Who Is Hitler In Broszat's Criticism Of The Third Reich

Hitler in Broszat's controversial view was - to use Mommsen's phrase -, a "weak dictator"; as such, the Government of Nazi Germany was not a monocracy but rather a polycracy8. Broszat contends in his 1969 book The Hitler State, that Nazi Germany was dominated by a power struggle by various institutions and that these particular power struggles provide justification for the course that Nazi Germany inevitably took9. In addition, that these power struggles formed the dynamics and structure of the Nazi state, which were the driving force behind Nazism.10 Moreover, as a result, Hitler was not the driving force behind the dynamics and organization of Hitler's Germany11, so Hitler as a leader did not dominate in the Third Reich due to the constant
Broszat broke away from a personality based, Hitler-centred treatment of Nazism to explore the causal connections between the development of the internal power – structure and the progressive radicalization of the Nazi regime24. Being particularly concerned about the historicism of the Third Reich, it being seen as an aberration, and therefore wanted to look more widely at the structures other than Hitler. This being achieved by looking at a wider range of sources, such as the research undertaken and published between the mid-1970s and early 1980s with the framework of the ‘Bavaria Project', which led to an ‘Alltagsgeschichte' which helped to offer an entirely new dimension to the understanding of the relationship between the state and society in Nazi Germany25. In Broszat's viewpoint, such Hitler-centred treatment of Nazism is a major obstacle in historians approaching the scholarly study and analysis of Nazism in the same way that other periods of history are tackled and that until there is a proper integration of Nazism into ‘normal historical writing, the Third Reich would remain an ‘island' in modern German