How does a political system rebuild after a cataclysmic military defeat? How can a society, and its political infrastructure, resurrects itself or, in the case of Germany after World War II, be resurrected in such a way as to ensure long-term political stability?

Politics After Hitler is the first book to demonstrate the importance of America, Britain, and France in the development of party politics in Germany after 1945. In the wake of the war, rightists of all descriptions, Communists, nationalists, and founders of small splinter parties all came under intense and deliberate...

The consequences of Germany's twelve-year Nazi regime continue to reverberate and to spark debate among scholars and the general public. In this volume leading scholars present provocative essays probing the nature, history, and aftermath of the Nazi regime, including its connections to the Federal Republic of Germany after the war. The essays address the nature of Nazism as reflected in contemporary perceptions of Nazi Germany in the United States; the origins and character of fascism; the many forms of antisemitism; German scholars' efforts to promote persecution in the Third Reich; the...

This text concerns the efforts of Britain, France and the United States to reshape German party politics immediately after World War II. Based on archival research in the four countries involved, it concludes that interference by the occupiers made a stable and moderate party system in the Federal Republic of Germany much more probable. This interference was propelled not by concrete Allied plans for a German political revival, but by fears of reaction, revolution, nationalism and political fragmentation.