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This Man Spent 25 Years Documenting Every Day of Hitler's Life

Adolf Hitler has been dead for 71 years, but history's biggest villain still manages to capture the almost uninterrupted attention of German people. For news magazines, putting Hitler on the cover is still the easiest way to sell copies whenever they're out of ideas for a cover story – which is why German periodicals like Der Spiegel are notorious for doing exactly that basically every four weeks. Every year, countless new biographies, history books and documentaries dedicated to this worst person ever see the light of day. Only the better ones manage to reveal some new aspects of Hitler's life and his tragic role in history. But – until recently – they all had one thing in common: All these books and films at some point had the dates wrong.

Harald Sandner got so annoyed by seeing the wrong dates being thrown around in historic works that he decided to take on the task of reconstructing each day of Hitler's life. Sandner, who makes his living being a salesman and IT expert in a logistics company, spent 25 years collecting pictures, documents and archival materials and traveling across Europe on his own expense.

The result of all this is Das Itinerar (The Itinerary) – a 2400-page book that doesn't only list where the Führer spent each day of his life, it also documents the means of transportation he used to get there and what he did in each place – down to the number of audience members at speeches and events.

Read entire article at VICE