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Rating: 
Summary: Amazing
Review: An amazing read. I have read a lot about Mr.Hitler and the National Socialist Movement, and I have see references to Mr. Hitler's artistic bends. However to see all of it in a single book..AMAZING. Nothing can take away the horror of 1933-1944 in Germany and Europe, but to think that the whole purpose, in the eyes of the dictator was to create beauty. Adolf Hitler wanted to create a world of absolute German neo-classical art and society. In and of itself, not a bad goal, but not an achieveable goal, and espscially in the way it was attempted!
An amazing new angle at the often flat and one sided person of Adolf Hitler.
Rating:
Summary: A revelation. A very important book.
Review: I had never previously read books that dealt with Hitler or World War II before reading this one. Like every other Baby Boomer, I've seen enough films and TV shows to write my own WWII movie that most people would probably find credible. What we know of the war is about the fighting, the arrests of those pronounced "undesirable" by the Nazis, children denouncing their parents to the authorities, the concentration camps, etc. The Germany that Hitler presented to his people was a forward-looking state of culture and enlightenment, the acme of modern civilization. People want to believe the best about themselves. Hitler had an instinctive sense of theatre, a passion for ritual, and the desire to make everyone in the entire world subservient to him, as well as the power to squelch all opposition. In some ways, he was visionary. The Volkswagen was mostly his idea. (It was created to justify his building of the Autobahn, which is still one of the wonders of modern Germany.) But he wanted everyone to have HIS taste. Only his taste was acceptable. Everything else was either kitsch or decadent. Disagreement meant losing one's job in most cases or, in some extreme cases, a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. Of course, the most troubling aspect of Hitler was how he could have gotten so many people to go along with him. For me this book explains it. I think this is an important book that made me see things from a different perspective. Parts of the book made me drop my jaw. "Awesome" is an overused word, but it really is the applicable term here. The author made me extremely interested in a subject that basically had little appeal for me. I want to do a lot more reading about this subject now. Spotts' book is a knockout. It gets five stars from me.
Rating:
Summary: A Tremendous Achievement
Review: This is the book that I wanted to write. That having been said, I think Mr. Spotts did a considerably better job of it that I ever could. It is impossible to begin to understand Adolf Hitler without understanding his aesthetic approach to the world as he wanted it to be. Usually, histories and biographies of Hitler dismiss his interest in art as either sub-bourgeois sentimentality or propaganda-oriented. This book is intelligent enough not to take either of these tacks, and as a result delivers an exhaustive and meaningful account of how Hitler was, ultimately, an artist who achieved political power.I wrote an initial paper on the subject in college (imagine how popular that was), but my thesis centered primarily on Hitler's hopes for his art career and the psychological issues underlying his artistic preferences. This book addresses the former, but not the latter, I think quite rightly. What Spotts does, which I would never have been able to do, is exhaustively examine Hitler's work schedules and attendance at specific meetings and events, not to mention budget allocations. This establishes without question the priorities he put on various components of the arts, versus politics or even the business of fighting the war. Spotts is mostly objective, or mildly condemnatory. This makes for a more focused read. I think this is the only book I have ever seen on Amazon.com where all the reviews are five stars. It absolutely deserves it.
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