The title Hitler at Home sounds suspiciously like a sequel to “Springtime for Hitler.” And perhaps we can extend the analogy just one step further: like the eponymous Producers of stage and screen (and unlike their hapless playwright), Despina Stratigakos knows exactly what kind of material she is working with. She has produced a major study of architectural propaganda by revealing an important but little-known Nazi propaganda coup: the creation of Hitler the homebody. Stratigakos is an architectural historian who has combined a careful analysis of pictorial evidence (published as well as newly unearthed) with extensive use of archival documents to show how the Nazi party, even before it came to power, cultivated an image of a modest and benevolent leader who shrank from the limelight. She has unearthed not only the careful deliberation behind the image but also Adolf Hitler's extravagant expenditures on home construction and furnishings. She has extracted useful material from numerous archives in Germany, the United States, and Great Britain. Nearly a hundred varied and well-reproduced illustrations, including a dozen in color, effectively complement the text.

Stratigakos opens her book with the notorious suicide of Hitler's niece, Geli Raubal, in his apartment in 1931. The nasty headlines generated by this news spurred the Nazi party to try to shape an image of the bachelor's private life, an aspect of the leader hitherto unmentioned in the party's promotional materials. The first part of the book is a careful account of the process of designing and furnishing Hitler's apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, his rooms at the old chancellery in Berlin, and especially his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden. Hitler assembled a combination of rich materials, modern sparseness, and spatial grandeur in his residences, and he did so at great expense and with careful attention to detail, clearly at pains to project just the right image of himself as elegant and tasteful yet familiar and approachable. Using evidence of interior plans, the book also contributes to biography by reconstructing some contours of Hitler's actual domestic life as well as that of Eva Braun, whose presence in Hitler's life and home was a tightly held secret.

The second half of the book turns to the propaganda about Hitler's domestic life. It looks first at the “invention of the private Hitler” during the 1932 election campaign, with particular emphasis on the widely distributed photographs of Heinrich Hoffmann. From 1933 on, Hoffmann's picture books and other works framed a carefully curated image from Berchtesgaden that rooted Hitler both in an avuncular domestic context and in the broader myth-saturated landscape of the German mountains. The book then addresses the international propaganda offensive. During the 1930s, the foreign press (Stratigakos looks at English-language publications) was hungry for information on the private life of the famous man, and the Nazis complied eagerly and strategically, ushering foolish journalists into the great man's presence. Stratigakos brings to light some embarrassing episodes in the history of venerable publications. Foreign press outlets helped circulate benign images of Hitler the Bavarian gentleman, as in the “happy and harmonious fable” of Berghof life (219) published in the New York Times on August 20, 1939. Wartime accounts began to strike a different note, and a few postwar revelations of Hitler's extravagance enabled the press to avoid taking a look back on what it had published before the war.

Much of Stratigakos's other work has uncovered the unjustly neglected achievements of women architects. This book, too, makes a similar contribution, if an unusual and troubling one. Gerdy Troost was the partner and successor of Hitler's favorite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, who died in 1934. A chapter explores her accomplishments as the primary designer of Hitler's domestic spaces, work she carried out in close and frequent consultation with Hitler. Stratigakos makes a strong case that she played a major role in shaping not only Hitler's homes but also his public image. Her work and her personal connection to Hitler (she often appeared in public at his side) deserve to be mentioned alongside that of the much better known Albert Speer. The book succeeds in rescuing Troost from obscurity while never losing sight of her unrepentant devotion to Hitler, whom she never disowned before her death in 2003, and whose crimes she always denied knowing about. (An obvious comparison is to the equally shameless filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, another long-lived creator of Nazi propaganda, who, unlike Troost, could not keep herself out of the limelight, ensuring that she remained far more famous and far more reviled, despite a more tenuous personal connection to Hitler.) Hitler's considerable attention to the promotion of his domestic and architectural image, documented in the book, underscores Troost's importance.

This an impressive work for several reasons: the way it combines pictorial and written evidence, much of it original; the soundness of the interpretation it offers; its readability throughout; and, above all, its original and insightful argument linking Third Reich design with the promotion of Hitler's personality and thus his power. It deserves to be widely read.