Robert D. Schulzinger

Edward N. Peterson. The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory. Pp. 376. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978.

But these and other comments do not detract one bit, in this reviewer’s eyes, from something much more importanta talented historian entered a neglected field of study and opened the doors of serious scholarship to a topic that will no longer be sidestepped by others too timid to lead. More important still, Mosse correctly puts first things first. If, indeed, the volume leapfrogs from contributor to contributor who fueled the volcanic eruption that was the holocaust, it did so because these are the people who built the intellectual foundation that gave respectability to racism, and they needed to be identified before Mosse or others could build future studies on a solid foundation, including the European antiracist tradition of the same time span. To have attacked the subject otherwise would have placed the proverbial cart well before the horse and left it to others