Ellie Cawthorne: Why did you think that a new biography of Hitler was needed?
Brendan Simms: Because I think that some of the most important things that we think we know about Hitler are actually not true. Primarily, I argue that Hitler saw his main enemies not to be communism and the Soviet Union, but actually Anglo-American capitalism. That's a fairly fundamental point, which I think has been missed in the previous literature.
I also argue that, in the beginning, Hitler wasn't actually aiming for world domination. Instead, he began with a concept of international parity – he wanted to establish a role for Germany among the other great world powers. But the way in which events unfolded made it imperative, from his point of view, to seek something like global domination because he thought that was the only way he could make the world safe for Germany. As circumstances changed and he realised he was going to have to take the war to the Anglo-Saxon powers, he became ever-more ambitious. Not so much out of greed as out of fear. Fear was the overarching sentiment.
