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Where did it all start? This is the story of how Hitler became the Fuhrer.

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When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the ´most stupendous experience of my life´.

That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world that he opened his newly healed eyes on was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled and the army had been resolutely humbled.

Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the ´criminals´ who had signed the armistice, against the socialists who he accused of stabbing the army in the back and, most violently, against the Jews - a direct threat to the master race of his imagination - on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany´s woes.

But this was not all about the war; the seeds of that hatred lay in Hitler´s youth.

By peeling back the layers of Hitler´s childhood, his war record and his early political career, Paul Ham´s Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitler´s life affect his rise to power?

More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: Was Hitler a freak accident? Or was he an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue, who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

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"A concise study of one of the most fascinating and evil men in history . . . Essential for anyone interested in military history" Soldier

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Paul Ham is the author of the critically acclaimed Sandakan, Hiroshima Nagasaki, Vietnam: The Australian War, Kokoda and 1914: The Year the World Ended.

A former correspondent for the Sunday Times (between 1998-2012), Paul was born in Sydney and educated in Australia and Britain, where he completed a Masters degree in Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He now writes history full-time, and lives in Sydney and Paris.

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