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Rating: 
Summary: There Is Something Severly Wrong With This Guy's Thinking!
Review: Any author who thinks that Hindenburg was loyal to the Weimar Republic is out of his mind. There wasn't a German alive who liked it and to say that somebody was loyal to it is ludecrous. He also implies that Hitler outwitted Hindenburg to gain the chancellorship. That's also crazy. Hitler just got lucky that Papen underestimated him when he used him in his plot to try to gain the chancellorship for himself (which failed obviously). In fact I don't believe that Hitler and Hindenburg had any interaction at all on the subject (except of course when he was sworn in). The matter was proposed to Hitler through Papen. If Fischer could be so off base on such a basic concept, I shudder to think about how acurate the rest of the information in this book is.NOTE: This is not an uninformed opinion. I have compared this book with others by Burleigh, Kershaw, Machtan, and Turner on similar subjects. My recomendation is to forget about this book and get Kershaw's book Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. It's actually more of a biography of Hiter's power. I found it to be a much more logical, coherent, and enlightening book.
Rating:
Summary: There Is Something Severly Wrong With This Guy's Thinking!
Review: Any author who thinks that Hindenburg was loyal to the Weimar Republic is out of his mind. There wasn't a German alive who liked it and to say that somebody was loyal to it is ludecrous. He also implies that Hitler outwitted Hindenburg to gain the chancellorship. That's also crazy. Hitler just got lucky that Papen underestimated him when he used him in his plot to try to gain the chancellorship for himself (which failed obviously). In fact I don't believe that Hitler and Hindenburg had any interaction at all on the subject (except of course when he was sworn in). The matter was proposed to Hitler through Papen. If Fischer could be so off base on such a basic concept, I shudder to think about how acurate the rest of the information in this book is. NOTE: This is not an uninformed opinion. I have compared this book with others by Burleigh, Kershaw, Machtan, and Turner on similar subjects. My recomendation is to forget about this book and get Kershaw's book Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. It's actually more of a biography of Hiter's power. I found it to be a much more logical, coherent, and enlightening book.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable one-volume account
Review: For a comprehensive overview of the Third Reich, Fischer's book is one of the best single-volume works on the market. It's eminently readable on all aspects of Nazi society: the sham politics, the ruthless military ethos, the imposition of one man's psychosis on the policies of an entire nation. The opening chapter, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is a cogent synthesis of the historical strains from which the darkest period of the 20th century emerged: Germany's anti-modernism, which stretched back to the Enlightenment; the economic breakdown, political instability, and unraveling of civil society which the Versailles Treaty wrought; and the scapegoating of two groups which Hitler believed were a mortal threat to the country--the Communists and the Jews.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative but disturbing
Review: Klaus Fischer's account of Nazi Germany succeeds as a source of basic information, particularly regarding the early roots of the Nazi movement. Since this is its main purpose, it merits consultation by anyone seeking a solid basic grasp of those world-shattering events. However, the reader should be prepared to wade through some fairly archaic, and at times deeply disturbing, ideological baggage that pops up along the margins of the main historical narrative. First, Fischer's fleeting references to Marxism and Communism as historico-social phenomena are shallow, unsubtle and dismissive in a manner only possible for a scholar trained in America (as Fischer was), and thus saddled with that peculiar cultural blind spot of ours. However, this blind spot does not much compromise the narrative, beyond giving the misleading impression that the ideas of Marx are somehow "natural" (as opposed to historical and contingent) breeding grounds for totalitarianism. More disturbing by far is the extent to which Fischer's account of the psychological makeup and personal characters of Nazi party members echoes and reproduces some of the same archaic ideologies for which they themselves were so notorious. For example, Fischer makes frequent use of the term "deviance" to describe Nazi operatives, and explicitly includes under this rubric not only sadism but homosexuality! In his desire to paint the Nazis as twisted fiends, he ends up demonizing gays in much the same way that Jews were demonized by the Nazis. Equally archaic is his reference to facial physiognomy as evidence of criminal character among Nazis. Clearly, Fischer is unaware of the large body of literature (best represented by SJ Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) which documents the intellectual bankruptcy of such thinking. Both of these ideas played a role in the racist, homophobic thought complex which National Socialism inherited from the late nineteenth century and put to such deadly effect. That an historian writing in the 1990s could continue to use ideas that have been so thoroughly discredited by scientific research is unfortunate, and given Fischer's topic, gruesomely ironic. The problems noted here do not distort Fischer's account of matters of public record, but they do raise serious questions about his interpretive competence. In the end, some readers might not have the moral stomach to reap the factual rewards undeniably offered by Fischer's book.
Rating:
Summary: Informative but disturbing
Review: Klaus Fischer's account of Nazi Germany succeeds as a source of basic information, particularly regarding the early roots of the Nazi movement. Since this is its main purpose, it merits consultation by anyone seeking a solid basic grasp of those world-shattering events. However, the reader should be prepared to wade through some fairly archaic, and at times deeply disturbing, ideological baggage that pops up along the margins of the main historical narrative. First, Fischer's fleeting references to Marxism and Communism as historico-social phenomena are shallow, unsubtle and dismissive in a manner only possible for a scholar trained in America (as Fischer was), and thus saddled with that peculiar cultural blind spot of ours. However, this blind spot does not much compromise the narrative, beyond giving the misleading impression that the ideas of Marx are somehow "natural" (as opposed to historical and contingent) breeding grounds for totalitarianism. More disturbing by far is the extent to which Fischer's account of the psychological makeup and personal characters of Nazi party members echoes and reproduces some of the same archaic ideologies for which they themselves were so notorious. For example, Fischer makes frequent use of the term "deviance" to describe Nazi operatives, and explicitly includes under this rubric not only sadism but homosexuality! In his desire to paint the Nazis as twisted fiends, he ends up demonizing gays in much the same way that Jews were demonized by the Nazis. Equally archaic is his reference to facial physiognomy as evidence of criminal character among Nazis. Clearly, Fischer is unaware of the large body of literature (best represented by SJ Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) which documents the intellectual bankruptcy of such thinking. Both of these ideas played a role in the racist, homophobic thought complex which National Socialism inherited from the late nineteenth century and put to such deadly effect. That an historian writing in the 1990s could continue to use ideas that have been so thoroughly discredited by scientific research is unfortunate, and given Fischer's topic, gruesomely ironic. The problems noted here do not distort Fischer's account of matters of public record, but they do raise serious questions about his interpretive competence. In the end, some readers might not have the moral stomach to reap the factual rewards undeniably offered by Fischer's book.
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