The incredible story of Ernst Hanfstaengl, the only person to have worked directly for both Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt, who funded Mein Kampf and helped create the monster of Nazism before later working to destroy it Ernst Hanfstaengl was court jester, pianist, and foreign press chief for Hitler during his political climb. He later played a lead role in Roosevelt's top-secret project to use disinformation and black propaganda against the Nazis. Filled with revelations about Hitler's personal and political life and descriptions of American psychological warfare, Hitler's Piano Player is a shocking story of a man torn apart by opposing loyalties. A Harvard-educated German, Hanfstaengl was living in Germany in 1922 when he first heard Adolf Hitler speak in a Munich beer hall. Introducing himself after the speech, Hanfstaengl began one of the strangest relationships in 20th century politics. As he tried to introduce Hitler to Munich high-society and polish his image in the eyes of the world, Hanfstaengl also helped finance Mein Kampf, claimed to have devised the chant of Sieg Heil, and attempted to set Hitler up with the American ambassador's beautiful young daughter. But he fell out of the future Fuehrer's graces and fled to Britain, where he was interned, and then transferred to America. There, he worked for his old friend from the Harvard Club in New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The star of Roosevelt's 'S-Project,' Hanfstaengl provided the White House with biographical information on four hundred leading Nazis, analyses of Hitler's speeches, and a detailed psychological portrait of Hitler, describing his education, diet, and even his sex life. Through newly declassified documents, interviews with surviving members of Hanfstaengl's family, and original writing by Hanfstaengl himself, Peter Conradi recounts the remarkable life of history's personal link between Hitler and FDR.

Hitler's Piano Player : The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl

Peter Conradi

Duckworth & Co.

<p>The subject of a major motion picture starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter. One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century - amazingly he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed The Quack who saved a King'. Logue wasn't a British aristocrat or even an Englishman - he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York into the man who was capable of becoming King. Had Logue not saved Bertie (as the man who was to become King George VI was always known) from his debilitating stammer, and pathological nervousness in front of a crowd or microphone, then it is almost certain that the House of Windsor would have collapsed. The King's Speech is the previously untold story of the extraordinary relationship between Logue and the haunted young man who became King George VI, drawn from Logue's unpublished personal diaries. They throw extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men - and the vital role the King's wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played in bringing them together to save her husband's reputation and his career as King. The King's Speech is an intimate portrait of the British monarchy at a time of its greatest crisis, seen through the eyes of an Australian commoner who was proud to serve, and save, his King.</p>

The King's Speech

Biographies & Memoirs

Mark Logue

Historical

Quercus Publishing Plc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Peter Conradi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Peter Conradi