Hitler

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as they chronicle the years dominated by Germany’s malign master. First the Great War that gave Hitler his chance to escape obscurity, and then the greater one he launched himself. Opening with the continent’s catastrophic slide into generalised conflict in 1914, Kershaw apportions blame or the disaster more or less equally to all the combatant nations.

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments. His book could serve as a manifesto about extending dignity and human rights for

Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers, by social historians, and by lawyers, whom one imagines perusing it with nods, frowns and the occasional wince. Mosley is a barrister of Gray’s Inn, and it was as a lawyer that, with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he came to dominate motor racing. Their association began in 1964, when Mosley was a pupil in Lord Hailsham’s chambers and Ecclestone was the country’s top used-car dealer, said to be able to value an entire showroom at a glance. Ten years later, when they had both made the transition from driving to

Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium foil more usually dropped from planes to jam enemy radar signals. The following morning a wave of Junkers dropping magnesium flares led the German Christmas Day onslaught, soon answered by American P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with machine guns. On the ground, following reports of appalling atrocities, the battle was

‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno Ganz, who not so much portrays Hitler as becomes him in Bernd Eichinger’s 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), spits the Führer’s nihilist venom so convincingly that the fundamental insanity of Nazism is at once laid bare, even to his closest collaborators. The madness of Nazism is now merely Hitler himself, and when on 30 April Ganz/Hitler, entombed in the Führerbunker, shoots himself, the film’s tension is at once gone. What follows is just rats fleeing the hole; and the rest, as it were, is silence. But it was not. VE

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments . After war broke out in September 1939, Resistance fighters from France and other occupied