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Robert Payne

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The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (The Robert Payne Library Book 8) Kindle Edition

by Robert Payne (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 126 ratings

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In The Life And Death of Adolf Hitler, biographer Robert Payne unravels the tangled threads of Hitler’s public and private life and looks behind the caricature with the Charlie Chaplin mustache and the unruly shock of hair to reveal a Hitler possessed of immense personal charm that impressed both men and women and brought followers and contributions to the burgeoning Nazi Party. Although he misread his strength and organized an ill-fated putsch, Hitler spent his months in prison writing Mein Kampf, which increased his following. Once in undisputed command of the Party, Hitler renounced the chastity of his youth and began a sordid affair with his niece, whose suicide prompted him to reject forever all conventional morality. He promised anything to prospective supporters, then cold-bloodedly murdered them before they could claim a share of the power he reserved for himself. Once he became Chancellor, Hitler step by step bent the powers of the state to his own purposes to satisfy his private fantasies, rearming Germany, slaughtering his real or imaginary enemies, blackmailing one by one the leaders of Europe, and plunging the world into the holocaust of World War II.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER is the story of not so much a man corrupted by power as a corrupt man who achieved absolute power and used it to an unprecedented degree, knowing at every moment exactly what he was doing and calculating his enemies’ weaknesses to a hair’s breadth. It is the story of a living man.

Robert Payne (1911-1983) was born in Cornwall, U.K. His father was English, his mother French. He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and at the universities of Liverpool, Capetown in South Africa, Munich and The Sorbonne. During his lifetime he had over a hundred books published on a wide range of subjects, the widest range of any known author. He was known chiefly for his biographies and history books, among them Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Leonardo, Chaplin, the Christian Centuries, The World of Art. He also wrote novels and poetry. Librarians loved him; critics raved about him. Orville Prescott of The New York Times referred to him as “a literary phenomenon of astounding versatility and industry.”

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840 pages
Language

English
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Publication date

April 29, 2014
File size

5779 KB
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About the Author

Robert Payne (1911-l983) was born in Cornwall, U.K. His father was English, his mother French. He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and at the universities of Liverpool, Capetown in South Africa, Munich and The Sorbonne. During his lifetime he had over a hundred books published on a wide range of subjects, the widest range of any known author. He was known chiefly for his biographies and history books, among them Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Leonardo, Chaplin, the Christian Centuries, The World of Art. He also wrote novels and poetry. Librarians loved him; critics raved about him. Orville Prescott of The New York Times referred to him as "a literary phenomenon of astounding versatility and industry."

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00K1D4UC0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brick Tower Press (April 29, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 29, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5779 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 840 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,681 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,693 in Biographies of World War II
- #2,275 in Biographies of Presidents & Heads of State (Kindle Store)
- #6,170 in Military & Spies Biographies

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4.4 126 ratings

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Website: www.robertpayneauthor.com/bio.htm

Robert Payne (1911-1983) was acclaimed as a "literary phenomenon of astounding industry and versatility" by Orville Prescott of The New York Times. During his lifetime he had over 100 books published on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects. He was known chiefly for his biographies and histories, but he also wrote novels, poetry and was a multi-lingual translator. When he died the Times (London) headlined his obituary "Prolific Writer of High Standard."

His literary career began in 1936 with a jumpstart: translation of Yuri Olyesha's Envy (Hogarth Press), War in the Marshes (Faber & Faber--T.S. Eliot was his editor), Forever China, China Awake, and the most enduring of all--The White Pony, culled from 3000 years of Chinese poetry, in 1947. In the 60's and 70's his career catapulted him to enormous stature as biographer and literary figure with the publication of his great biographies: Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Hitler, Leonardo. Critics raved about his "vast erudition," his "magic power over words" and that rare ability to capture the essence of his subjects and bring them to life.

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Firelady1841

Awesome

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2018

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I am just amazed at his hatred for Jewish people. He really believed that the Germans were suffering economically because of the Jewish people....how ludicrous and very very sad. I also feel for the Germans, he just used them for his gain and to this day, Germans are still paying reparations for what Hitler did.......It is amazing how one man ended up turning the whole world against him. But honestly....what did he expect? Even Rome ended up falling apart. History repeats itself...whether Rome or Hitler and the SS, same agenda, different Times... And the Devil will roam the earth to and fro and will take with him who ever he can...I am sure that God has a special place for the likes of Hitler. I would not want to be in his shoes, we all have to answer for our sins.

2 people found this helpful

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M. G Watson

Flawed --and Fabulous

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2006

I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see all the negative reactions here to Robert Payne's fine work on Hitler - in my opinion the most readable and enjoyable of the English-language biographies on that infamous tyrant. I respectfully submit that some of my fellow readers were too busy taking issue with its flaws to see its intrinsic genius.

It is of course undeniably true that there are several glaring errors in Payne's research on Hitler which were exposed by subsequent biographers; it is equally true that he relied very heavily on source material of dubious authenticity to fill in various gaps in Hitler's life. Payne devotes an entire chapter to Hitler's visit to England in the early 1900s, a visit which apparently never happened; he also writes extensively on secret negotiations between Germany and the USSR which supposedly took place in 1943 and which also may never have occurred. These mistakes (and others) are glaring and embarrassing, but readers would do well to remember that Payne was writing in 1968, long before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and had much more restricted access to documents than did, for example, Ian Kershaw. He was also trying much harder to paint a picture of Adolf Hitler, the human being, than was Kershaw, Bullock, or Toland, who were more concerned with trying to weave Hitler's life into the fabric of his times - i.e. to tell the "whole story" of the Nazi era.

It is in this last category - Hitler the person - that Payne succeeds where the others often falter. If his details occasionally stray into the erroneous, his reconstruction of Hitler's youth in Braunau and Linz, his self-imposed misery in Vienna, his life as a soldier during the Great War, and the tumultuous early days of the National Socialist movement are all brought to life with the vividness of a novel. Payne may only be a second-tier historian, but he has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms the dramatic. He brings to life in vivid terms the beer-hall brawls, the back-room deals, the raucous political rallies, and the frequent moments of despair which often gripped the movement as it struggled for power, never letting us lose sight of the man who was behind it all. Kershaw is a masterful researcher, but like many historians he lags in the writing department, and his massive two-volume work on Hitler (which has become the standard in English-speaking countries) while exhaustive, never really put me in Hitler's shoes. Bullock had advanced writing and researching skills, but he was more interested in mapping out the era than in understanding the man. And Toland offered nothing more than a detailed timeline that never once attempted to penetrate Hitler's soul.

The defects in Payne's work are indeed serious, but so long as one doesn't use THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER as the sole source of his knowledge on the subject, I would recommend it highly for people who are interested in achieving a personal understanding one of the most enigmatic and terrible men in history.

33 people found this helpful

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Al Singh

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2014

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I have read this book many times, and it never fails to fascinate. Hitler's later career is well known to history; the really interesting part of this book deals with his youth. He appears to have been an isolated dreamer, alienated from others but not totally devoid of human feeling. For much of his young life he drifted about aimlessly, unable to make anything of himself or even support himself. It wasn't until he was in his thirties that he discovered his ability to speak. Thereafter the demons entered in. As a young man he was alienated but probably not altogether irredeemable; by the time he rose to power he was probably insane. It remains a profound mystery that one of the most civilized nations in the world could have followed him willingly into the abyss. This book is the biography of a madman who influenced world history more than any man before or since. It offers cautionary lessons, and it illustrates how fragile civilization is at its core.

10 people found this helpful

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Rose

One Incorrect Fact?

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2020

The author stated that Hitler’s father never beat him, but every other source says that he was beaten, and beaten severely.

Other reviews here state there are factual errors but other than a trip to the UK, the errors are not stated. I am guessing the father’s behavior is one of them.

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2021

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Rare find

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Jackson Grimes Ohio Grand Dragon

An ok tome

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2016

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0k, anti-National Socialist as expected with the Jewish control of publishing houses in North America. Bernice Talbot used to have this laying around when we lived together in Chicago, IL. She probably got it from Rockwell Hall and it was orange and yellow. I liked Toland's book on Hitler's life better though.

4 people found this helpful

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