Uncertain about how he viewed his father and the movement he led, especially because of Nazi connections, I proceeded gingerly. After Herr Ploetz graciously picked me up at the train station, I cautiously asked harmless questions about his father. On a gray day in June I arrived in Herrsching to examine the correspondence and papers of Alfred Ploetz. He experimented on rabbits, not on humans. When I visited Herrsching, Ploetz's 87-year old son, Wilfried Ploetz, was still living in the medieval manor house bought by his father, who conducted scientific experiments on heredity there. Herrsching was the home of the physician Alfred Ploetz, the founding father of the race hygiene or eugenics movement in Germany, whose goal was to improve human heredity by rationally controlling reproduction. (About the same distance from Munich in a different direction is Dachau, site of the Nazi's first concentration camp, which I likewise visited). My own research into the impact of Darwinian ethics on German thought in the pre-Nazi era and its ultimate influence on Hitler's ideology led me in the summer of 1999 to the resort Herrsching on beautiful Ammersee, just a 44-minute train trip from Munich, Hitler's early headquarters, where he began his drive to power in early 1919 when he joined the fledgling German Workers' Party, soon renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party and nicknamed the Nazi Party.

What shaped the life of the man who today is the symbol of evil and brutality, but who in the 1930s was cheered by millions of Germans, most of whom claimed to be Christians? What lay at the roots of Hitler's character and world view? This question has intrigued millions, and oceans of ink have been spilled to provide explanations, but still there are no simple answers.

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