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 Fuhrer 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?