This would be an excellent overview of Nazism and Nazi ideology were it not for two things. First of all, the author is apparently a traditional Marxist who freely uses sectarian terminology such as "counter-revolutionary." This is, at best, distracting and at worst somewhat silly. It is generally just distracting, since, with a few ridiculous exceptions, the author does not allow his own ideological biases to distort the story he is telling. Second, the editor apparently did nothing to correct the proofs of the text since there are an abundance of type setting errors, spelling errors and other easy to fix problems with the final text. If I were the author I would be certain that the second edition, if any, is brought out under another press with another editor.

If you can put up with those problems and are interested in this topic you should buy this book. Unlike Italian Fascism, there are few compact statements of what the Nazis actually believed and the historical antecedents that bolstered these beliefs. Most other essays or books on Nazism view it as a sociological rather than an ideological phenomenon, which leaves out a lot. The only other organized compact source I can think of on Nazi ideology is the first half of Stephen Hick's dvd entitled, Nietzsche and the Nazis, and Hicks is equally or more sectarian in a libertarian way.

So, this book gets four stars, and with a few minor changes, could easily have received five stars. ( )