The Third Reich: A New History

Summary

A sweeping reinterpretation of Nazi Germany that treats National Socialism less as a political movement than as a pseudo-religious phenomenon — a secular faith that offered transcendence, community, and apocalyptic purpose to a society in crisis. Burleigh draws on an unusually wide range of cultural and intellectual sources to map the moral collapse that made genocide possible, refusing to reduce the story to economics or institutional politics alone. The book's argument that totalitarian ideologies function as substitute religions has influenced historians and political theorists ever since.