The Radical Right has represented a major element in German politics and society throughout the history of the united country (i.e. since the 1870s), though the understandable concentration on the Third Reich (1933-45) has tended to distort the wider picture.

This book explores the history of the radical right through the full span of Germany's life as a nation, thus putting the Third Reich in its natural context, and also emphasising that the attitudes and policies of the radical right did not begin with Hitler's pursuit of power in the 1920s or end with his death in the ruins of Berlin.