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Hitler's National Socialism

- Rainer Zitelmann

Copyright © Dr. Rainer Zitelmann 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

First published in German by Berg Publishers Ltd in 1987 under the title Hitler.

Selbstverständniseines Revolutionärs and subsequently published in several new editions in German.

This new English language edition first published in 2022 by Management Books 2000 Ltd 36 Western Road Oxford OX1 4LG

Tel: 0044 (0) 1865 600738

Email: info@mb2000.com

Web: www.mb2000.com

This new English edition is based on the 4th expanded German edition, which was published in 1998 by Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung and in English as Hitler. The Policies of Seduction by London House in 1999.

The new essay "On the Recent Historiography of Hitler and National Socialism (1996-2020)' is largely based on an essay published in 2017 in the 5th expanded new editionof Hitler. Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, which was published by Lau-Verlag.

Translator of the essay: Sebastian Taylor, capitallanguagesolutions.com

Translator of the main body of the book: Helmut Bogler

Copy editing: Anja Hilgarth, Herzogenaurach

Cover: Matthew Renaudin

Author photo: Dr. Rainer Zitelmann

Composition and layout: ZeroSoft, Timisoara

This English language edition is published by arrangement with Maria Pinto-

The Author:

Rainer Zitelmann was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1957. He studied history and political science from 1978 to 1983 and graduated with distinction. In 1986, he was awarded the title Dr. phil for his thesis Hitler. The Policies of Seduction under the mentorship of Professor Freiherr von Aretin. From 1987 to 1992, he worked at the Central Institute for Social Science Research at the Free University of Berlin. He then became editor-in-chief of Ullstein-Propyläen publishing house, at that time Germany's third largest book publishing group. From 1993 to 2000, he headed various departments of the German daily newspaper Die Welt before setting up his own business in 2000. He founded the company Dr. ZitelmannPB. GmbH, which has since become the market leader for positioning consulting for real estate companies in Germany. He sold the business in 2016.

In 2016, Zitelmann was awarded his second doctorate, this time in sociology, with his thesis on the psychology of the superrich under the mentorship of Professor Wolfgang Lauterbach at the University of Potsdam. The study was published in the United States, China and South Korea as The Wealth Elite. In 2018 he published The Power of Capitalism and in 2020, CATO published The Rich in Public Opinion, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese.

Zitelmann has written a total of 25 books, which have enjoyed substantial success in a range of languages around the world. Over the last few years, he has written articles and given interviews to many of the world's leading media outlets, including Le Monde, Corriere de la Serra, Il Giornale, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Daily Telegraph, Times, Forbes, National Interest, Washington Examiner and numerous media in China and South Korea.

Contents



On the Recent Historiography of Hitler and National Socialism (1996-2020)

Hitler's Weltanschauung and the Ideology of National Socialism The Götz Aly Debate - Hitler's Beneficiaries Volksgemeinschaft - Myth, Promise, Reality? How Modern was National Socialism?

National Socialist Revolution?

Recent Hitler Biographies: Kershaw, Ullrich, Longerich, Pyta and Simms

National Socialism and Anti-Communism Notes

Bibliography: "On the Recent Historiography of Hitler and National Socialism (1996-2020)'

Foreword by Karl Otmar von Aretin


Translator's Note


I. Introduction


II. Hitler and the Revolution

1. The "So-Called Revolution' of November 1918

2. Hitler's Concept of the State and the "Obligation to Rebel'

3. Hitler's Definition of Revolution

4. Hitler's View of Historic Revolutions

a. The French Revolution of 1789

b. The Proclamation of the Third Republic in September 1870

c. The 1848 Revolution in Germany

d. The Jews as Leaders of Revolutions and a "Negative Example' for Hitler

5. Hitler's Revolutionary Claim

On the Recent Historiography of Hitler and National Socialism1 (1996-2020)


This is not a biography of Hitler, it is a study of his objectives and worldview, especially in the fields of social, economic and domestic policy. What was Hitler's thinking on the economy? What was his view of modern industrial society? What did he think about capitalism and socialism, about market and planned economics, about private property and nationalization? What were his views on the social strata within German society - the workers, bourgeoisie, middle class and farmers? What were his sociopolitical ideas? What precisely did he mean when he used the term "Volksgemeinschaft "? And how did he position himself within the political spectrum: what were his thoughts on social democracy, communism and fascism?

Since the original publication of this work, no other book has dealt with these topics. Over the intervening three decades, however, there has been a flood of books and essays on the subjects of Hitler and National Socialism. Any attempt to pay tribute to this wealth of research and to comment on every single facet of the research debate would, of course, extend far beyond the scope of this preface. Nevertheless, I would like to use the following pages to consider a number of the more recent works on National Socialism and Hitler's biography, especially where their findings relate directly to the essential questions that guide this book.

Readers who are not quite so interested in an exploration of recent research should feel free to skip past this preface and begin on page 69. This study was originally written in 1985/86 as a dissertation under the mentorship of Professor Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Over the years, several German editions of this book have been published under the title Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs. In English, the book was published as Hitler: The Policies of Seduction - a title

which, unfortunately, does not accurately communicate the focus of my research, which is why it has been changed for this new edition.

My work was the first book to analyse and reconstruct Hitler's social, economic and domestic objectives on the basis of a comprehensive range of primary sources. At the same time, it was intended to provide valuable insights into the attractiveness and mass appeal of National Socialism by focusing more on the social-revolutionary motives that underpinned Hitler's Weltanschauung than the previous research had done. When the book was first published in 1987, it met with an overwhelmingly positive response from researchers around the world.2 Now, following a thorough review of the recent historiography, I can say with all certainty: my findings remain just as valid today as they were 30 years ago and the relevance of the questions I raised is confirmed by a number of far more recent research.3

The starting point for my analysis was my thesis that the research had mistakenly claimed that Hitler's worldview was founded on just two components - anti-Semitism and the question of capturing Lebensraum in the East - and that these could not explain the allure and mass appeal of National Socialism, especially as neither figured prominently in any of the speeches Hitler gave between 1929 and 1932. In my opinion, even attempts to explain the success of National Socialism by focusing on irrational components failed to convince. At the same time, I highlighted the socialist and revolutionary objectives that underpinned Hitler's system of thought and the promise of social advancement as essential elements in the attraction exerted on the German population by National Socialism.

William Brustein draws very similar conclusions - admittedly from a different perspective - in his 1996 book, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933. "My central thesis,' writes Brustein, "is that the mass of Nazi followers were motivated chiefly by commonplace and rational factors - namely, their material interests - rather than by Hitler's irrational appeal or charisma.'4 In complete agreement with my own earlier findings,5 Brustein

concludes that anti-Semitism played a subordinate role in the rise of the NSDAP between 1929 and 1933.6

Having evaluated comprehensive datasets compiled together with Jürgen W. Falter, Brustein determined that 40 percent of new NSDAP members between 1925 and 1933 were blue-collar workers. In his earlier research, Jürgen W. Falter had proved that the NSDAP had a larger proportion of working-class voters than had previously been assumed.7 Brustein's extensive research now proved that, in terms of its social composition, the NSDAP had a disproportionately high number of well-educated working-class members and a disproportionately low number of less-educated working-class members.8 And it was precisely for these working- class groups that Hitler's promise of social advancement - a promise that plays a major role in this book - was particularly attractive: "The desire for economic advancement and the perception that the NSDAP, alone among the working-class parties, responded to that desire, made the NSDAP a likely choice for millions of German workers.'9

Another of Brustein's key findings also corresponds with the conclusions of my book:

'By combining nationalist-etatist thinking with creative Keynesian economics, the NSDAP, more than any other party, fashioned a program that addressed the material concerns of many German
workers.'10 According to Brustein, anti-Semitism, hypernationalism and xenophobia, "played a marginal role in the rise of the NSDAP'. Of far greater relevance was the fact that, "The Nazi Party alone crafted economic programs that in the perception of many Germans could redress their grievances or provide the means to greater social mobility.11

In 2020 a new, groundbreaking study by Jürgen W. Falter about the members of the NSDAP was published. On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, the NSDAP counted 900,000 members. By the time the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, this figure had swelled to almost nine million. Or, to put it another way, roughly one in seven eligible voters in Germany was a party member by the end of the war.

After its re-formation in 1925, the NSDAP only accepted new memberships from the general public for about a combined 12 of the following 20 years. Time and again, membership recruitments were suspended. In Mein Kampf and a series of early speeches, Hitler had already developed the theory of the "historical minority'. Falter bases his presentation of this theory primarily on Chapter VI.2 of this book: the historical minority must comprise "courageous' individuals who are prepared to make great sacrifices, both personally and for their careers. According to Hitler, before a political movement comes to power, during the period when it is fiercely resisted by the "establishment system' and other opponents, it will inevitably only attract "brave' members. Once the party has seized power, however, Hitler warned in Mein Kampf that increasing numbers of opportunists would join the party in pursuit of their own private advantage or to further their own careers. And in fact, that is precisely what happened. After January 30, 1933, opportunism and career ambitions played an increasingly key role in the recruitment of new members: between January 30 and the end of April 1933 alone,1.75 million new members signed up as members of the NSDAP, at which point new memberships were suspended. But, in spite of the regular recruitment stops, the party's membership continued to grow strongly.

After the war, many members stated that they had been forced to join the party. Despite his extensive analysis, Falter finds no evidence to support such claims. In fact, members were fully able to leave the party and cancel their memberships. A total of 760,000 members resigned from the NSDAP between 1925 and 1945, 250,000 before January 1933 and almost half a million members left the party during the Nazi dictatorship.

In previous research, it has been claimed that the middle class in particular was the decisive social pillar of National Socialism - both in terms of party members and voters. Many of these sociological theories were based on very sparse data sets. Some were even based more on speculation than on data. For his study, Falter analysed by far the largest and most comprehensive sample from the two central NSDAP membership card indexes. As Falter

demonstrates, a disproportionately large number of white-collar professionals and civil servants joined the party after January 30, 1933. Nevertheless, the proportion of blue-collar workers in the NSDAP was always far higher than has been previously assumed. Similar to the party's voters, roughly 40 percent of the NSDAP's members were working class. In terms of its social composition, the NSDAP was neither a workers' nor a middle-class party, it was rather a "catch- all party of protest'. Men were much more strongly represented in the party than women, a fact that also applied to other political parties in Weimar Germany.

Where the NSDAP did differ from other parties, however, was in the youthfulness of its supporters. In the early years, most of the party's new members were under the age of 30, including many who were even under the age of 25. Then, as the party got older, so did the average age of its members. In response, after the second suspension of new memberships in 1942, only graduates of the Hitler Youth and the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel, the branch of the Hitler Youth exclusively for girls) were accepted, along with war survivors and those who had left the Wehrmacht. The party was to remain young.

According to Falter, there was no single, all-encompassing motive to become a National Socialist. Anti-Semitism played a role, but mainly among supporters of the so-called Old Guard, who joined the party prior to October 1928. One analysis cited by Falter shows that 50 percent of those over the age of 40 but only 26 percent of those between the ages of 20 and 40 cited hostility toward Jews as a primary motive for joining the party. There is no doubt that the NSDAP was a thoroughly anti-Semitic party, but Hitler knew that anti-Semitism would only mobilize a minority of voters. In contrast to the early days of the NSDAP, Hitler did not primarily focus on anti-Semitic motives in his speeches at the end of the 1920s. Instead, he devoted far greater attention to his social promises:


Hand in hand with the ideal of the "Volksgemeinschaft' (national community), there was also often a desire to abolish privileges and the established class system. There are frequent references to the

community of front-line combat troops, the aim of eradicating class barriers, and the desire for social justice across classes. The combination of nationalism and socialism in the name, combined with the party's policy program, were major factors boosting the NSDAP's attractiveness.12

In this introductory review of the recent historiography, I will address research on Hitler published after 1996. I have decided to set this cut-off date because historians' earlier treatment of Hitler is expertly reviewed in John Lukacs' excellent account, The Hitler of History, which was published in both United States and Germany in 1997. Lukacs' book is a historiographical work: it provides an overview and attempts to draw together the many disparate strands of international Hitler research. At the same time, Lukacs also presents his own personal conclusions from earlier research, following the same interpretations I had developed in the very book you are now reading. "It is not only the tremendous accumulation of materials, research, and writings about Hitler but a certain perspective that allows me to make a shocking statement: He may have been the most popular revolutionary leader in the history of the modern world,' he writes.13

Lukacs called for a thorough reassessment of the meaning of Hitler and the very meaning of the ideas of "progress' and of "modern'. Lukacs underlines the "modern', "social' and even "progressive' aspects of Hitler's Weltanschauung,

'... not for the purpose of mitigating his record but, to the contrary, to emphasize the abiding dangers of their past (and at times at least potentially present) attractions'.14 Lukacs recognized that "Hitler was a new kind of revolutionary; a populist revolutionary in a democratic age, notwithstanding all of the then still extant older elements of German institutions and German society, many of which he knew how to employ for his own purposes'.15 Lukacs does not regard Hitler as a reactionary. In fact, he concludes that the opposite was true and observes that, as Hitler himself said, reactionaries were his main enemies, both within Germany and abroad. Lukacs also suggests that "we must accept his word in order to understand him ...

A revolutionary does not only wish to change the direction of the ship of state; he wishes to remake its society.'16

According to Lukacs, my research into Hitler's system of thought made a number of "undeniable contributions'. Above all, "that Hitler was truly a revolutionary, and that, consequently, his aspirations and visions were modern (no matter how deeply rooted in some traditional German attitudes); and so were his ideas and plans about the remaking of German society'.17 Moreover, Lukacs agreed with my conclusion that "contrary to accepted opinion, Hitler was neither ignorant of nor indifferent to economics'.18

In his description of Hitler, Lukacs uses a term I did not use in my book, but which has since come to dominate the public consciousness: the notion of Hitler as a populist leader. In Lukacs' opinion, Hitler "was a populist - a believer in the sovereignty of the people; a modern populist, not an old-fashioned demagogue'. Of course, the world had seen populists before, but Hitler realized "that modern populism, by its very nature, must be nationalist, and - more important - that nationalism must be populist'.19 By no means did Lukacs intend this terminology to gloss over Hitler's atrocities - quite the contrary. Lukacs repeatedly describes Hitler as a "reactionary' and was one of the first historians to offer a clear warning against the dangers of modern populism.

In 2001, Ulrich von Hehl published an overview of research about National Socialism. In contrast to Lukacs, who agreed with my theses, Hehl provides an accurate summary and admits that I "furthered the research debate' but ultimately distances himself from my conclusions.20 According to Hehl, my thesis is based on three "preconditions':21

1. The rejection of a normative concept of modernization; 2. A decoupling of
the constitutive link between modernization and democratisation; 3. A general questioning of the entire concept of National Socialism's unintended modernization effects, which he [Zitelmann], on the contrary, describes as "intended'.22

Moreover, Hehl correctly summarizes my research findings, stating that I am of the opinion

... that Hitler's thinking contained serious economic, social and domestic policy components beyond his well-established foreign and racial policy goals, which have not previously been taken sufficiently into account; indeed, that the dictator must be seen as a social revolutionary and conscious moderniser, and that his central goal of conquering new Lebensraum in the East was not primarily determined by racial ideology but by economic factors.

In his stocktaking of previous research, Hehl then proceeds to raise the objection that, by focusing so exclusively on the personality of Hitler, the research had ignored undeniably important external factors.23 It is to these theses - so aptly summarized by Hehl - and their acceptance into the body of research that we will now turn our attention.



Hitler's Weltanschauung and the Ideology of National Socialism

In the conclusion of this book, I argue that there was no such thing

as the national socialist Weltanschauung - which is why I use the

term "Hitlerism'. My work was never intended to examine the

worldviews of other National Socialists - although in Section V.3, I

establish that there were considerable differences between

Hitler's own views and those of Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich

Himmler, which Hitler criticized as "mysticism'.

Riccardo Bavaj rightly argues that emphasizing the heterogeneity of the National Socialist worldview does not mean, however, denying the "effectiveness of ideas that co-determined the actions of National Socialists and had a decisive influence on the development of the National Socialist movement'. Accordingly, he stresses that it would also be a mistake to dismiss ideengeschichtliche (history of ideas) research into fascism as a fruitless, abstract and intellectual game without practical purpose,

particularly as leading NSDAP members "certainly had their own stringent Weltanschauung'.24

This is substantiated by Frank-Lothar Kroll's Utopie als Ideologie, which he wrote in 1998 as a post-doctoral thesis and which closed a major research gap. Kroll not only analysed Hitler's ideology, he also focused on the political thinking of Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Walther Darre, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. He decided to examine the thinking of these five National Socialists in particular because they wielded both an ideological and tangible influence over the Third Reich's constitution and political decision-making processes.25

Kroll concludes that there was little common ground between these
"masterminds' of the National Socialist movement, apart from their shared belief that the victory of National Socialism would mark the beginning of an entirely new epoch in world history, an era in which they would create a "new man' and a "new world'.26 Beyond this - from my point of view rather sparse - common ground, Kroll stresses the diversity of opinions held by the leading protagonists of National Socialism. According to Kroll, Hitler, for example, regarded

... every expression of Germanic fervor, especially of the kind that had embedded itself in Himmler's SS, but also the kind that underpinned the "Blood and Soil' ideology championed by Darre ..., as the private quirkiness of anachronistic sectarians divorced from reality, and as abhorrent to the ultimate goals of National Socialism.27

Kroll also observes that, "[c]ontrary to obvious and widespread assumptions, Hitler had very little sympathy for Germanicism as a whole.'28

As far as his analysis of Hitler's history-of-ideas and political imagination is concerned, there are many similarities, as well as a number of differences, between the conclusions drawn in Kroll's work and my own. Kroll agrees that one of Hitler's essential guiding principles was that the era of the bourgeoisie, which was morbid, decayed and cowardly, was about to come to an irrevocable end.29

Kroll, who speaks of Hitler's "theory of the end of the bourgeois age', points out that I was the first to elaborate in detail this aspect of Hitler's view of the bourgeoisie, but criticizes the fact that my account does not take into account the ideengeschichtliche context.30

The historically singular nature of the "people's state', which allegedly bound together the conflicting interests of the various social strata - and thus at the same time the world-historical epochal in the emergence of National Socialism - "lay for Hitler in the social sphere,' according to Kroll. He added that the "modern' components of the social program that Hitler envisaged, which were intended to level out traditional class differences, had "always had an instrumental character in addition to their programmatic and sincerely intended content'.31

Kroll's conclusions also chime with my work as far as Hitler's "modernity' is concerned. Although Kroll puts the term in quotation marks, he stands firmly against authors such as Hans Mommsen and Jens Alber, who criticized my findings and denied the attribution of "modernity' to both Hitler and National Socialism. Kroll, in contrast, cites abundant evidence and criticizes researchers who fail to recognize Hitler's modernity:

It is incomprehensible and in all likelihood only a result of a highly ideologically predisposed blindness to sources, that a certain research direction stubbornly refuses, in view of the abundance of such statements, to grant Hitler's thinking the attribute of a specific form of contemporary "modernity'. In this context, it would be more appropriate to consider the question of whether Hitler's inclination toward the achievements and inventions of the technical-industrial age did not mark him as a representative of that late 19th-century progressive optimism, which fostered (e.g., environmental) arguments that were deemed anachronistic at the time, and that were countered by the supposed "anti-modernists' within the National Socialist movement, but that have today, in many cases, come to seem almost "modern' again.32

The idea that, in this respect, Hitler was "a child of the 19th century', although he himself never alluded to the fact, is also one I expound in this work.33

There are many other points of agreement between Kroll's reconstruction of Hitler's conceptions of history and the findings of my own work - including, for example, when Kroll rightly draws attention to the significance of Hitler's theory of the "historic minority'. In fact, I address the key role played by the theory of the "historic minority' in Hitler's overall thinking in detail in Chapter VI.2.

There are, of course, differences between Kroll's work and my own, particularly in the weight we each assign to the importance of economic issues in Hitler's thinking. I, for example, demonstrate how strongly Hitler's views were shaped by economic considerations and politico-economic convictions, especially in order to justify his goal of conquering "new Lebensraum in the East'.

Another researcher, Barbara Zehnpfennig, published two books, the first in 2000 and the second in 2011, in which she reconstructs Hitler's worldview on the basis of his book, Mein Kampf. In common with my approach, these books strive to take Hitler seriously, to factually reconstruct his worldview and to engage with his thinking.

Even knowing what horrors would arise from Hitler's dictatorship does not justify supplanting analysis with moralizing. After all - and this is the greatest challenge - if a commentary aspires to be scientific, it must make every effort to do justice to the text.34

Zehnpfennig adopts the classical hermeneutic approach, which means that she attempts to understand Mein Kampf solely on the basis of the text itself. Her commentary "takes the text as text and examines it with regard to its inner structure'.35 Her aim is to "reflect intensively on Hitler's thoughts ... in order to reconstruct the world as it was seen by Hitler himself'.36 Just as Eberhard Jäckel and I had done before her, Zehnpfennig stresses the internal consistency of Hitler's worldview.37 Zehnpfennig takes issue with the notion that Hitler's thinking represented a crude mixture of widespread 19th-century stereotypes and instead concludes that it was far more "an ideological system of astonishing consistency'.38

In 2000, Zehnpfennig published Hitlers Mein Kampf: Eine Interpretation. She rightly highlights the fact that I reconstructed

Hitler's worldview fully aware that I "was only considering one element of the overall concept'.39 This is where her criticism begins: "But how can anyone hope to accurately analyse a single component without examining its function within the structure as a whole?'40 She suggests, for example, that it would also be necessary to examine the relationship between Hitler's anti-Semitism and the social, economic and domestic policy goals I analysed in my work.

And yes, this is indeed a desideratum. But the goal of developing a precise understanding of the entirety of Hitler's thinking cannot be achieved by an analysis dedicated entirely or primarily to just one of his texts, in this case Mein Kampf. Even with an emphasis on the internal consistency, continuity and constants of Hitler's thinking, it is important to remember that his views - like those of most politicians - changed substantially over the course of several decades.

There would seem to be two extremes in the research landscape. Some scholars - such as Mommsen and Wehler - are clearly reluctant to engage with Hitler's thinking in any way, classifying it as confused and irrelevant to understanding the history of National Socialism. Others - such as Jäckel and Zehnpfennig - engage with Hitler's thinking, but rely too one-sidedly on a limited number of sources (in particular Mein Kampf ) while neglecting the issue of how Hitler's thinking shifted and evolved. Surprised, and perhaps in some ways fascinated, by the inner logic and consistency of his thinking, they neglect to devote adequate consideration to contradictions and the way his thinking developed over time.

In the book you are now reading, I employ numerous examples

- such as Hitler's views on economics - to prove that his thinking was definitely subject to change. As a result, I highlight the fallacy of equating Hitler's concepts and objectives in the early 1920s with his views in the late 1930s. If a researcher were to, for example, analyse Hitler's thinking with a focus on the extent to which his Weltanschauung changed over time - for all the fundamental constants that remained - they would certainly be making a valuable contribution to the body of research.

While Zehnpfennig's books contain a number of noteworthy insights - such as her thesis that "Hitler's racism had only a limited biological basis'41 - Lars Lüdicke's 2016 book Hitlers Weltanschauung does not contribute any novel or far-reaching insights to the discourse. He rightly objects that Hitler's thinking cannot be derived from Mein Kampf alone, since this book is nothing more and nothing less than one single source text.42 Nevertheless, he then proceeds to make precisely this mistake and reconstructs Hitler's vision of conquering new Lebensraum in the East exclusively from passages in Mein Kampf.43

Lüdicke takes Hitler's remarks in Mein Kampf and repeats his theses on "Judeo- Bolshevism', which, as I have demonstrated on the basis of numerous sources, Hitler no longer believed in by 1939 at the latest, despite continuing to publicly adhere to the term for propagandistic purposes. The main justification for Hitler's goal of forcibly acquiring Lebensraum was not rooted in his racial ideology, but in economic considerations, as a closer analysis of his public and private statements - including setting them in a temporal context - shows.44

Lüdicke's book, contrary to the claims made in the introductory chapter, is not based on a comprehensive analysis of Hitler's statements. Moreover, the findings of previous research are either ignored or clearly unfamiliar to the author. For instance, the book's bibliography neither includes the significant contributions toward understanding Hitler's economic views from Barkai (1975)

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