Book excerpt: In the years preceding publication of this book in 1986 much progress was made in identifying the social sources of support for Hitler’s NSDAP and in determining the tactics employed by the party to mobilise its constituency at grass roots level. It has emerged that the Nazi’s roots were far more diverse than previously assumed, extending beyond the lower middle class to encompass both the affluent bourgeoisie and the working class. This book collects together original studies which represent a distillation of some of the contemporaneous research.