Introduction

Abstract Perhaps understandably, immediate post-war writings on the origins of Nazism took the form of either radical anti-German polemic which depicted Nazi aggression as the product of the German national character or of centuries-old traditions, or conservative apologetics arguing that Nazism had been a short-term aberration in an otherwise healthy national history hijacked by ‘demonic forces’. As might be expected, the former tended to appear in the victorious nations rather than in Germany. A. J. P. Taylor’s The Course of German History is a prime example—published in 1945, it spoke of ‘certain permanent factors’ which could be traced back a thousand years. Of the latter, there was no shortage of texts published in Germany insisting that Nazism had been a product of the ‘age of the masses’ or of ‘demagogic politics’ which, far from being peculiarly German, had entered European politics with the French Revolution; similarly, pointing to the fact that Hitler himself had been Austrian helped found the exculpatory myth that Germany had been the ‘first country occupied by Nazism’, as if the millions of people who had voted for and joined the Nazi party had been anything other than Germans.