Reviews:

 

“Many biographies have been written about Adolf Hitler, but Rainer Zitelmann’s book on Hitler is not just another biography. He has taken the trouble to collate and evaluate all of Hitler’s utterances and writings and has thus cleared the ground for a fuller understanding of Hitler’s self-image, the nature of his ideology, his objectives, and his policies…Rainer Zitelmann has resolved to abstain from moral judgments; but his meticulous and responsible scholarship speaks all the louder. His book constitutes a milestone in our understanding of Adolf Hitler.”

Professor Klemens von Klemperer, L. Clark Seelye Professor of History at Smith College, Journal of Modern History

 

“Advances in historical scholarship usually occur when either new sources or new ideas emerge. In the case of Rainer Zitelmann’s book, both come together: the author brings consistently original questions to previously unexplored source material. In this way, all of Hitler’s speeches, essays, writings, and conversations—for the first time, whether well known or unknown, published or unpublished—are systematically analyzed in order to answer the central question that has long occupied historians: whether, and to what extent, Hitler was a revolutionary or a reactionary... The result is as closely grounded in the sources as it is reflective, as critical as it is creative, as thoroughly documented as it is bold...”

Professor Klaus Hildebrand, University of Bonn, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

 

“All in all, even though I thought I was reasonably well-informed on the subject, I can say that learned things from this book that I had either no idea about, or that I was actively misinformed about. It helps that the book is several steps removed from current-day political debates: Zitelmann is not trying to play the ‘Hitler card’ against his political opponents. (The author is a free-market liberal, but he did most of the work for this book before he developed those views, and certainly well before the current bunch of anti-capitalist ‘anti-fascists’ popped up.) The book ends up debunking the current attempts to instrumentalise ‘anti-fascism’ for a fashionable anti-capitalism, but it does so more as a by-product rather than on purpose. Its purpose is simply to make sense of the ideology that led the world into the 20th century’s greatest catastrophe.”

Dr Kristian Niemietz Institute of Economic Affairs Editorial Director, and Head of Political Economy.

 

“This is a thought-provoking work … it will likely influence the seemingly inexhaustible debate about the content of Hitlerism for a long while to come.”

Lawrence D. Stokes, Professor of History, Dalhousie University (Canada), Canadian Journal of History.

 

“Dr. Zitelmann unquestionably deserves credit for having significantly complemented, if not surpassed, all previous biographers of Hitler.”

Professor Franciszek Ryszka, University of Warsaw, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte

 

“Many readers will already know that Ludwig von Mises considers the Nazi economy to be a form of socialism. In the Nazi system, private property in production goods existed in name only. The ostensible owners were merely managers bound to follow the government’s directives. Rainer Zitelmann, the foremost authority on Adolf Hitler’s economic policies, has fully confirmed Mises’s analysis in "Hitler’s National Socialism", which will be published next month. …. Zitelmann also points out that Hitler admired Joseph Stalin’s economic planning and viewed him as a fellow exponent of a centrally planned economy.”

David Gordon, Mises Institute

 

„This work will require all who concern themselves with the Third Reich to rethink their own ideas and to reexamine the evidence on which those ideas are based. For any book to do that today is itself a major accomplishment. It would certainly be most unwise for any scholar to ignore the picture of Hitler presented here simply because it does not fit in with his or her own preconceptions.”

Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen

 

“Rainer Zitelmann has written one of those books that makes one wonder why it was not published long ago.”

Professor Peter Krüger, Philipps Universiy of Marburg, Historische Zeitschrift (Germany)

 

“The great strength of this work lies in the fact that the author has read and presented the sources without prejudice and with genuine curiosity. Reconstructing the internal logic and rationality underlying Hitler’s fundamental principles is a legitimate undertaking and one that succeeds to a considerable extent. That Hitler held coherent views on domestic, economic, social, and societal policy—or that such coherence can be demonstrated—has so far received too little recognition. This is one of the book’s major achievements.”

Professor Jost Dülffer, University of Cologne, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)