[citation needed] That type of authoritarianism was seen to be avoiding both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of Britain and France.
Recognizing the importance of modernizing forces in industry and the economy and in the cultural realm, Wehler argues that reactionary traditionalism dominated the political hierarchy of power in Germany, as well as social mentalities and in class relations (Klassenhabitus).
Other books with a thesis similar to Vansittart's were Rohan Butler's The Roots of National Socialism (1941) and William Montgomery McGovern's From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi-Fascist Philosophy (1946).
Since then, scholars have examined developments in intellectual, political, social, economic and cultural history to investigate why German democracy failed during the Weimar Republic and which factors led to the rise of Nazism.
[6] Namier concluded "had not Hitler and his associates blindly accepted the legend which latter-day liberals, German and foreign had spun around 1848, they might well have found a great deal to extol in the deutsche Männer und Freunde of the Frankfort Assembly".
[6] After Bismarck's departure in 1890, Vermeil wrote, "It was after his fall, under William II, that this nationalism, breaking all barriers and escaping from the grip of a weak government, gave rise to a state of mind and a general situation that we have to analyze, for otherwise Nazism with its momentary triumphs and its terrible collapse will remain incomprehensible".
[15] Vermeil concluded that Germany will remain on a separate path, "always placing the spirit of its implacable technical discipline at the service of those visions of the future that its eternal romanticism begets".
[22]Another version of the Sonderweg thesis emerged in the United States in the 1950s to the 1960s, when historians such as Fritz Stern and George Mosse examined ideas and culture in 19th-century Germany, especially those of the virulently anti-Semitic völkisch movement.
However, in recent years, Stern has abandoned his conclusion and now argues against the Sonderweg thesis, holding the views of the völkisch movement to be a mere "dark undercurrent" in Imperial Germany.
In 1990, Jürgen Kocka wrote about the Sonderweg's theories: Yet, at the same time, researches looked back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to uncover the deeper roots of the Third Reich.
Leonard Krieger, Fritz Stern, George Mosse and Kurt Sontheimer emphasized the illiberal, antipluralistic elements in German political culture upon which National Socialist ideas could later build.
Hans Rosenberg and others argued that preindustrial elites, especially the east Elbian landowners (the Junkers), upper-level civil servants and the officer corps retained great power and influence well into the 20th century.
The unification of Germany by means of "blood and iron" under Prussian hegemony expanded the political influence and social weight of the officer corps with its status-oriented claims to exclusivity and autonomy.
Along with the old elites, many traditional and preindustrial norms, ways of thinking and modes of life also survived, which included the authoritarian outlook and antiproletarian claims of the petty bourgeoise as well as militaristic elements of middle-class political culture, such as the institution of the "reserve officer".
The liberal Max Weber criticized the "feudalization" of the upper bourgeoisie, which seemed to accept both the disproportional representation of the nobility in politics and the aristocratic norms and practices, instead of striving for power on its own terms or cultivating a distinctly middle-class culture.
Stürmer contends that what he regards as Germany's vulnerable geopolitical situation in Central Europe left successive German governments no other choice but to engage in authoritarianism.
Analyzing the troops of the special police battalion units, who were the ones who directly killed Jews in the mass raids phase of the Holocaust (prior to the death camps), Browning concluded that the typical middle-class workers were not ingrained with anti-Semitism but became killers through peer pressure and indoctrination.
Goldhagen countered that German society, politics and life until 1945 were characterized by a unique version of extreme anti-Semitism that held the murder of Jews as the highest possible national value.
[2] They rejected the entire concept of the Sonderweg as a flawed construct supported by "a curious mixture of idealistic analysis and vulgar materialism" that led to an "exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s".
[28] From the right, Otto Pflanze claimed that Wehler's use of such terms as "Bonapartism", "social imperialism", "negative integration" and Sammlungspolitik ("the politics of rallying together") has gone beyond mere heuristic devices and instead become a form of historical fiction.
In the 2014 work "AntiJudaism: The Western Tradition", historian David Nirenberg argues that the conditions of Jew-hatred and replacement were also found in every other European country and had their roots in Graeco-Roman antiquity and imperial Christianity.
[citation needed] Schubert states[30] that the history of the Holy Roman Empire is not to be confused with the Sonderweg, which can be seen only as a result of the concept of German identity, which developed in the Romanticism of the late 18th century and was reinforced by the Napoleonic Wars in which Germany was under French occupation.