A startling reassessment of Hitler’s aims and motivations, Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is an adroitly argued and highly original work that provides the key to a fuller understanding of the Third Reich. Spotts, author of the distinguished Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, convincingly demonstrates that unlike the traditional biographical view that Hitler was an "unperson" who had no life outside of politics, Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism—and that he used the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends.