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.
Karl Harrer
Harrer became increasingly unhappy with the direction in which the party was going after Adolf Hitler became an influential force within it. Early in 1920, Hitler moved to sever the party's link with the Thule Society and to redefine the policies of the DAP. On 24 February 1920 in the "Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München", Hitler for the first time enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Worker's Party's manifesto that had been drawn up by Drexler, Feder and Hitler. In addition, to increase its appeal to larger segments of the population, the DAP changed its name to the "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party). Such was the significance of the move in expanding the party's public profile that Harrer resigned from the party in disagreement as he had always believed that it should be a semi-secret elite group rather than a mass popular movement. The Thule Society subsequently fell into decline and was dissolved about five years later, well before Hitler came to power.