In this book the author surveys the way in which he sees the impression that the measures Adolf Hitler undertook in Germany in the years before World War II impressed and frequently frightened the other countries of Europe as well as the United States. A brief historical introduction is followed by a series of short chapters dealing with Hitler's appeal to Germans and some outside Germany, through the steps the new regime took in the field of education, rearmament, the police apparatus, industry, and the cultural field. The 1936 Olympics and the diplomacy of Hitler's Germany are described in more detailed chapters, and these are supplemented by discussions of the impact of anti-Semitism and other persecutions as well as Hitler's private life. The account is based on a few memoirs and a rather limited selection of secondary works. Except for the volumes of Hitler's speeches edited by Max Domarus, no major collections of documents are cited.

Although there are portions of the book that offer thoughtful observations, such as the emphasis on indoctrinating youth as so important to the regime, the significance of organized rituals, and the deliberate misleading of such sympathetic visitors as Charles Lindbergh, this is a book that is so riddled with errors that it cannot be recommended to anyone. The author must be the only person left on earth who takes the results of the plebiscites in Nazi Germany seriously (pp. 3, 6, 7, 15, 48–49, 163). Evidently none of the books he consulted contained the then current joke that the results of the next election had been stolen from the Ministry of Propaganda.

Anyone even slightly familiar with the events of the time will be astonished to read that the great inflation preceded the occupation of the Ruhr and was ended by the Hitler government (p. 58), that Poland ruled Danzig (p. 28), that the British wanted to go to war in the Rhineland crisis of 1936 (p. 31), that the German-Italian military alliance of 1939 was actually signed in 1936 (p. 38), that the Communists started the Spanish Civil War (p. 84), that Germany left the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference after President Hindenburg's death in 1934 (p. 98), and so on and so forth. Names are repeatedly misspelled, offices confused, and most English leaders accorded titles they did not hold at the time. The space of this journal should not be taken up by an endless listing of howlers. Only one more deserves mention. The author accepts the story about the reception in Berlin of the British declaration of war on September 3, 1939, to be found in the memoirs of the German interpreter Paul Schmidt (p. 130) that was exposed as a piece of fakery in 1958. It is sadly appropriate that the cover picture shows German soldiers marching, not goose-stepping.