In Nazism, the historian faces a phenomenon that leaves him no way but rejection, what­ever his individual position. There is literally no voice worth considering that disagrees on this matter. . . . Does not such fundamental rejection imply a fundamental lack of understanding? And if we do not understand, how can we write history? The term “under­standing” has, certainly, an ambivalent meaning; we can reject and still “under­stand”. And yet, our intellectual, and psychological, capacities reach, in the case of Nazism, a border undreamed of by Wilhelm Dilthey. We can work out explanatory theories, but, if we face the facts directly, all explanations appear weak.

—Wolfgang Sauer, ‘National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?’, AHR 73 (1967–8), p. 408, in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 19.