The book formulated an "ideal" of national empowerment, which found many adherents in a Germany desperate to rebound from the Treaty of Versailles.

Moeller van den Bruck's reich is not a state in the usual sense of the word but the ideal condition and the only way in which the scattered German people can achieve a common purpose and destiny.

On the eve of the book's publication, van den Bruck inserted a preface in which he tried to distance himself from possible future implications: "The Third Reich is but a philosophical idea and not for this world, but for the hereafter.

To pursue the philosophical idea, he believed that Germany would need an Übermensch of the type described by Nietzsche but that this individual was not Adolf Hitler or anyone else living.

For van den Bruck, Germany's great misfortune lay in the political system created by the Weimar Republic, which had competitive parties and liberal ideologies.