Michael Wildt is one of the most innovative historians of contemporary history working in Germany today... His scholarship is marked by imaginative questions and answers that are arrestingly original, patiently reconstructed, close to the sources, and justly influential...Like much of his previous work, ... his book] impresses not just for reinterpreting a topic...but for recalibrating our lens onto the Third Reich. - Yad Vashem Studies

Michael Wildt's account will stimulate academic as well as public debate about the causes and underlying effects of the Nazis' persecution of the...

In the spring of 1933, German society was deeply divided - in the Reichstag elections on 5 March, only a small percentage voted for Hitler. Yet, once he seized power, his creation of a socially inclusive Volksgemeinschaft, promising equality, economic prosperity and the restoration of honor and pride after the humiliating ending of World War I persuaded many Germans to support him and to shut their eyes to dictatorial coercion, concentration camps, secret state police, and the exclusion of large sections of the population. The author argues however, that the everyday practice of...