Likewise, Bracher complained that too many Germans were willing during the Weimar-Nazi time periods to subscribe to a "readiness for acclamatory agreement and pseudo-military obedience to a strong authoritarian state". Through Bracher was opposed to the "Sonderweg" interpretation of German history, he did believe in a special German mentality ("Sonderbewusstsein") that made the Third Reich possible. Bracher wrote that:"The German ""Sonderweg"" should be limited to the era of the Third Reich, but the strength of the particular German mentality ["Sonderbewusstsein"] that had arisen already with its opposition to the French Revolution and grew stronger after 1870 and 1918 must be emphasized. Out of its exaggerated perspectives (and, I would add, rhetoric) it become a power in politics, out a myth reality. The road from democracy to dictatorship was not a particular German case, but the radical nature of the National Socialist dictatorship corresponded to the power of the German ideology that in 1933–1945 became a political and totalitarian reality" The "Sonderbewusstsein" Bracher referred to was the original theory of the "Sonderweg", namely the idea of the Prussian-German state as the great Central European power neither of the West nor of the East, but rather was something special and unique; this ideology emphasised opposition to democracy as part of its opposition to "Western civilization". Another well-known book associated with Bracher was the 1960 monograph co-written with Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz "Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung" ("The National Socialist Seizure of Power"), which described in considerable detail the "Gleichschaltung" of German life in 1933–1934. In a review of "Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung", the American historian Walter Laqueur praised Bracher, Sauer and Schulz for their refusal to engage in apologetics, and willingness to ask tough questions about the conduct of Germans under the Nazi regime. In the same review, Laqueur expressed regret that books like William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" were best-sellers, while a book like "Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung", which Laqueur regarded as infinitely better work of scholarship then Shirer's book was unlikely ever to be translated into English, let alone become a bestseller. Bracher advocated the view that Nazi Germany was a totalitarian regime, through Bracher maintained that the "totalitarian typology" as developed by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski was too rigid, and that totalitarian models needed to be based upon careful empirical research.