Hitler remains a blot on Germany, nay the century's moral landscape - a scar embedded deep on a people. That man could do thus to man defied all sense of logic, reasoning, raising questions --has the human world really progressed?

'Hitler' by Ian Kershaw is again one of those many attempts to study what made Hitler the man he was -but without trying to make it a psychobiography. In this first of a proposed two-volume work, the professor of history at the University of Sheffield in England, traces the life and times of the dictator from his birth to the order to German troops to remilitarise the Rhineland in 1936. It is a vast canvas as he delineates both that movement and that embrace.

The description of Hitler's early life and the portraiture of the milieu in which he grew, specially the anti-Semitism of Vienna, gives some insight as to what made Hitler the racist ideologue that he became. ''What has continued in the writing of the book to interest me more than the strange character of the man who held Germany's fate in his hands between 1933 and 1945,'' says Kershaw ''is the question of how Hitler was possible: not just how this initially most unlikely pretender to high state office could gain power; but how he was able to extend that power until it became absolute, until field marshals were prepared to obey without question the orders of a former corporal, until highly skilled 'professionals' and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses.''

Cutting through the self-blandishments of the autocrat to what instigated and fuelled his hatred for Jews, Kershaw says it was his experience in the first World War and the revolutionary period that followed and of course Germany's humiliation therein that wrought the change in him - from a failed artist and social dropout, a "nobody" into a man with a mission, a sense of discipline and belonging, and ultimately, in Munich, a peerless propagandist and beer hall agitator who finally discovered his powers as a speaker.

Dwelling largely on the cause of a betrayed Fatherland, he was able to galvanise the emotions of an entire people and gradually after 1919 the Jew was pinpointed as being behind all the misforturtunes that befell the nation. Jews must be removed was his simple yet repetitive cry. ''Don't think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,'' he said in 1920, ''without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis.''

However, Kershaw's central biographical exercise delves more into the nature and development of Hitler's power rather than focus on his experiences, personality traits or ideology. ''What has continued in the writing of the book to interest me more than the strange character of the man who held Germany's fate in his hands between 1933 and 1945,'' he says, ''is the question of how Hitler was possible: not just how this initially most unlikely pretender to high state office could gain power; but how he was able to extend that power until it became absolute, until field marshals were prepared to obey without question the orders of a former corporal, until highly skilled 'professionals' and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses.''

His description of Hitler is as, we have read many times over, an ''unperson,'' someone who had very little personal life or history beyond his life as a public figure. Kershaw says his biography is of Hitler's power - of how Hitler became and acted as the Fuhrer and of how he was given the power to act that way by his followers. It was a power that was almost derailed at numerous times, but was saved by a variety of people and circumstances.

When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 it was a fallout of the political miscalculations of many others as it was a result of Hitler's own actions. Earlier in his career, had Hitler received a more severe jail sentence than he did after his beer hall putsch in 1923, his fortunes, and the world's, would almost surely have been different. And had the Depression not occurred, German democracy might have had more support than it did from the German people. But Hitler was hardly a passive factor in German history. He deftly exploited the circumstances in Germany that suited his talents and ideology. He played to the general fear of Bolshevism, resentments about national humiliation, widespread anti-Semitism, the desire for a new and better society and the search for national redemption.

Hitler was the central element in the phenomenal rise of Nazism. Without him there would have been no Holocaust. And, as Kershaw contends, without Hitler there would not have been a "European war" by the end of the Thirties. But German society welcomed him, joined him in his movement and helped build the Nazi enterprise.

Hitler and his German audience were inseparable. On hearing Hitler speak in Hamburg in 1932, one schoolteacher extolled him as ''the helper, saviour, the redeemer from overgreat distress.'' Hitler knew of his salvational impact on many Germans - and he, himself, believed it. A few months after the German march into the Rhineland in 1936, Hitler addressed Nazi Party functionaries: ''How deeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together! Once you heard the voice of a man, and it spoke to your hearts; it awakened you, and you followed that voice.''

Two days later, he went on to say: ''That you have found me . . . among so many millions is the miracle of our time! And that I have found you, that is Germany's fortune!'' It is this utter acceptance by Hitler of the adulation of others that Kershaw considers the Fuhrer's hubris - the overweening arrogance that, in life as in myth, courts disaster. Kershaw's book is able to explain why Hitler and Germany could be identified with each other - what made Hitler's dictatorial power possible.


What Amazon.com says:

In his forthright introduction, Kershaw acknowledges that, as a committed social historian, he did not include biography in his original intellectual plans. However, his "growing preoccupation" with the structures of Nazi domination pushed him toward questions about Hitler's place and considerable authority within that system. He argues that the sources for Hitler's power must be sought not only in the dictator's actions but also (and more importantly) in the social circumstances of a nation that allowed him to overstep all institutional and moral barriers. In a comprehensive treatment of Hitler's life and times up through the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, Kershaw draws from documents recently made available from Russian archives and benefits from a rigorous source criticism that has discredited many records formerly understood to be reliable. Hubris thus supplants Alan Bullock's classic Hitler: A Study in Tyranny as the definitive account of a man who, with characteristic smugness, indicated that it was a divinely inspired history that made him: "I go with the certainty of a sleep walker along a path laid out for me by Providence." Kershaw's penetrating analysis of how such a certain path could emerge from the dire circumstances of post World War I Germany is the abiding strength of Hubris. © Amazon.com