I always feel slightly uneasy when I see a bookshelf with too many books about Hitler on it. How many is too many? Two, or possibly three. I know this is wrong of me, unduly prejudiced, but still ... Then again, as Auden said in "1 September 1939", "Accurate scholarship can / Unearth the whole offence ... Find what occurred at Linz, / What huge imago made / A psychopathic God"  Linz being Hitler's childhood town. But accurate scholarship needs to take account of what else happened in his early life; and here is some very accurate scholarship indeed.

I am, of course, largely taking Weber at his word, because I don't have any books about Hitler on my shelves; but his word is plausible enough. Hitler's military service during the first world war has largely been a matter of either accepting or brushing aside his claims to heroism and Kameradenschaft. Nazi propaganda made much of his alleged derring-do and, after all, he did get two Iron Crosses, so maybe there was some truth in the stories. Or, on the other hand, it was propaganda, so could be ignored while deeper and darker matters were addressed at greater length. After all, there is scant material directly relating to Hitler from that period in the military archives.

Weber's bright idea was to go back to those archives and dig out everything in them from people who were around Hitler at the time: that way he could find out exactly what the conditions on the ground were like, and what the context was. The result is a fascinating historical work, not simply because it's about the formative war experiences of an evil dictator. He's also given us a picture of a nation from an  for us  unusual angle.

Hitler made large claims about his wartime service, as you might expect. Weber quotes Mein Kampf: "For a thousand years to come nobody will dare to speak of heroism without recalling the German army of the world war. And then from the dim past will emerge the immortal vision of those solid ranks of steel helmets that never flinched and never faltered ..." etc, etc. Nazi papers told stories about how he single-handedly captured a group of British soldiers armed only with a pistol. He claimed that he knew intimately the dangers and discomforts of life in the trenches, the constant proximity of death, and so on. This, perhaps minus the more implausible stories, has become the accepted version: on one page alone Weber lists 10 different sources, most of them highly respectable (biographies, histories of the first world war, the BBC) testifying to the danger of Hitler's work.

The reality was, as you might have suspected, somewhat different. True, as a dispatch runner he did occasionally have to risk gunfire; but for the most part he had a cushy war, sleeping on a proper bed with a proper roof an hour's walk behind the front, and most of the time he was well out of danger. Weber suggests that one possible reason that he never got promoted was that he was perfectly happy where he was. (Other possible explanations include the fact that his commanding officers didn't like his attitude, or that he had no leadership potential.)

Even Hitler's rank comes under pitiless scrutiny from Weber. I had a hazy notion that he was a corporal, or a lance-corporal, but it is made quite clear that Hitler had no command over anyone; and he is referred to throughout as "Private Hitler". (Remaining so over four years is some kind of achievement.) But after the war, and as he became more powerful, and the myths started being built, those from his regiment who knew better were intimidated, imprisoned, or killed.

His self-declared courage was the cornerstone of his belief in himself, and therefore of National Socialism; it was Germany's wartime betrayal by the Jews, he said, that had defeated the country. (And yet no one recalls him ever making an antisemitic remark during the whole period.) To expose his account of his war years as a fabrication would have been to undermine the whole project; a lie at the root of a whole nightmarish system of lies.