ABSTRACT
In 1998 Ron Rosenbaum published the much-acclaimed Explaining Hitler. In it, Rosenbaum explores the competing, often conflicting versions of Hitler that have been written over the past sixty years, from the earliest German journalists of the 1930s who wrote disparaging criticism of Hitler and the “Hitler party”; to post-war psychological and metaphysical explanations that describe Hitler as an “evil genius” largely responsible for German militarism, German fascism, and the Jewish Holocaust; to contemporary “functionalist” scholarship that explains Hitler as the product of “deeper forces of history and society…rather than as a singular ‘(im)moral agent.’”1
