In 1992,
The New York Times wrote that it "remains the standard biography of the dictator and a widely respected work on the Nazi movement in general." In 1998, the Hitler expert
Ian Kershaw described the book as a "masterpiece". The book has been criticised for its reliance on the works of
Albert Speer and
Hermann Rauschning, which it treats as authentic
eyewitness testimony and innocent of
ideological agenda, but is rejected as unreliable by some scholars, such as
Theodor Schieder. Many of Bullock's statements – as is the case with his British rival
Hugh Trevor-Roper and later German historians
Joachim Fest and
Klaus Hildebrand – are thus "incorrect, or at least in need of serious nuancing". Bullock's portrayal of Hitler as a
cynic is argued to derive from the main thesis of Rauschning's
The Revolution of Nihilism, which is that
National Socialism had no ideological content and amounted to a nihilist pursuit of power. Bullock notably later changed his mind and acknowledged in the late 1990s that a
providentialist form of ideology was central to Hitler's actions. ==See also==