Adolf Hitler spent 1924 away from soci­ety and sur­round­ed by co-con­spir­a­tors of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Behind bars in a prison near Munich, Hitler passed the year with deep read­ing and inten­sive writ­ing, a year of slow­ly walk­ing grav­el paths while work­ing fever­ish­ly on his book Mein Kampf. This was the year of Hitler’s final trans­for­ma­tion into the self-pro­claimed sav­ior and infal­li­ble leader who would appro­pri­ate Ger­many’s his­tor­i­cal tra­di­tions and bring them into his vision for the Third Reich.

In a book devot­ed entire­ly to that dark year of Hitler’s incar­cer­a­tion fol­low­ing his attempt­ed coup, Peter Ross Range rich­ly depicts this year that bore to the world a monster.