In 1938 the Third Reich came of age. Hitler began the year as the leader of a right-wing coalition; he ended it the sole master of a volatile nation. Over the course of 12 months the Fuhrer brought Germany into line with Nazi ideology, secured dictatorial power, and revealed his belligerent plans to take back parts of "Greater Germany" lost to Europe in the First World War. Until 1938, Hitler could be dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator -- a problem to Germany alone. By the year's end, he had gambled everything and proven himself a threat to the whole of Europe and a concern for the world at large. The sequence of events began in January with Hitler's purge of the German army, and escalated with the merger with Austria -- the Anschluss, and the first persecutions of Viennese Jewry. In the following months Hitler bent the nation to his will. By the end of the year the brutal reality of the Nazi regime was revealed by Joseph Goebbels in Kristallnacht, a nationwide assault on Germany's native Jewish population. Based on recently unearthed archival material, Giles MacDonogh reveals the true texture of life in 1938, offering a gripping account of the year Adolf Hitler came into his own and set the world inexorably on track to a cataclysmic war. - Jacket flap.