wrong, and thus paved the way for National Socialism. 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 thesis In the 1950s, Fischer examined the Imperial German government archives – such as were extant and available at the time – that related to the Great War. (This had previously been done by Karl Kautsky, Professor Walther Schucking and Count Max Montgelas and published at Charlottenburg in November 1919 in a collection known as The Kautsky Documents. In 1924 this large book was published in English. A further book by Count Montgelas, The Case for the Central Powers was published in London the following year.) The American Klaus Epstein noted, when Fischer published his findings in 1961, that in his opinion Fischer instantly rendered obsolete every book previously published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War, and German aims in that war. Fischer's own position on German responsibility for World War I has become known as the "Fischer thesis." In 1961, Fischer, who by then had risen to the rank of full professor at the University of Hamburg, rocked the history profession with his first postwar book, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany's Aims in the First World War), in which he argued that Germany had deliberately instigated World War I in an attempt to become a world power. In this book, which was primarily concerned with the role played in the formation of German foreign policy by domestic pressure groups, Fischer argued that various pressure groups in German society had ambitions for aggressive imperialist policy in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In 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. 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. Though Fischer argued that the German government