ABSTRACT
The notion of the Sonderweg, which explains Adolf Hitler as the teleological culmination of Germany's special path, is superficially attractive, but the facts of his story tend to undermine it. There was nothing inevitable about Hitler and Nazism. It is tempting but unhistorical to view his rise as essentially a matter of his driving sense of purpose carrying him to the leadership of his party and then of the German nation. He was an opportunist who read his times with perception and showed great political skill in developing a set of ideas and strategies that suited the circumstances prevailing in post-war Germany. Luck played a major part. Without the 1914–18 War and its aftermath, it is unlikely that Hitler would have developed his extreme political ideas. Even if he had, the probability is that his particular brand of activist politics would have left him marginalised, unable to affect the main stream of German development. It has to be remembered that Hitler's Nazism only just made the breakthrough into German national politics. But for the onset of the international economic depression that impacted so badly upon Germany, it is difficult to see how he and his movement could ever have been more than a peripheral influence.
