Robert Gellately on his book - Hitler's True Believers

A discussion with Christine Schmidt, Wiener Holocaust Library, 2 October 2020.

The Wiener Holocaust Library was delighted to welcome Robert Gellately to the Library for a virtual book talk to discuss his new work, 'Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis'. Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodge-podge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world.