A highly intelligent and very valuable book by one of the ablest writers on Nazism in Germany. Hitler's world view-the intellectual system which was the dynamic force of his career--is too often omitted from the history of his movement. Jackel has reconstructed it with great skill and scholarship. His book tills a serious gap: it shows us the human motor which drove that otherwise inexplicable machine of brutal conquest and extermination. -- H.R. Trevor-Roper

Even the demonic Hitler had a comprehensive philosophy, and Eberhard Jäckel probes deeply into the dictator’s mind to determine how he viewed the world.

"[Jäckel’s] critique of the self-contradictions historical research has brought upon itself by abandoning systematic analysis and relying instead on intuitive judgments and the obiter dicta of ex-Nazis such as Hermann Rauschning is cogent and convincing. So also is his analysis of the development of Hitler’s ideas from the ‘conventional foundations’ with which he began in 1920." - New York Review of Books