Hitler was Nazi Germany and Nazi Germany was Hitler."" Though true to the extent that Hitler's personality, leadership, and ideological convictions played a massive role in shaping the nature of government and life during the Third Reich, this popular view has led many writers since the end of World War II to overlook important aspects of Nazism while centring attention solely on Hitler's contributions to the Nazi Party. This book seeks to ?ll a significant gap in the literature by concentrating particularly on the Nazi Party and its growth during the years of the Weimar Republic, examining the paramilitary presence in Germany and Bavaria after World War I. Most of the book describes the development of the Nazi Storm Detachment (Sturmabteilung, or SA) before and after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. By the time Hitler came to power in January 1933, there were perhaps as many as 400,000 of these brown-shirted men, often self-styled revolutionaries, creating violence on a daily basis and destroying the underpinnings of the Weimar Republic. The book features several photographs captured from the Nazi Party's Central Publishing Facility in Munich and passed to the author in the late 1950s.

The coverage of The Cold War in Germany: Overview, Origins, and Intelligence Wars is indicated in the subtitle. The "overview," like the "origins," concentrates primarily on the historical development of the Cold War. But the "overview" concentrates more heavily on World War II in terms of background while the "origins" goes back in time to the beginning of the modern era in Western Society. The book also deals with the various "wildcards" of the postwar era including Eurocommunism and the developments of terrorist activity in the 1970s. Author Otis C. Mitchell, who served as an Army intelligence operative in North Germany, interweaves his counterintelligence experiences with newly declassified documentary evidence (particularly those of the C.I.A. operation in "battleground" Berlin called Base of Operations Berlin, or BOB). Combining these two sources, Mitchell paints a broad picture of the West and East German intelligence and counterintelligence services. He shows that the Cold War had, by the time of the building of the infamous Berlin Wall, already established basic patterns that lasted until its end and beyond. This system became anachronistic after the end of that long struggle, and was not adequate to face the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism as it developed in the 1990s and the early twenty first century.