[6] By approaching the subject from a different angle from conservative historians such Henry Ashby Turner and Karl Dietrich Bracher, Mason's "primacy of politics" thesis reached the same conclusion about Nazi Germany: big business served the state, rather than vice versa.
[4] The key aspects of the crisis were, according to Mason, a shaky economic recovery being threatened by a rearmament program, which was overwhelming the economy; the Nazi regime's nationalist bluster limited its options.
[4] In that way, Mason articulated a Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") view of the war's origins through the concept of social imperialism.
[7] Mason's thesis was in marked contrast to the Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") by which historians usually explained the war.
[4] Mason believed German foreign policy was driven by domestic political considerations and that the start of the war in 1939 was best understood as a "barbaric variant of social imperialism".
[11] Mason contended that when faced with the deep socioeconomic crisis, the Nazi leadership had decided to embark upon a ruthless 'smash and grab' foreign policy of seizing territory in Eastern Europe that could be pitilessly plundered to support living standards in Germany.
[13] In Mason's opinion, the decision to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union and to attack Poland and to run of the risk of a war with the United Kingdom and France were the abandonment by Hitler of his foreign policy programme, which had been outlined in Mein Kampf, and was forced on him by his need to stop a collapsing German economy by seizing territory abroad to be plundered.
[11] Mason's theory of a "flight into war" being imposed on Hitler generated much controversy, and in the 1980s, he conducted a series of debates with economic historian Richard Overy on the matter.
Overy maintained the decision to attack Poland was not caused by structural economic problems but was the result of Hitler wanting a localised war at that particular moment.
As one civil servant put it in January 1940, "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a fix".
Mason wrote: In their recent essays Karl Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand are largely concerned with the intentional actions of Hitler, which, they believe, followed with some degree of necessity from his political ideas.
And the moral absolutes of Habermas, however politically and didactically impeccable, also carry a shadow of provincialism, as long as they fail to recognize that fascism was a continental phenomenon, and that Nazism was a peculiar part of something much larger.
[21]In 1985, Mason decided that the government of Margaret Thatcher was the harbinger of fascism, advised trade union leaders to start making preparations to go underground and moved to Italy.