To this day, Nazism remains vivid in the public mind as the greatest evil in human history, and continues to be the subject or background of countless novels, films, and non-fiction analyses. But the artists and scholars of 2014 still have no real explanation; they are no closer than they were in 1982 to identifying the fundamental roots of Nazism.
This book does.
The Cause of Hitler’s Germany is about two-thirds of The Ominous Parallels, a book published by Dr. Peikoff in 1982. In the The Ominous Parallels, Dr. Peikoff intended a warning: If Americans continue to accept and act on the same philosophic ideas that led to the Third Reich, then America will have to follow a parallel course and suffer the same result.
Unlike The Ominous Parallels, The Cause of Hitler’s Germany is offered not primarily as a warning but rather as an explanation.
The Cause of Hitler’s Germany focuses only on the Nazi aspects of The Ominous Parallels: on their intellectual origins in German philosophy, and then on their manifestations in Weimar culture and, as a result, in the world of Hitler.
Learn more about the genesis of The Cause of Hitler’s Germany >