Triumph of the Will?

Book excerpt: Triumph of the Will? solves one of the 20th century's most baffling mysteries. What transformed Adolf Hitler from a purposeless drifter into a leader able to manipulate the minds of millions? In October 1918 Adolf Hitler, a lance-corporal in the Austrian army, lost his sight following a British gas attack. Doctors diagnosed his blindness as being due not to physical injury but hysteria. He had suffered a mental breakdown.Rather than being treated in a nearby hospital, he was sent 600 miles from the Front to a 'nerve' clinic in the Pomeranian town of Pasewalk. There Dr Edmund Robert Forster, one of Germany's leading hysteria specialists, used hypnosis to treat him. Although his sight was restored, the experience left Hitler convinced he had a divine mission to 'make Germany great again.' He believed, from then on, that every step he took was dictated by a supernatural power.In 1931, Erik Jan Hanussen, a clairvoyant, astrologer, millionaire media tycoon and Nazi supporter, taught him how to hypnotise the masses. Hitler proved himself the greatest hypnotist of them all.This is the extraordinary true story of the lives and deaths of Forster and Hanussen. It details the techniques they used and describes the vital roles played of hypnotism, astrology, clairvoyance and the occult in the Nazis' rise to power.