21 Facts About Fritz Fischer

Fritz Fischer was a German historian best known for his analysis of the causes of World War I In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the controversial thesis at the time that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany.

Fritz Fischer was named in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing as the most important German historian of the 20th century.

In 1984, Fritz Fischer was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association.

Fritz Fischer joined the Nazi Party in 1939, and left the Party in 1942.

In 1942, Fritz Fischer was given a professorship at the University of Hamburg and he married Margarete Lauth-Volkmann, with whom he fathered two children.

Fritz Fischer was made an honorary member of the American Historical Association in 1984.

In 1949, at the first post-war German Historians' Congress in Munich, Fritz 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.

Fritz 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.

Fritz 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.

The American Klaus Epstein noted, when Fritz Fischer published his findings in 1961, that in his opinion Fritz Fischer instantly rendered obsolete every book previously published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War, and German aims in that war.

In Fritz Fischer's opinion, the "September Program" of September 1914 calling for the annexation of parts of Europe and Africa was an attempt at compromise between the demands of the lobbying groups in German society for wide-ranging territorial expansion.

Fritz Fischer argued that the German government used the July Crisis caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914 to act on plans for a war against the Dual Entente to create, a German-dominated Europe, and, a German-dominated Africa.

The book was preceded by Fritz Fischer's groundbreaking 1959 article in the Historische Zeitschrift in which he first published the arguments that he expanded upon in his 1961 book.

Fritz Fischer was the first German historian to publish documents showing that the German chancellor Dr Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had made plans in September 1914 to annex all of Belgium, part of France and part of Russia.

Fritz Fischer suggested that there was continuity in German foreign policy from 1900 to the Second World War, implying that Germany was responsible for both world wars.

Fritz Fischer was the first German historian to support the negative version of the interpretation of German history, which holds that the way German society developed from the Reformation inexorably culminated in the Third Reich.

The Australian historian John Moses noted in 1999 that the documentary evidence introduced by Fischer is extremely persuasive in arguing that Germany was responsible for World War I In 1990, The Economist advised its readers to examine Fischer's "well documented" book to examine why people in Eastern Europe feared the prospect of German reunification.

Fritz Fischer's allegations caused a deep controversy throughout the academic world, particularly in West Germany.

Fritz Fischer's arguments caused so much anger that his publisher's office in Hamburg was firebombed.

Fritz Fischer's works inspired other historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, to write books and articles against his war-aims thesis.

Many critics claim that Fritz Fischer placed Germany outside the proper historical context.