ABSTRACT
Less than twelve and a half years separate Hitler’s triumphal entry into the Reichskanzlei on 30 January 1933 and his squalid suicide in a bunker beneath the ruins of the Reichshauptstadt on 30 April 1945. Yet this brief chronological period has generated more historical writing and controversy than any other era in German history. The legacy of Hitler’s Drittes Reich (the Heiliges Römisches Reich and the Kaiserreich having been the first and second empires respectively) resounds in Germany and beyond to this day.
