Pg. 99: Alan E. Steinweis's "The People’s Dictatorship"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The People's Dictatorship: A History of Nazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this up-to-date, succinct, and highly readable volume, Alan E. Steinweis presents a new synthesis of the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. After tracing the intellectual and cultural origins of Nazi ideology, the book recounts the rise and eventual victory of the Nazi movement against the background of the struggling Weimar Republic. The book details the rapid transformation of Germany into a dictatorship, focusing on the interplay of Nazi violence and the readiness of Germans to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Steinweis chronicles Nazi efforts to transform German society into a so-called People's Community, imbued with hyper-nationalism, an authoritarian spirit, Nazi racial doctrine, and antisemitism. The result was less a People's Community than what Steinweis calls a People's Dictatorship – a repressive regime that acted brutally toward the targets of its persecution, its internal opponents, and its foreign enemies even as it enjoyed support across much of German society.

Learn more about The People's Dictatorship at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Kristallnacht 1938.

The Page 99 Test: The People's Dictatorship.

--Marshal Zeringue