Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil / Ron Rosenbaum.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [397]-424) and index.

Contenidos: Introduction: The Baby Pictures and the Abyss

Part One: The Beginning of the Beginning
The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers

The Hitler Family Film Noir

The Poison Kitchen: The Forgotten First Explainers

Part Two: Two Postwar Visions – Sincerity and Its Counterfeit
H. R. Trevor‑Roper: The Professor and the Mountebank

Alan Bullock: Rethinking Hitler’s Thought Process

Part Three: Geli Raubal and Hitler’s “Sexual Secret”
Was Hitler “Unnatural”?

Hitler’s Songbird and the Suicide Register

The Dark Matter: The Sexual Fantasy of the Hitler Explainers

Part Four: Hatred – Complex and Primitive
Fritz Gerlich and the Trial of Hitler’s Nose

The Shadow Hitler, His “Primitive Hatred,” and the “Strange Bond”

Part Five: The Art of Evil and the Future of It
To the Gestapo Cottage; or, A Night Close to the Führer

David Irving: The Big Oops

Part Six: The War over the Question Why
A Tale of Three Kafkas: A Cautionary Parable

Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why

Dr. Louis Micheels: There Must Be a Why

Part Seven: Blame and Origins
Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer: The Temptation to Blame God

George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish “Invention of Conscience”

Singling out Christianity: The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby

Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans

Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

Afterword to the Updated Edition
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Ron Rosenbaum embarks on an investigative and philosophical journey to explore one of the most unsettling questions of the 20th century:
Why did Hitler do what he did?
Or more broadly: Can evil like Hitler’s be explained at all?