Young Hitler
The book is divided into two sections: in the first part, a narrative retells the formative years of the young Adolf Hitler between 1907 and 1918, when he lived as a starving artist on the streets and in the asylums of Vienna, and then joined World War I as a volunteer on the Western Front. When the war ends, Hitler comes into contact with members of the Thule Society in Munich, an association of occultists who had launched a political party, the German Workers Party (DAP).The narration ends in 1920 when Hitler takes over the DAP and turns it into the Nazi Party (NSDAP). In an interview with The Guardian, author Claus Hant explained that the events after 1920 are exhaustively documented in the numerous Hitler biographies. But what the biographies do not investigate is the time before then, when Hitler was transformed from inconsequential artist and drifter to towering political leader. Hant says that he has centered Young Hitler deliberately around this momentous transformation. According to Hant, this decisive turning point in Hitler’s life can only be explained satisfactorily now that recent research has unearthed certain previously unknown data and facts.
Criticism of the Catholic Church
Though the broader membership of the Nazi Party after 1933 came to include many Catholics, aggressive anti-Church radicals like Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler's chosen "deputy" Martin Bormann saw the campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists. While the Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler's public relationship to religion in Nazi Germany may be defined as one of opportunism, his personal position on Catholicism and Christianity was one of hostility. Bormann recorded in "Hitler's Table Talk" that Nazism was secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook.