ABSTRACT
Any new book on National Socialism, especially one presuming to provide a comprehensive history, must offer some justification for adding another volume to the hundreds of thousands of published works on this most thoroughly chronicled period in history. For more than twenty years I have taught an undergraduate course entitled "Hitler's Germany." Although, of course, there is no dearth of material to assign in such a course (indeed, the most difficult task is to choose between the many outstanding books that are available), I was nonetheless frustrated by the lack of a brief, but comprehensive text that covered not only the period from 1918 to 1945, but also the nineteenth-century background and the post-1945 afterlife that I consider essential to a full understanding of the Nazi 1 experience.
