Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?
It has become increasingly difficult to sustain the view, rooted in wartime allied propaganda and given more sophisticated expression in the work of the dominant school of left-liberal West Germans of the 1970s to 1990s, that the roots of nazism lay deep in the German past. Often seen against the long-term background of modern German history since the era of Bismarck’s unification of the country in the 19th century, the Third Reich is now increasingly also viewed in a broader international, even global context, as part of the age of imperialism, its drive for domination building on a broader tradition of the German quest for empire.
.. In the new, transnational vision that has emerged among historians in our own era of globalisation, nazism appears as an ideology drawing on sources from many countries, from Russia to France, Italy to Turkey, rather than being the culmination of exclusively German intellectual traditions, as the historians of the postwar generation argued. Racial doctrines borrowed from the French theorist Arthur de Gobineau were married to a distorted version of social Darwinism originating in Britain, antisemitism derived from Russian and French writers was fused with anti-Bolshevism imported from the Whites in the Russian civil war, the worship of violence and hatred of parliamentarism taken from Mussolini’s Italian fascist movement were joined to ideas of national reawakening taken from Kemal Atatürk’s nationalist revolution in Turkey.