In this 'major contribution to the study of the Third Reich' (Times Literary Supplement), Ian Kershaw argues that it lay not so much in Hitler's personality or his bizarre Nazi ideology, as in the social and political values of the people themselves.

In charting the creation, rise, and fall of the `Hitler Myth', he demonstrates the importance of the manufactured 'Führer cult' to the attainment of Nazi political ends, and how the Nazis used the new techniques of propaganda to exploit and build on the beliefs, phobias, and prejudices of the day.