ABSTRACT
Hitler born into lower-middle-class respectability in the small Austrian border town of Braunau am Inn in 1889. Hitler hastened to volunteer for service in the Bavarian army. Hitler's power raises a number of highly complex problems. This chapter describes the premises that Hitler's personal power indeed real, not a phantasm. But they interpret the extent and expression of that power in large measure as the collaboration product and tolerance, miscalculations and weakness of others in positions of power and destructive influence. And they suggest that the progressive extension of Hitler's power, which reached the point where it's exclusively destructive potential became all-consuming and wholly antagonistic to preservation of rational political authority, was mainly the result of the concessions and capitulations which others were ready to make. Examination of Hitler's power begins and ends with Hitler. The actions of others, and the conditions shaping those actions, are also vitally important.
