Inside Hitler's Crib: He was just a German homeboy

Biography, if freed from the birth-to-death approach, is the most elastic of genres. Seldom has its flexibility been better demonstrated than by Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian who combines meticulous research with elegance and wit: not qualities normally associated with biographers of Adolf Hitler.

No ordinary portrait, Hitler at Home plays with the ways in which the Nazi leader collaborated with his party propagandists to manufacture a counterpoint to all the marching, fist-waving, floodlights and glitz documented by Leni Riefenstahl. They devised “Hitler at Home”: lover of large dogs, flaxen-haired tots and mountain views.

Hitler playing with Eva Braun's Scottish terriers Negus and Katuschka

CREDIT: 2011 GETTY IMAGES/GALERIE BILDERWELT

This sanitised Adolf, flogged through innocuous magazines like Homes and Gardens to eager audiences around the world, was a sentimental man of the people: a hard-working chap who escaped the cares of state in every good German’s dream home: a little alpine chalet. Photographs of the Führer dreamily gazing at the snowy peaks of the Obersalzberg signalled the purity of Nazi aspirations...