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Die fatale Attraktion des Nationalsozialismus: Über die Popularität eines Unrechtregimes

The research required for the writing of this 402 page monograph was based on a wide range of primary sources, including extensive Gestapo and Social Democratic reports, personal accounts (such as the Abel Collection with its 581 accounts of early Nazis), diaries, letters, oral interviews, recordings of discussions between POWs, and extensive memoirs revealing the continued attraction of key aspects of Nazism after 1945. The secondary literature is listed in a 39-page bibliography. These extensive materials support the book’s empirical and theoretical contribution to a challenging and highly controversial historiographical question.

The reality of an inhumane and populist movement and regime raises challenging questions, especially when the support base cannot be explained primarily in materialistic terms. This book discusses the fatal attraction of National Socialism – in particular the aesthetisation of politics, the politics of promoting a national community and militarism – from the movement’s origins through to the history of the Third Reich, and to how Nazism has been remembered. It presents a full history of this important topic based on a study of an array of ego-documents and other records, and puts forward a new interpretative framework.