Ralf Georg Reuth – författare

Repeatedly decorated for valour during the First World War, Erwin Rommel went on to lead German Panzer divisions in North Africa, becoming known as the ‘Desert Fox.’Stripping away layers of wartime German and Allied propaganda, Reuth’s dramatic reassessment of Rommel’s life finds him at odds with his popular legacy. His purported involvement with the 20 July plotters was a myth. In fact, he remained mindlessly loyal to his Führer until forced to commit suicide in 1944.Colluding with the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to bolster his fame, Rommel was also a useful figure for the Allies ― in exaggerating his battlefield prowess they succeeded in making the incompetence of their own campaign in North Africa.This revelatory biography shows Rommel was no master strategist caught between duty and resistance, but the embodiment of the tragic German choice to follow Hitler unquestionably into the abyss.

Hitler's tyranny is still difficult to understand today. In this book, Ralf Georg Reuth examines ten aspects of this catastrophe. Among other things, he asks: Was anti-Semitism more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere? Was Versailles responsible for Hitler's rise, and why did the Germans follow a racial fanatic like him? How did his war differ from all others before it? The disturbing answers provide an overall picture that shows: Hitler was not just the consequence of German history, but the result of chance, deception, and seduction. This thought-provoking new study takes aim at several of the 'sacred cows' of Hitler scholarship from the past forty years. Reuth interrogates and challenges a range of orthodox views on such topics as how mainstream politicians facilitated Hitler's rise to power, the Fuhrer's infamous pact with Stalin, and the complicity of ordinary Germans in his genocidal tyranny. Eschewing a conventional chronological approach in favour of a forensic analysis of Adolf Hitler's mainsprings of action both as chancellor and military commander, Reuth portrays Hitler as the apotheosis of a specifically German strain of militarism and imperialism, shifting the focus firmly back on to the mindset and modus operandi of Hitler himself. The portrait that emerges is one of a murderous fantasist and political opportunist driven by an all-embracing ideology of racial superiority. Reuth's account courts controversy on a few points but offers a fascinating counterpoint to much recent scholarship.