 Hook was distinguished from many in the radical movement in the 1930s in his recognition of the novel threat of Nazism to European and Western society. For most Marxist theorists, the emergence of Nazism could not be considered a major historical threat since the laws of historical inevitability were believed to prove that socialism must follow the capitalist crisis. The success of Nazism in Germany must then be explained away as a passing phenomenon in the decadent “last phase of capitalism.” Even as a post-doctoral student in Germany in the late 1920s, Hook had expressed criticism of the approach to the elections in Germany of the Communist Party in their confidence that any Nazi triumph would be brief and would necessarily be followed by the transfer of power toward socialism and the Communist Party. Hook’s opposition to Nazism included a partial recognition of the extreme price that even a brief transitional period of Nazi rule could exact in Europe. It was this opposition to Nazism that led Hook to subsequently break decisively with the Trotskyite position in the early 1940s.