leading propagandists for Bismarck, along with the new National Liberal Party. Only an honorable few continued to oppose him and the militarist success-worship that followed his victorious wars. Shirer in his 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich argued for the view that German history proceeded logically from "Luther to Hitler" and saw Hitler's rise to power as an expression of German character, rather than of the international phenomenon of totalitarianism. Shirer encapsulated that by stating that "the course of German history... made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility." The French historian Edmond Vermeil wrote in his 1952 book ("Contemporary Germany") that Nazi Germany was not "a purely adventitious episode appearing on the fringes of the German tradition". Instead, Vermeil contended that German nationalism had an especially aggressive character, which had been restrained only by Bismarck. After Bismarck's departure in 1890, Vermeil wrote, "It was after his fall, under William II, that this nationalism, breaking all barriers and escaping from the grip of a weak government, gave rise to a state of mind and a general situation that we have to analyze, for otherwise Nazism with its momentary triumphs and its terrible collapse will remain incomprehensible". Vermeil concluded that Germany will remain on a separate path, "always placing the spirit of its implacable technical discipline at the service of those visions of the future that its eternal romanticism begets". Poliakov wrote that even if not all Germans supported the Holocaust, it was "tacitly accepted by the popular will" In contrast, German historians such as Friedrich Meinecke, Hans Rothfels, and Gerhard Ritter, joined by a few non-German historians such as Pieter Geyl, contended that the Nazi period had no relationship to earlier periods of German history and that German traditions were at sharp variance with the totalitarianism of the Nazi movement. Meinecke famously described Nazism in his 1946 book ("The German Catastrophe") as a particularly unfortunate ("on-the-job accident") of history. Although opposed to what they regarded as Meinecke's excessively-defensive tone, Ritter and Rothfels have been joined by their intellectual heirs Klaus Hildebrand, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Henry Ashby Turner in contending that though the Nazi dictatorship was rooted in the German past and that individual choices made during the later Weimar years that led to the Nazi years. Though Bracher is opposed to the interpretation of German