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Brendan Simms

Biography

Brendan Simms

Brendan Simms is a professor in the History of International Relations and fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He is the author of such books as THE LONGEST AFTERNOON: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo and EUROPE: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present, shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. He lives in Cambridge, UK.

Brendan Simms

Books by Brendan Simms

Hitler: A Global Biography
by Brendan Simms - Biography, History, Nonfiction

HITLER offers a deeply learned and radically revisionist biography, arguing that the dictator's main strategic enemy, from the start of his political career in the 1920s, was not communism or the Soviet Union, but capitalism and the United States. Whereas most historians have argued that Hitler underestimated the American threat, Brendan Simms shows that Hitler embarked on a preemptive war with the United States precisely because he considered it such a potent adversary. The war against the Jews was driven both by his anxiety about combatting the supposed forces of international plutocracy and by a broader desire to maintain the domestic cohesion he thought necessary for survival on the international scene.