必然产物？又或仅仅只是一次历史的偶然？
借助本书，读者或许能从中找寻到最为真切的答案。（ANDY）

Awards/获奖情况：Hitler claimed that his years as a soldier in the First World War were the most formative years of his life. However, for the six decades since his death in the ruins of Berlin, Hitler’s time as a soldier on the Western Front has, remarkably, remained a blank spot. Until now, all that we knew about Hitler’s life in these years and the regiment in which he served came from his own account in Mein Kampf and the equally mythical accounts of his comrades. Hitler’s First War for the first time looks at what really happened to Private Hitler and the men of the Bavarian List Regiment of which he was a member. It is a radical revision of the period of Hitler’s life that is said to have made him. Looking at the stories of his fellow regimental veterans - an officer who became Hitler’s personal adjutant in the 1930s but then offered himself to British intelligence, a soldier-turned-Concentration Camp Commander, Jewish veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, and others who simply returned to their lives in Bavaria - Thomas Weber presents a Private Hitler very different from the one portrayed in his own self-mythologizing account. Instead, we find a man who was shunned by the frontline soldiers of his regiment as a ’rear area pig’ and who was still unsure of his political ideology even at the end of the war in 1918. In looking at the post-war lives of Hitler’s fellow veterans back in Bavaria, Thomas Weber also challenges the commonly accepted notion that the First World War was somehow a ’seminal catastrophe’ in twentieth century German history - and even questions just how deep-seated Nazi ideology really was in its home state.

About the Author/作者介绍： Thomas Weber is Lecturer in Modern European, International, and Global Political History at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His first book, The Lodz Ghetto Album, won the Infinity Award of the International Center of Photography and the Golden Light Award. His second book, Our Friend "The Enemy", won the Duc d’Arenberg History Prize.

Format:电子手稿

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

Sales in other countries/其他国家销售情况：HITLER’S FIRST WORLD WAR sold in 10 languages but not Chinese.

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