Alumni and guests are invited to join the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Rheinland, and Brian Simms for his book presentation - "Hitler - A global biography" followed by dinner.

In 2017 the University of Cambridge, as part of a global series, hosted a conference in Dusseldorf with a great array of distinguished academics and masters from several colleges. Among the panelists were Christopher Clark and Brendan Simms.

About the book

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms's major new biography shows, Hitler's main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the `living space' necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States.

Drawing on new sources, Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitler's ideology emerged after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were, in his view, models for Germany's own empire, similarly founded on the appropriation of land, racism and violence. Hitler's aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany | a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but, through emigration and foreign inuence, to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called the `Anglo-Saxons'. In the end only dominance of the world would have been enough to achieve Hitler's objectives, and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the entire world to defeat him. Brendan Simms's new book is the _rst to explain Hitler's beliefs fully, demonstrating how, as ever, it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most murderous behavior.

Reproduced with kind permission of Random House

About the author:

Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His major books include Un_nest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize) and Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, which was published in 2013 to extraordinary reviews.

Reproduced with kind permission of Random House