In 1920 an obscure, brown-shirted band of fanatics who called themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche ArbeiterparteiNazis for shortbought their first newspaper. It did not seem much of a buy. The Volkischer Beo-bachter (People's Observer), was a slender Munich biweekly with barely 7,000 subscribers and not a pfennig in the till. Its new publisher, one Adolf Hitler, made it a daily and rang up a blustering new masthead slogan: "Combat Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Germany."
From this tiny seed, sown a full 13 years before Hitler's accession, sprang the most perverted, rapacious...