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.
Helmut Brandt (CDU politician in East Germany)
In 1945 there was a widespread assumption that the destruction of Nazi Germany should open the way for a return to multi-party democracy. Helmut Brandt was a founder member of the Christian Democratic Union ("Christlich-Demokratische Union " / CDU), intended as a slightly more broadly based version of the DVP that had existed before the abolition, in 1933, of parliamentary democracy. He quickly became the party's expert on legal issues. The next year, however, April 1946 saw the creation of a new political party within the Soviet occupation zone, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), formed through a contentious merger of the old German Communist Party and (many of the elements of) the more moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party. During the next few years the authorities sought to move towards a new one-party dictatorship, not by banning the other political parties but by controlling them. This was achieved by placing them all into an umbrella organisation known as the National Front and itself controlled by the SED (party). In the end it was only in the Soviet occupation zone (reinvented, formally in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany) that a return to single-party dictatorship was achieved, and even here implementation of the strategy was far from smooth, and stretched out over several years. With the CDU in his part of Germany increasingly under state pressure from without and infiltrated within, in 1948 Helmut Brandt joined the pro-Soviet District Federation (""Landesverband"") in the eastern sector of Berlin. In West Berlin this led to accusations that he was leading a split of the CDU which still saw itself as a single political party across all the allied occupation zones in what was left of Germany after 1945. It was also in 1948 that Helmut Brandt was appointed as one of the 45 CDU members of the first and co-opted as a member of the assembly committee charged with drawing up a new constitution. By this time. however, the CDU leadership in the Soviet occupation zone was undergoing internal fragmentation, dividing those who, for various reasons, were prepared to collaborate, whether willingly or not, with the constitutional developments being implemented by the ruling SED (party) from those, such as Georg Dertinger and Helmut Brandt, who were less so. On account of his "bourgeois-conservative" propensities Brandt now found himself forced out of positions of influence within the CDU, notably by of the East German party's collaborationist wing. It was Gohr who replaced him as chairman of the District Federation (""Landesverband"") in what was becoming known as the Soviet sector of Berlin.