Bringing History to Life Collections

Bringing History to Life Collector’s Edition’ is a 180 page must read special issue packed with in depth WW2 historical information narrated as a story and illustrated with informative graphs and timelines. Readers interested in WW2 will not be disappointed.

Get close to Hitler

ELECTED DICTATOR • The pale Austrian soldier was persuasive. With Italy’s fascist leader Mussolini as his role model, Hitler and his Brownshirts first tried to seize power in Germany by force. They failed, but subsequent elections saw the Nazi party steadily grow, until in 1933 a powerless President Hindenburg swore in the popular Nazi leader as the country’s chancellor.

THE NAZI PARTY COMES OF AGE • In 1918, a Bavarian locksmith founds the German Workers’ Party. In September the following year, the party gains a new member – a pale, Austrian soldier with a rare gift for speaking. Adolf Hitler becomes the 55th member of the insignificant party. Over the next four years, he takes control, renames it the Nazi Party, and builds an army of brutal young thugs to crush opponents. After gaining a reputation locally for being an angry but gifted orator, Hitler decides to instigate a Nazi revolution in Germany. His putsch fails.

HITLER behind bars • The Beer Hall Putsch in Munich was legally treated as high treason – and its leader, Adolf Hitler, risked life imprisonment. But the Nazi leader had many sympathisers, making his punishment more tolerable. And in prison, Hitler was left in peace to develop the Nazi ideology – and enjoy a mountain of cream cakes.

A VISION DEVELOPS • Adolf Hitler left the Landsberg prison in southern Bavaria as a new man. He had spent his nine months behind bars drafting visions for a future Nazi empire headed by himself. Even disastrous elections, public speaking bans and temporary bans against the SA and the SS could no longer stop the ambitious Nazi leader. Over the next nine years, Hitler won the favour of the German people through a combination of political ingenuity, street violence and favourable circumstances.

THE WORLD IS SEDUCED • A flock of white pigeons was released into the sky when Hitler welcomed the Olympics to Berlin in 1936. The games was one of Nazism’s biggest PR stunts, showing the Third Reich in its best light. But behind the façade, freedoms were being curtailed. Hitler’s dream included the extermination of both political opponents and the Jews.

ALBERT SPEER built Hitler’s dreams • In 1933, Germany’s new Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, takes the young architect Albert Speer under his wing. The two men are on the same wavelength, and soon Speer is realising Hitler’s dream of the thousand- year Reich – with gigantic buildings of marble and granite.

OLYMPICS USED FOR PROPAGANDA • Hitler was not a fan of sport, but he understood the propaganda value of the Olympic Games and pulled out all the stops to show an idealised Nazi Germany to the world. Athletes, spectators and journalists from around the globe bought the story and reported back with excitement from those happy summer days in Berlin.

HITLER'S EASIEST VICTORY • Not a single shot is fired when Hitler’s troops march into Austria. In each city, brass bands and happy school children wait for the German soldiers. The persecution of Jews, however, begins immediately.

ATTACK ON HITLER

HITLER IS THE NEW MESSIAH • Adolf Hitler was not just Germany’s head of state. The Nazi leader was seen as a demigod by his people. The cult that surrounded the Führer was the result of a deliberate strategy that made him central to the lives of ordinary Germans.

VEGETARIAN AND ASCETIC • While Hitler was happy to order the mass murder of millions of people, he didn’t believe in the slaughter of animals for human consumption. His diet was strictly vegetarian and – out of fear...