The "American Historical Review" wrote in May 1989, "Zitelmann's book is an admirable example of exhaustive scholarship on an important aspect of the mind of Hitler. But it is less likely to stand as a decisive synthesis than as a provocative turn in the pursuit of the eternal enigmas of the Third Reich and its creator". In the February 1988 issue of the "[Zeitschrift|Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen", the American historian Gerhard L. Weinberg wrote, "This work will require all who concern themselves with the Third Reich to rethink their own ideas and to reexamine the evidence on which those ideas are based. For any book to do that today is itself a major accomplishment. It would certainly be most unwise for any scholar to ignore the picture of Hitler presented here simply because it does not fit in with his or her own preconceptions".