One consequence of Hitler’s crimes still continues: every year, if not every month, the world has to wade through a newly published book on his life and crimes. A big red swastika and his magic name on the jacket seem an almost certain guarantee of its sales to a public which appears forever puzzled, thrilled, horrified, and fascinated by the jather sordid subject. As there remain few new facts and facets of Hitler’s biography to be unearthed, most recent publications on the Nazi past have offered merely a rehash of findings and theses made known before by students in the field.
The Hundred Days to Hitler serves as a perfect example of that kind of literature. Its authors, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, two British movie writers who for more than a decade have turned the production of books on bits and pieces of the Nazi era into a kind of cottage industry, now attempt to de- scribe Hitler’s last and ultimately successful battle for power in Germany. Somewhat arbitrarily, they date this often desperate, finally decisive period from Hitler’s expulsion of Otto Strasser, a more moderate old Nazi, from the party ranks to Hitler’s triumphant entry into the Reich Chancellery and the passing of the law that invested him with dicta-
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