In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological, social growth, and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's. How did Germany fall into the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it, and all of Europe, into utter moral, physical, and cultural, ruin? Evans' history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as he shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur.
