The article briefly reviews the major findings of a case study exploring the language of the Third Reich by means of the recently introduced computational tool Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams). This tool has been designed to investigate cultural trends and salient semiotic developments in history on the basis of the digital corpus of Google books on the World Wide Web. The aim of the article is to examine the reliability and overall usefulness of the new instrument for conducting fine-grained “culturomic” investigations on the basis of very large monolingual corpora
