In this radically revisionist work Conan Fischer investigates how the public brawling between Communists and Nazis during the Weimar Era masked a more subtle and complex relationship. It examines the way in which the National Socialists' growth across traditional class and regional barriers came to threaten the Communists on their home ground and forced them to adopt increasingly precarious, compromising strategies to confront this challenge. Encouraged by Moscow, they ascribed a qualified legitimacy to grass-roots Nazism which justified fraternisation with Hitler's ordinary supporters.