One of the many issues currently under dispute by historians of Wilhelmine Germany is the question of “parliamentarization”: was the German political system, or was it not, evolving into a parliamentary democracy in the years before 1914? The answers to this and related questions have important implications for explaining modern German history.

For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic's chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, with a leadership corps that had been “Bolshevized,” then “Stalinized,” and that took all its orders from Moscow, the KPD by the final years of Weimar was incapable of modifying its policies, even when their disastrous consequences were plain for all to see. As might be expected, East German historians present a very different picture, arguing that the KPD was the sole Weimar party to have defended working-class interests, resisted militarism and imperialism, and fought to prevent the establishment of fascist rule. Since the Weimar Republic, in the Marxist view, was a class state operating to oppress German working people, there was little about it worth fighting for. While conceding that workers suffered even more under the Nazi dictatorship, East German writers deny that the KPD carries any responsibility for Hitler's triumph. On the contrary, they contend, the Communists alone recognized what National Socialism represented and sought to devise the political tactics that would block a Nazi takeover.

On February 12, 1942, Adolf Hitler, eulogizing his renowned highway builder Fritz Todt, proclaimed that the Westwall, Todt's Wunderwerk, would protect the Reich's western borders “under any circumstances” and “against any attack.” “No power on earth,” the Führer contended, would be able to break through “this most gigantic fortified zone of all time.” Like many of Hitler's declarations of confidence in military technology, this was a mixture of propaganda, intimidation, and obsolete information. Conveniently obscured, for example, was the neglect of the Westwall since the defeat of France in 1940. In fact, the vaunted line was to be no match for enemy forces superior in numbers and matériel. In the fall of 1944 American troops penetrated the Westwall south of Aachen and captured this westernmost city in the fortified line. Further advance was halted by the surprise Ardennes counterattack in December (Battle of the Bulge), but by February 1945 breakthroughs in the Eiffel mountains initiated the drive to the Rhine and the final defeat of Germany.