Fritz Fischer (5 March 1908 – 1 December 1999) was a German historian best known for his analysis of the causes of World War I. In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the thesis that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany. Fischer's claims sparked a major historiographical debate in postwar West Germany, known as the Fischer Controversy.
Fischer was named in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing as the most important German historian of the 20th century. In 1984, he was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association.
Fischer was born in Ludwigsstadt in Bavaria. His father was a railway inspector. Educated at grammar schools in Ansbach and Eichstätt, Fischer attended the University of Berlin and the University of Erlangen, where he studied history, pedagogy, philosophy and theology. Fischer joined the Nazi Party in 1939, and left the Party in 1942. Fischer's early works were heavily influenced by the standard Hegelian−Rankean tradition typical of the pre-1945 German historical profession, and as such, Fischer's early writings bore a strong bent towards the right. This influence was reflected in Fischer's first books, biographies of Ludwig Nicolovius, a leading 19th-century Prussian educational reformer and of Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Prussian Minister of Education between 1858 and 1862.
In 1942, Fischer was given a professorship at the University of Hamburg and he married Margarete Lauth-Volkmann, with whom he fathered two children. He served in the Wehrmacht in World War II. After his release from a POW camp in 1947, he went on as a professor at Hamburg, where he stayed until his retirement in 1978. He was made an honorary member of the American Historical Association in 1984.
After World War II, Fischer re-evaluated his previous beliefs, and decided that the popular explanations of National Socialism offered by such historians as Friedrich Meinecke in which Adolf Hitler was just a Betriebsunfall (an 'occupational accident', meaning 'a spanner in the works') of history were unacceptable. In 1949, at the first post-war German Historians' Congress in Munich, Fischer strongly criticized the Lutheran tradition in German life, accusing the Lutheran church of glorifying the state at the expense of individual liberties and thus helping to bring about Nazi Germany. Fischer complained that the Lutheran church had for too long glorified the state as a divinely sanctioned institution that could do no wrong, and thus paved the way for National Socialism. Fischer rejected the then popular argument in Germany that Nazi Germany had been the result of the Treaty of Versailles, and instead argued that the origins of Nazi Germany predated 1914, and were the result of long-standing ambitions of the German power elite.
In the 1950s, Fischer examined the extant Imperial German government archives relating to the First World War. (This had previously been done by Karl Kautsky, Professor Walther Schucking and Count Max Montgelas, whose findings were published at Charlottenburg in November 1919 in a collection known as the "Kautsky documents". This large book was published in English in 1924 as Outbreak of the World War. A further book by Count Montgelas, The Case for the Central Powers, was published in London the following year.)
In 1961, Fischer, who by then had risen to the rank of full professor at the University of Hamburg, rocked the history profession with his first postwar book, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany's Aims in the First World War), in which he argued that Germany had deliberately instigated a world war to become a world power. In this book, which was primarily concerned with the role played in the formation of German foreign policy by domestic pressure groups, Fischer argued that various pressure groups in German society had ambitions for aggressive imperialist policy in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In Fischer's opinion, the Septemberprogramm (September Program) of September 1914 calling for the annexation of parts of Europe and Africa was an attempt at compromise between the demands of the lobbying groups in German society for wide-ranging territorial expansion. Fischer argued that the German government used the July Crisis caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914 to act on plans for a war against the Franco-Russian Alliance (Dual Entente) to create Mitteleuropa, a German-dominated Europe, and Mittelafrika, a German-dominated Africa. Though Fischer argued that the German government did not want a war with the British Empire, they were ready to run the risk in pursuit of annexation and hegemony.
The American historian Klaus Epstein opined, in his review of Fischer's book published in October 1962, that Fischer instantly rendered obsolete every book published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War and German war aims. Fischer's position on German responsibility for the world war has become known as the "Fischer thesis".
The book was preceded by Fischer's groundbreaking 1959 article in the Historische Zeitschrift in which he first published the arguments that he expanded upon in his 1961 book. In The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt wrote that Fischer's publication made it "impossible to maintain" that the First World War had been a "ghastly mistake" rather than the consequence of German policy.
For most Germans, it was acceptable to believe that Germany had caused the Second World War, but not the Great War, which was still widely regarded as a war forced upon Germany by its encircling enemies. Fischer was the first German historian to publish documents showing that the German chancellor Dr. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had made plans in September 1914 (after the war began) to annex all of Belgium, part of France and part of Russia. Fischer suggested that there was continuity in German foreign policy from 1900 to the Second World War, implying that Germany was responsible for both world wars. These ideas were expanded in his later books Krieg der Illusionen (War of Illusions), Bündnis der Eliten (From Kaiserreich to Third Reich) and Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall (Hitler Was No Accident). Though Fischer was an expert on the Imperial era, his work was important in the debate on the foreign policy of the Third Reich.
In his 1969 book War of Illusions (Krieg der Illusionen), Fischer offered a detailed study of German politics from 1911 to 1914 in which he offered an analysis of German foreign policy based on the Primat der Innenpolitik (primacy of domestic politics). In Fischer's view, the Imperial German state saw itself besieged by rising demands for democracy at home and sought to weaken them through a policy of aggression abroad.
Fischer was the first German historian to support the negative version of the Sonderweg ("special path") interpretation of German history, which holds that the way German society developed from the Reformation (or from a later time, such as the establishment of the German Reich in 1871) inexorably culminated in the Third Reich. In Fischer's view, while 19th-century German society moved forward economically and industrially, it did not do so politically. For Fischer, German foreign policy before 1914 was largely motivated by the efforts of the reactionary German elite to distract the public from casting their votes for the Social Democrats and to make Germany the world's greatest power at the expense of France, Britain and Russia. The German elite that caused World War I was also responsible for the failure of the Weimar Republic, which opened the way for the Third Reich. This traditional German elite, in Fischer's analysis, was dominated by a racist, imperialist and capitalist ideology that was little different from the beliefs of the Nazis. Fischer called Bethmann Hollweg the "Hitler of 1914". Fischer's arguments set off what is called the "Fischer Controversy" of the early 1960s when German historians led by Gerhard Ritter attempted to rebut Fischer. The Australian historian John Moses noted in 1999 that the documentary evidence introduced by Fischer is extremely persuasive in arguing that Germany was responsible for World War I. In 1990, The Economist advised its readers to examine Fischer's "well documented" book to examine why people in Eastern Europe feared the prospect of German reunification.