Perhaps the seminal text in this respect is Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich, which was written to explain Hitler’s widespread popularity among the German people, even as he led them into global conflict and genocide. Kershaw is, of course, also the author of one of the standard lives of Hitler, and a recognised authority on the period.

In The "Hitler Myth," Kershaw explains that he wanted to focus on the “history of everyday life.” So his book concentrates on the general public’s attitudes to Hitler, rather than taking a “top-down” approach of looking at the actions and motives of people of high status. Kershaw was looking for an answer to the question “How could Hitler happen?” – and sought to explain did so many Germans failed to act against the brutality and criminality of Nazi rule, charting the growth of the cult of Hitler during the 1920s and early 1930s, culminating in Germany’s victory over France in 1940.

One reason for Hitler’s enduring popularity, Kershaw believed, could be found in the charismatic nature of his leadership. In making his case, Kershaw drew on ideas relating to political power and charismatic leadership put forward by Max Weber, whose inquiry into social structures and behaviour made him a pioneer in the field of sociology.

Kershaw also argues that Hitler’s propaganda-fuelled image functioned to bind together the potentially divisive forces within the Nazi movement, mobilising both the Nazi Party faithful and the broader mass of “non-organised” Germans. In the German popular imagination, the dictator was refashioned as a “fictive figure, manufactured by propaganda on the foundations of pre-existing heroic leadership ideals”—even though this mythical Hitler bore next to no resemblance to the man himself. Thus, the figure of Hitler was seen as a personification of the nation, divorced from all the petty corruptions of Party officials. Moreover, the dictator was personally given credit for all the regime’s successes—whether in the realm of economics (with the reduction of unemployment) or in foreign policy (with German military rearmament and the annexation of the Rhineland, actions that overturned the harsh terms of the much-resented Treaty of Versailles.)

In the run-up to World War II, Hitler was hailed as a statesman of genius, “an upholder and fanatical defender of Germany’s rights" – not as a racial imperialist warmonger working toward a ‘war of annihilation’ and limitless German conquest”. He was also portrayed as Germany’s sole saviour and protector—both practically, in terms of his unparalleled military leadership, and ideologically, in terms of his crusade against the twin evils of Bolshevism and the perceived economic and political influence of Jewish people. HIs myth only started to lose its hold when Germany’s military defeat began to seem inevitable, though some of its elements even remained alive in the German imagination after the war’s end in 1945.

For Kershaw, one of the most fascinating (and ironic) elements of the “Hitler myth” was the chronic mismatch between the dictator’s benevolent popular image and the reality of his brutal intentions.The German people greeted many of his foreign policy successes with such jubilation precisely because they had seemingly spared Germany from becoming embroiled in another global conflict. After all, the brutality and mass slaughter of World War I and its aftermath was still fresh in popular memory. So when Hitler managed to achieve the annexation first of the Rhineland, then of Austria (in the forced union known as the “Anschluss”), and finally the incorporation of the Czech Sudetenland into German territory, all without triggering a new military conflagration, people’s overwhelming fear of war was transformed into a mixture of euphoric relief and genuine admiration for the dictator’s achievements.

Had they known that Hitler’s ultimate goal was deliberately to provoke a conflict, and that, following the Munich Agreement—in which the international community forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany without a fight—he was “furious at being manoeuvered into a diplomatic settlement of the question,” Kershaw points out, their fervour might have been somewhat subdued. As it was, when war was declared in 1939, many Germans genuinely believed that Hitler had done his best to preserve peace, even if they did not greet the news with any great enthusiasm. In more general terms, by the time of his 50th birthday on September 20, 1939, “the great majority of Germans could find some point of identification with Hitler and his ‘achievements.’”