Backing Hitler
Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
Robert Gellately
Reviews and Awards
"Books on the Holocaust and Nazism now number in the tens of thousands. Of that vast library, a handful of texts should be deemed essential reading for any serious student of the bloody and pathetic 20th century. Robert Gellately's Backing Hitler is among them."--Washington Post Book World
"Readers will notice that Gellately offers a far more sophisticated argument and more abundant evidence than Daniel Goldhagen's cause celebre, 'Hitler's Willing Executioners.' In truth, Gellately's work is what Goldhagen's book could have been, but wasn't; that is, a closely reasoned and tightly constructed analysis."--Publishers Weekly
"In this original and outstanding book, Gellately uses a wealth of new source materials, including the daily press, to examine the public face of the Nazi 'law and order' dictatorship, in the process contributing much to our understanding of the extent to which it basked in social consensus....This is a genuinely important book which deserves the widest possible readership."--Michael Burleigh, Washington and Lee University
"Superbly researched and convincingly argued, this path breaking study demonstrates that most Germans supported Hitler throughout the Nazi regime....A crucial contribution to our understanding of the relationship between consent and coercion in modern dictatorship."--Omer Bartov, Brown University