This is a bold assertion running against much of the mainstream history, but it is presented with an astonishing range of evidence (some of it new or hitherto overlooked) to support a sophisticated analysis. If many Hitler books are scarcely worth the effort of reading, this one commands attention through its originality and sheer intelligence. The biography itself is now well known, though there are nuggets of fresh information to be found here. Instead Simms wants to explore much more fully the idea world that Hitler inhabited. It is Hitler’s intentions rather than the achievements that interest him and this is where the meat of the argument lies ... These are persuasive arguments, pursued relentlessly throughout the text. But they do raise problems. Simms’s insistence that the 'East' was not central to Hitler’s concerns about the global order is surely overstated ...
No doubt Simms expects to be argued with. This is a thoroughly thought-provoking and stimulating biography which all historians of the Third Reich will have to take seriously.
Though one can ultimately disagree with Simms’ revisionist arguments, he has made an impressive effort to challenge the conventional history of Hitler’s approach to the world and war in the 1930s and 1940s. This book will cause many to rethink long held beliefs and notions about Hitler and the Second World War.
...written with passion, it grabs the reader by the elbow and propels her from the very first page towards one, ultimate conclusion ... In tracing Hitler’s thinking about the Anglo-world across an impressive range of fronts over the span of his political career, Simms is able to show that the U.S. and Britain were more important reference points than has previously been acknowledged, and that Hitler’s geopolitical vision was genuinely global. The case he makes for this claim is compelling and original. If this were the book’s objective, we could simply record our approval and retire, tired but happy, to bed. But Simms has a much larger objective in view ... What sets Simms apart is his determination to answer every question with the same argument ... Simms’s reasoning makes it impossible to explain the increase in the intensity of the use of extermination in the last years of the conflict, when America was already in the fight and nothing could be gained through further killing sprees within the shrinking area under German control ... Simms’s monocausal approach creates an inertia at the heart of his narrative ... For Simms, Hitler’s mind is as unreactive as argon gas: he never yields an iota to the pressure of events
... fascinating ... A weary reader might ask why we need yet another biography of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Simms believes that, despite the attention Hitler has received, there is an unknown Hitler that other biographers and historians have missed—the Hitler who spent his political career grappling with the emergence of America as the dominant power of the 20th century. After reading Hitler: A Global Biography, one has to agree ... If there is one weakness in Mr. Simms’s comprehensive treatment, it is that he fails except in passing to discuss the other German thinkers and politicians who created the cultural environment in which Hitler and Nazism could flourish ... Yet Mr. Simms is surely right to stay focused on Hitler, since it was Hitler’s unique gift (if that is the word for it) to turn rhetoric into reality, with terrifying results ... a thought-provoking guide to seeing what happens when dictators read America wrong.
Simms’s reduction of virtually all the major events in the history of the Third Reich to a product of anti-Americanism...is nonsense, and indeed, Simms is forced to contradict himself by the sheer weight of the evidence against his thesis ... Time and again, Simms uses rhetorical sleight of hand to underscore his claim that the U.S. was the main focus of Hitler’s foreign policy by referring to 'Anglo-America' when he is in fact just talking about Britain ... In the end, Simms hasn’t written a biography in any meaningful sense of the word, he’s written a tract that instrumentalizes the past for present-day political purposes. As such, his book can be safely ignored by serious students of the Nazi era.
While his focus is on Anglo-America, Simms also does an excellent job in integrating some of the more recent specialized literature on the other international forces that shaped Hitler’s ideology ... While there is much to be said for Simms’ insistence that the Anglo-American west and international finance capitalism have not received enough attention in previous accounts of Hitler’s world view, there is of course a danger in pushing these arguments too far ... Hitler did indeed spend a great deal of time thinking about global capitalism and 'the West,' but there is no obvious reason to highlight this at the expense of his other obsessions ... If—as Simms suggests—Hitler’s admiration and fear of the British and Americans was boundless, he certainly did a terrible job of acting on those fears.
... what it lacks in length it makes up in scrappy contentiousness ... In the rarefied world of Nazi scholarship, an author claiming that Hitler didn’t seek world domination qualifies as incendiary, and Simms comes back repeatedly to that aspect of his narrative ... More than a few readers...will respond with a quick 'Says who?' Simms is clearly expecting to raise some hackles ... It’s unlikely that many readers will soldier through [Simms' book], but unfortunately, the times may warrant it.
The argument feels forced at times, yet Simms points to some important correctives in our study of Hitler's ideology ... A new perspective on a figure whose actions continue to have a profound and lasting impact on world history.