The story of the rise of Adolf Hitler, with which we are all familiar, is the story that Hitler himself invented at his trial in 1924 and then developed into Mein Kampf. It tells the story of his rapid emergence as a National Socialist leader in 1919 and how he successfully rallied most of the establishment in Munich and much of it in Bavaria to support the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. This is the narrative that has been largely accepted at face value for over ninety years. However, upon closer examination, Hitler's account of the events of his life in the years immediately following the First World War turns out to be in every respect as unreliable as his account of his experiences as a soldier during the war itself. In The Making of Hitler ( Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber picks up where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, peeling back the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own narrative to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in Munich after the First War. world war. This is the gripping tale of how a bumbling, unemployed loner with virtually indistinguishable leadership qualities and unstable political ideas became a charismatic, self-confident, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with which the world would soon become tragically familiar. Weber makes clear that the picture of the fully formed political leader that Hitler portrayed in Mein Kampf is quite far from reality. At the beginning of 1919, Hitler's ideas and preferences were still quite unclear and largely undefined, and they continued to change until 1923. Confirmation of Hitler's emergence was the failed Ludendorff putsch in November 1923 and the subsequent Ludendorff trial. While the initiators and pioneers of the Munich political scene during the trial tried to place all the blame on Hitler, he was given a brilliant opportunity to place himself in the spotlight, turning what was the “Ludendorff trial” into the “Hitler trial.” By this time he will no longer be simply a local Bavarian political leader. From now on, he will present himself as a potential “savior of the nation.” In the months following the trial, Hitler reinforced this myth by writing Mein Kampf in his comfortable prison cell. His years of transformation were now behind him. His years as Führer were soon to come. This book, a scholarly study of the German historian Thomas Weber, is well-cited in the original, as befits a serious work. In this translation, references to sources are omitted and several translator's notes are added.