A quarter century has passed since the publication of Richard F. Hamilton's Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), which shook the foundations of the hallowed, originally Marxist-based, assumption that Nazism was essentially a movement of the “middle classes” with only very minimal involvement of the “proletariat” of factory workers or the upper classes. While Hamilton and the quickly following The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 by Tom Childers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) broke open the old taboo, a number of others had prepared the way, including Michael Kater's critical quantitative studies of the social composition of Nazi organizations and voters and the doctoral research and first publications by the two authors of this book. A wave of empirical studies followed, based on statistical data that demonstrated that the Nazi Party, had, in fact, been what it had claimed, namely a true mass party that appealed to voters from all classes—a critical factor in its success. Oddly, as the authors point out, the new view of the party's make-up was actually a rediscovery, which mirrored the perceptions of contemporary observers. Opponents and refugees of the Nazi regime had already noted the breakdown of class loyalties—most famously Hannah Arendt in her chapter “A Classless Society” in The Origins of Totalitarianism—albeit not supported by sophisticated quantitative analysis. Labor leaders in exile such as the Bavarian Social Democrat and later Minister President Wilhelm Hoegner felt deeply betrayed by large numbers of workers who voted for the Nazis.

In this book the authors have reprinted five of their essays from the 1980s, which contributed to the fundamental reinterpretation of the social composition of the Nazi movement. The first two chapters primarily take on previous and evolving opinion in the historical profession whereas chapters three through five examine social/occupational membership in the pre-1933 party. Unfortunately these chapters have been revised without indications where the updates are, which leads the reader to wonder precisely how much in the forefront of scholarship the original articles had been. Chapters six through eight are new local micro-studies from the Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen areas.

How useful is the republication of pioneering articles from more than two decades ago, when the basic arguments about the social composition of Nazi organizations, their members, and their voters have long been accepted in the profession and beyond? Even in the general public one would be hard-pressed to find adherents of the old belief that Nazism was just a lower-middle-class movement. Clearly one argument for this attractively published collection is that it helps to document a dramatic case of revision of historical interpretation. In the historiography of Nazism it is arguably the most radical turnabout—more fundamental than even the intentionalist-functionalist debate or the controversies over the starting date of the Holocaust and the extent of the German support for Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. In contrast to those, the reappraisal of the social foundation of Nazism triggered a basic rethinking of the nature of fascism, since the fundamental assumptions about its roots in middle-class fears, reactionary anti-modernism, and authoritarianism—their “sado-masochist” “escape from freedom” (Erich Fromm)—no longer sufficed. The reconceptualization of fascism (Stanley Paine, Zeev Sternhell, Roger Griffin, and many others), which Griffin has called “the new consensus,” would not have been possible without this turnabout.

In this sense the book is a towering monument to the power of rigorous historical analysis based on archival documents and statistics to break through ideological or comfortable assumptions and to gain far more valuable, perhaps even usable understanding. One could imagine using the eight clear, to-the-point exposés in this book, which are effectively supported by archival and statistical evidence, as a great lesson for students. The three new micro-studies could even be emulated by students in local studies.

But as a contribution to the history of Nazism and its social composition, the book is curiously stuck in the past. The new chapters strive for precision and completeness by increasing the social and vocational breakdown to twenty-four and more groups. At one point the authors even claim to have solved the old problem of sampling by including “all the members that the party had in the town and county of Friedberg” at one point in time (p. 153). This is giving up the forest for the trees—as though that local list were not itself a kind of sample for the larger question of the Nazi social composition. More importantly, the authors have conceptually not moved much beyond the 1980s to social determinants beyond class and vocation such as milieus, kinship, religious confession, changing conduct according to different majority-minority ratios, etc., which have been employed with good success by recent studies at least since the Bayernprojekt.