What was the secret of his power over his listeners? His appeal to excess and to hate? They spoke of his intuitive powers and his "luck" (he escaped several attempts on his life).

At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very person from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his bad temper. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this unstable and disorderly century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crime, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman.

How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation famous for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant?

Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too weak and too late to succeed. German society had gathered behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support.

Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hates; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his mysterious personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an real curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.

We think we know everything about the evil forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant despise for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with Eva Braun, who adored him; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of Jews, whose survival made him angry — each and every phase of his official and private life had found its biographers.

And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable mad man find it within himself to impose so much hope as an absolute ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises?

We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His Nationalist Socialist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections. The aging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the Third Reich, which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years.

From that moment on, the situation became worse. The burning of the Reichstag came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear spread all over the country. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight moved toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late.

The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who promised him an affection, a tenderness and a loyalty that is nearly irrational. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into joy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not discover the catastrophe he had within himself?

Violating the Treaty of Versailles, which limited the German army to 100000 men, Hitler began a rearmament program of massive scale: fighter planes, tanks, submarines. His goal? It was enough to read Mein Kampf, written in prison after the unsuccessful overthrow of 1923 in Munich, to find his goal: to become, once again, a global superpower, capable and desirous of reconquering lost land, and others as well.

And the free world let it happen.

And yet in his own "logic," Hitler was persuaded for a fairly long time that the German and British people had every reason to get along and divide up spheres of influence throughout the world. In fact, he wanted to swallow up Russia, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic countries to augment lebensraum. But then why did he launch his destructive war against London? Why did he declare war against the U.S.? Solely to please his Japanese ally? Why did he enforce a policy of cruelty in the Soviet territories occupied by his armies, when certain segments of the population there were ready to greet them with flowers? And finally, why did he invest so much energy in his hatred of Jews? Why did the night trains that took them to their death have priority over the military transport that were taking badly needed troops to the front? His dark obsession with the "Jewish question" and its "Final Solution" will be long remembered, for it has made names that broke men's hearts with terror: Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec.--

After Rommel's defeat in North Africa, after the failure at Stalingrad and even when the landings in Normandy were nearing, Hitler and his followers still had the mind to come up with the Final Solution. In his testament, drafted in an underground bunker just hours before his suicide in Berlin, Hitler returns again to this hatred of the Jewish people that had never left him.

But in the same testament, he settles his score with the German people. He wants them to be sacked, destroyed, reduced to misery and shame for having failed him by denying him his glory. The former corporal become commander in chief of all his armies and convinced of his strategic and political genius was not prepared to recognize his own responsibility for the defeat of his Reich.

His kingdom collapsed after 12 years in a war that remains the most terrible, the most brutal and the deadliest in history. But which, by the same token, allowed several large figures to emerge. Their names have become legendary: Eisenhower, De Gaulle, Montgomery, Zhukov, Patton ... But when later we evoke the 20th century, among the first names that will surge to mind will be that of a extremist with a mustache who thought to rule by selling the soul of his people to the thousand devils of hate and of death.