Professor Hans Mommsen, one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Third Reich, has gathered together a group of historians who are engaged in pioneering research into national socialism. This book covers such topics as the Viennese background to Hitler's career; the development of fascist tendencies amongst the German population during the Weimar period; the nature of popular support for national socialism; the myth of the Nazi economic boom and the ideological concepts and political developments which culminated in the mass murder of European Jews. It makes accessible to a wider public controversial arguments which have resulted from recent reassessments of Hitler's movement and his Nazi regime.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prize-winning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.