The second volume of a new chronicle of the Third Reich under Hitler’s hand, ending with his death and Germany’s disastrous defeat.

In The Hitler Years: Disaster, 1940-1945, Frank McDonough completes his brilliant two-volume history of Germany under Hitler’s Third Reich.

At the beginning of 1940, Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope
with the endless shame of the Holocaust. Despite Hitler’s grand ambitions and the successful early stages of the Third Reich’s advances into Europe, Frank

McDonough convincingly argues that Germany was only ever a middle-ranking power and never truly stood a chance against the combined forces of the Allies. In this second installment of The Hitler Years, Professor Frank McDonough charts
the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich and Germany’s ultimate defeat.

From historian Frank McDonough, the first volume of a new chronicle of the Third Reich under Hitler’s hand.

On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government by President Hindenburg. Within a few months he had installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his leftwing opponents, terrorizing the
rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life. He embarked on a crash program of militaristic Keynesianism, reviving the economy and achieving full employment through massive public works, vast armaments spending and the
cancellations of foreign debts. After the grim years of the Great Depression, Germany seemed to have been reborn as a brutal and determined European power.

Over the course of the years from 1933 to 1939, Hitler won over most of the population to his vision of a renewed Reich. In these years of domestic triumph, cunning maneuvers, pitting neighboring powers against each other and biding his
time, we see Hitler preparing for the moment that would realize his ambition. But what drove Hitler’s success was also to be the fatal flaw of his regime: a relentless belief in war as the motor of greatness, a dream of vast conquests in Eastern
Europe and an astonishingly fanatical racism.