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.
Etschberg
In the early 1930s, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) became somewhat popular in Etschberg. In the 1930 Reichstag elections, 11% of the local votes went to Adolf Hitler’s party while 52.5% went to the Communists. By the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already seized power, local support for the Nazis had swollen to 35.9% while the Communists’ share of the vote had risen slightly to 54.7%. The Nazis nevertheless prevailed in the end, and Hitler's success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933 ("Ermächtigungsgesetz"), thus starting the Third Reich in earnest. Among other things, Hitler banned the Communist Party of Germany.