Becoming Hitler : the making of a Nazi / Thomas Weber.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-407) and index.

Prelude -- PART I: Genesis -- Coup d'etat (20 November 1918-February 1919) -- A Cog in the Machine of Socialism (February-early April 1919) -- Arrested (early April-early May 1919) -- Turncoat (early May to mid-July 1919) -- PART II: New Testaments -- A New Home at Last (mid-July to September 1919) -- Two Visions (October 1919-March 1920) -- A Two and a Half Thousand Year Old Tool (March-August 1920) -- Genius (August-December 1920) -- Hitler's Pivot to the East (December 1920-July 1921) -- PART III: Messiah -- The Bavarian Mussolini (July 1921-December 1922) -- The German Girl from New York (early 1923-summer 1923) -- Hitler's First Book (summer 1923-autumn 1923) -- The Ludendorff Putsch (autumn 1923-spring 1924) -- Lebensraum (spring 1924-1926) -- Epilogue -- Archival collections & private papers and interviews.

In this book, the author examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah.After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred. In the book, the author brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue.