The Hitler Book

Few books can offer a more compelling, or a more chilling, glimpse into the minds of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin than THE HITLER BOOK, the recently discovered top-secret dossier commissioned by Stalin. In addition to outlining every aspect of the German dictator's life, behavior, and personality, the book also provides a frightening look into the world of Stalin. Listening to Michael Prichard's low-key reading will cause shivers as listeners gain new insight into the German and Russian mentalities of the era. Prichard reads unobtrusively, as though he were a camera merely trying to capture an event without the participants' awareness. The result is a fascinating, albeit somewhat long, book. D.J.S. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

September 19, 2005
Even after Hitler's death, Stalin remained so intrigued by his nemesis that he commissioned a top-secret dossier detailing every aspect of the late dictator's private life, political behavior and personality. The result—File No. 462a, now known as The Hitler Book
—was discovered hidden in the Soviet archives just two years ago by Uhl, of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin, who presents it with Eberle, a historian at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Much of its material was extracted, not entirely voluntarily, from two of Hitler's captured SS aides, though one should avoid taking all their gossip too literally, for the book reveals as much about the Soviet mentality as about the German. The dossier's authors, after all, appreciated the regime's need to present Hitler as a degenerate, drug-addicted tool of German imperialist capitalism. Their lives depended on how well they understood that unwritten imperative. To that end, the text is silent about the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, owing to Stalin's paranoid anti-Semitism, about the Holocaust. This revelatory document was an extraordinary find and gives an absorbing, truly disturbing, account of Hitler and his demonic court. B&w photos.