What is the best Hitler biography? I am not a /pol/fag, strictly

Not sure about all of them, but I know David Irving's Hitler's War is kind of unique in being a sympathetic treatment, and I think it's considered one of his better books, coming before he went totally into writing propaganda pieces.

>>8903573
Wait no, I'm wrong, it's pretty controversial. For some reason the way I remembered it, it was the big pre-controversy book that actually manages to be safely within respectable scholarship. Looks like it's not so "safe."

Still maybe worth looking at.

>>8903548
Try Kershaw, OP.
You will be disappoint, because Hitler is a boring and unassuming chap

>>8903573
>>8903576
David Irving can be a little iffy with his sources. He's OK to read, just don't take everything as Gospel.

In terms of a biography, Kershaw and there is also the boy who grew up with Hitler who wrote on him. I forget the name now.

>>8903548
Look up Rochus Misch, sekrets out of the führer bunker, might satisfy your fascination with the nazis a good bit.
>answered the phone for hitler
>hello, this is reichskanzlei /:=| ! Normandy :o ? Really? Yes! No! He's sleeping atm^^.... cu l8 :-D
>NKVD stuck a glas tube in his peenor after the war
>and struck it with a hammer

>>8903548
Ian Kershaw's Hitler - two parts, Hubris and Nemesis. Don't read Irving, he's often factually incorrect. Educate yourself on the Functionalism vs Intentionalism Historiographical debate also.

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>>8903615
>a holocaust-denying nazi apologist can be a little iffy with his sources

>>8903573
I don't want a sympathetic depiction of Hitler m8. He's not sympathetic.

Gerwarth also brings up this problem of tone and the need to obviously not be sympathetic towards Nazis, but at the same time to not be sensationalist and overly condemning. A scholarly tone is best.

The problem with scholarship on the Third Reich is that testimony from contemporaries is often unreliable. Obviously postwar, many contemporaries wished to distance themselves as much as possible and the result was often distorted, exaggerated or outright bogus testimonies.

Finding good scholarly work on the Third Reich and Nazi leaders can be a minefield.

>>8903615
>David Irving can be a little iffy with his sources
Ah, the art of understatement is so rarely practised around these parts.

>>8903766
;^)

>>8903781
>I don't want a sympathetic depiction of Hitler m8. He's not sympathetic.
>the need to obviously not be sympathetic towards Nazis
>scholarly tone is best

This attitude in itself can be a minefield, be careful. There really is no one "scientific objectivity" or "scholarly tone" in historical writing. Obviously you want to be objective and tell the truth as an historian, but this isn't some magical valueless stance, free from all bias or judgment. Judgment is a necessary precondition of writing history. Our bias is the hermeneutic starting point (it's our "interest" in what we're studying), that allows us to uncover truth at all, by really caring about clarifying the facts. You can't write holocaust history without having a stake in it, and having a stake in it probably means having extreme "bias" that Nazism was evil. That being the "correct" bias doesn't make it any less bias.

David Irving is probably a bad historian, yeah, especially in his later work. But that doesn't mean that you can't read his shit critically as real history. Someone being sympathetic to Hitler is obviously a moral issue, contrasted with someone being sympathetic with holocaust victims, but it's still a stance. It caused him to do real scholarship. Finding people whose biases align with yours more closely is comforting but it can lead to blind spots.

I recommend you read Hannah Arendt's "Reply to Eric Voegelin."

>In a six-page essay in The New York Review of Books published on 19 September 1996 the American historian Gordon A. Craig, a leading scholar of German history at Stanford University, noted Irving's claims that the Holocaust never took place and that Auschwitz was merely "a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate".[18] Though "such obtuse and quickly discredited views" may be "offensive to large numbers of people", Craig argued that Irving's work is "the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War" and that "we dare not" disregard his views. Craig called Irving a "useful irritant"; a devil's advocate historian who promoted what Craig considered to be a twisted and wrong-headed view of history, with a great deal of élan, but his advocacy of these views forced historians to make a fruitful epistemological examination about the current state of knowledge about the Third Reich. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein cited Craig's estimation of Irving as a person who has made an "indispensable contribution to our knowledge of World War II".[19] Finkelstein favourably quoted Craig's testament to Irving's value in part thus: "His book Hitler's War remains the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War and, as such, indispensable for all students of that conflict..."[20] In a speech at Yale University in 2005, Finkelstein said of Irving that "personally, I don't like the fellow...I think he is a Nazi", but that he thought Irving was useful as a devil's advocate.[21]

Here's a list of solid authors of varying standpoints on structuralism vs intentionalism:

Hans Mommsen
Ian Kershaw
Christopher Browning
David Cesarani
Eberhard Jäckel
Pridham/Noakes
Martin Broszat
Klaus Hildebrand

>>8903614

Not OP, but I have Kershaws version lying around.

>this problem of tone and the need to obviously not be sympathetic towards Nazis, but at the same time to not be sensationalist and overly condemning. A scholarly tone is best.

how is it with regard to this ?

>>8904227
Kershaw nails it.