Germany's Aims in the First World War by Fritz Fischer

In the 1950s, Fischer was the first historian who examined all of the Imperial German government archives in their entirety and as a result, as the American Klaus Epstein noted when Fischer published his findings in 1961, he instantly rendered obsolete every book previously published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War, and German aims in that war.

Fischer rejected the then popular argument in Germany that Nazi Germany had been the result of the Treaty of Versailles, and instead argued that the origins of Nazi Germany predated 1914, and were the result of long-standing ambitions of the German power elite. 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. In 1949, at the first post-war German Historians' Congress in Munich, Fischer strongly criticized the Lutheran tradition in German life, accusing the Lutheran church of glorifying the state at the expense of individual liberties and thus helping to bring about Nazi Germany. After his release from a POW camp in 1947, Fischer went on as a professor at the University of Hamburg, where he stayed until his retirement in 1978.Īfter 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. Fischer served in the Wehrmacht in World War II. In 1942, Fischer was given a professorship at the University of Hamburg and he married Margarete Lauth-Volkmann, with whom he fathered two children.

This influence was reflected in Fischer's first books, biographies of Ludwig Nicolovius, a leading 19th-century Prussian educational reformer and of Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg, the Prussian Minister of Education between 1858-1862. Fischer's major early influences were the standard Hegelian-Rankean opposition typical of the pre-1945 German historical profession, and as such, Fischer's early writings bore a strong bent towards the right. Fischer joined the Nazi Party in 1939, and left the Party in 1942. Educated at grammar schools in Ansbach and Eichstätt, Fischer attended the University of Berlin and the University of Erlangen, where he studied history, pedagogy, philosophy and theology. Fischer was born in Ludwigsstadt in Bavaria.

Germany's Aims in the First World War by Fritz Fischer