In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the controversial thesis at the time that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany.
[3] After World War II, Fischer re-evaluated his previous beliefs, and decided that the popular explanations of National Socialism offered by such historians as Friedrich Meinecke in which Adolf Hitler was just a Betriebsunfall (an 'occupational accident', meaning 'a spanner in the works') of history were unacceptable.
[2] Fischer complained that the Lutheran church had for too long glorified the state as a divinely sanctioned institution that could do no wrong, and thus paved the way for National Socialism.
[4] In the 1950s, Fischer examined the Imperial German government archives – those that were extant and available at the time – relating to the First World War.
[4] In this book, which was primarily concerned with the role played in the formation of German foreign policy by domestic pressure groups, Fischer argued that various pressure groups in German society had ambitions for aggressive imperialist policy in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
[8] Though Fischer argued that the German government did not want a war with the British Empire, they were ready to run the risk in pursuit of annexation and hegemony.
[4] In Fischer's view, the Imperial German state saw itself besieged by rising demands for democracy at home and sought to weaken them through a policy of aggression abroad.
[4] The German elite that caused World War I was also responsible for the failure of the Weimar Republic, which opened the way for the Third Reich.
This traditional German elite, in Fischer's analysis, was dominated by a racist, imperialist and capitalist ideology that was little different from the beliefs of the Nazis.
The Australian historian John Moses noted in 1999 that the documentary evidence introduced by Fischer is extremely persuasive in arguing that Germany was responsible for World War I.
They argue that Germany was not uniquely aggressive amongst European nations of the early 20th century, a time when Social Darwinist views of struggle were popular in Europe's ruling classes.
Critics also contend that in the centuries following Columbus's voyages to America, the Western European countries including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, etc.
had already acquired vast overseas colonial possessions and spheres of influence long before German unification in 1871, so it is difficult to single out Germany alone as "grasping for world power" when this was a centuries-old Western European tradition.