Andrew Zimmerman, ‘Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (review)’, German Studies Review 35, 3 (2012) 

bit of article in lieu of abstract:

Historians have recently returned to explorations of the continuities in German history that seek to link its National Socialist period to the Kaiserreich and even earlier periods. Enriched by criticisms of the liberal modernization theory implicit in the German Sonderweg thesis, the new students of German continuities have avoided grounding their narratives in characterizations of the German bourgeoisie as pathological deviants from a supposedly more democratic “Western” norm. The study of colonialism, both in Germany’s eastern territories and in its overseas empire, has offered this recent scholarship a set of promising possibilities for connecting Kaiserreich and Third Reich. Bearing a subtitle that includes the phrase “from Bismarck to Hitler,” a kind of byname for the once defunct Sonderweg narrative, Shelley Baranowski’s most recent book contributes to this historiographical turn.