Book Review: Hitler’s Maladies and Their Impact on World War II: A Behavioral Neurologist’s View’

Book Review: Hitler’s Maladies and Their Impact on World War II: A Behavioral Neurologist’s View’
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in Munich in the spring of 1932. Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Dustin Bass
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The mental health of Adolf Hitler has been an ongoing discussion since before his death in the spring of 1945. Historians and psychologists have endeavored to get to the bottom of what made Hitler arguably the most evil person in human history. Perhaps they are all right. Perhaps not so much. Tom Hutton, a clinical and research neurologist who was also a professor and vice chairman of the Department of Medical and Surgical Neurology at the Texas Tech School of Medicine, has taken many of the well-known studies and books over the past decades and pitted them against his knowledge of neurobehavior.

Hutton discusses the possibilities of Hitler’s mental fractures from the start of his life as a child of an angry and abusive father, Alois, and a doting mother, Klara, and moves chronologically toward his final days in a bunker in Berlin. Throughout the book, Hutton either denies, confirms, or keeps open the possibility of how certain experiences and illnesses may have contributed to Hitler’s mentality.

Dustin Bass
Dustin Bass
Author
Dustin Bass is the creator and host of the American Tales podcast, and co-founder of The Sons of History. He writes two weekly series for The Epoch Times: Profiles in History and This Week in History. He is also an author.
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