Adolf Hitler's father made a success of life. He was the illegitimate son of a servant girl who became pregnant while working for a Jewish family. Despite his background, he rose to become a civil servant, a state official of administrative rank. He died when Adolf was thirteen, honoured and respected.

His son began my making a mess of his life. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th 1889 in a small Austrian town called Braunau, near to the German border. He did not finish school, failed his entrance examination at the Vienna Academy of Arts and spent the time from his eighteenth to his twenty-fifth year in Vienna and then in Munich, doing nothing, other than mourning the tragic death of his mother, and aspiring to nothing. His orphans pension and the occasional lucky sale of a painting kept the young Bohemian afloat. It was during this time...