The twelve years of the National Socialist Third Reich have received more scholarly attention than any other period of similar duration for the obvious reasons of the brutality of the regime, its novelty, its instigation of the Second World War and above all the Holocaust. Those same features have made the interpretation of the regime especially problematic and contentious. The facts that an explicit constitution was never written and that an authorised ideology was never sanctioned have hampered the efforts of later commentators, as they did the efforts of theorists supportive of the regime at the time, to make sense of what the regime actually was. This lack of explicit central direction was recognised by a National Socialist official, who noted that often people waited in vain for instructions on how to act:

In terms of the broader issues of political theory, the nature of the state, law, administration and the international order, this prescription captured the uncertainty which theorists were faced with but erred in suggesting that they would ever find final confirmation of their views.