The Third Reich at War [Hardcover]

Richard Evans' three volume masterwork seems destined to become one of the definitive histories of the Third Reich. It is thoroughly researched, enormously detailed, very well written, and extremely grim reading. This third and last volume covers the final excesses of the regime, as it moved through increasingly radical steps to attempt to both win the war and to meet its self imposed racial goals.

As Evans notes, this volume is centered on the Third Reich itself and is not intended to be a general history of WWII. While there is some coverage of key military campaigns, the main focus is on the territory controlled by the Third Reich, with special attention being paid to the dark events in Eastern Europe.

A key part of Prof. Evans' contribution is that he allows us to see the impact of the Third Reich at a local, grass roots level. He makes copious use of diaries, showing the tedium, stoicism, or despair of civilians' everyday lives. In the earlier volumes we saw the creation in Germany of a pervasive Orwellian totalitarian state, which tried to be all-controlling but was also careful to retain a populist base. Now we see that totalitarian state reaching out into territories where the constraints of popular support are both unnecessary and unwanted.

In reading Evans' three volumes, I have occasionally felt exhausted by his detailed descriptions of so many terrible events. But his relentless detail is also key to understanding the real scope of what was happening. It is very tempting to caricaturize the Third Reich by focusing on its senior leadership and reducing its history to a small set of two-dimensional villains in strange costumes, clicking heels and ordering evil deeds. Well unfortunately the reality was much uglier than that. Evans convincingly shows us not just a few aberrant individuals, or even occasional lunatics, but rather an entire vast, well organized totalitarian system of control, with very large scale participation, which committed a whole vast array of callous oppression, so that moving forward to large scale murder seemed an entirely normal step. From sending opposition figures to concentration camps, to deliberately allowing millions of Soviet POWs to starve, to systematically exterminating civilian Jews, was all part of a steady downward progression. It's rather a terrifying insight into humanity, but it is a lesson worth studying and remembering.

To quote from Evans' concluding paragraph:

"The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism, and authoritarianism. ... This is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history."

Five stars. Grim reading, but valuable history.

My God, what a horrible book! Not that the book itself is bad -- it is very good indeed. But its subject matter and exposition is unrelievedly hideous. Virtually every chapter seems to have a new statistic detailing hundreds of thousands of people being killed. And the author has almost nothing good to say about its subject -- the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. That is probably because there is almost nothing good to say about it.

While there is probably not much new in this book, it is a marvellous compendium of what is known about World War II Germany. Naturally, any book on the war years is bound to be selective, and I think Evans does the average reader a favor by accentuating the negative. Not only were the heads of the Nazi heirarchy murderous beasts -- the military leadership were mostly moral cretins, and when they were not moral cretins, were complicit thugs. The civil service and the industrial complex were self-serving cowards at best and more often, complicit vipers. Even the German citizenry, while not quite "Hitler's Willing Executioners," were more than willing to support the regime and overlook its crimes until they were bombed back into the stone age.

On top of everything else, they were strategically and politically stupid. Evans makes it clear, by detailing production and population figures, that there was never a realistic chance that Germany could achieve its wartime goals, much less conquer the world. Taking on three major opponents at once, each of which could outproduce and outman Germany, was madness.

The great virtue of this book is to disabuse anyone who might be tempted to admire the Third Reich -- particularly adolecent males who could be seduced by the Wehrmacht's "heroism" or German military efficiency. Evans does well by devoting 4/5ths of his book to Germany's long, slow decline and less than 1/5th to its early, lucky triumphs. Even before Hitler's insane Russion venture, Evans suggests, the odds were stacked against Germany. Since it could not successfully cross the English channel, the best it could hope for was a strategic standoff, and the voracious Nazi appetite for aggression could not content itself with half-a-loaf.

Inevitably in a book on such a vast topic, there are weaknesses. One could have wished for more emphasis on the German home front, which is a relatively obscure topic, and less on the fighting of the war, which has been endlessly chronicled. It would have been helpful to have more analysis on the degree to which the German people benefitted from Nazi conquests in the first three years of the war -- a hot topic recently. And one could wish that Evans had spent a bit more time on the big philosophical questions, such as why the German people tolerated, much less supported, these marching morons as long as they did. And even if it is granted that most of the German people would not have supported the massacres, how did Germany ever manage to produce so many bullies and sadists who were more than willing to conduct them?

In the final analysis, this is a cautionary tale about the potential depravity of the human spirit. There are Germans everywhere in the Western World, including millions of German ancestry in the United States. Arguably, the greatest (ethnically) German general of World War II was named Eisenhower. The great majority of ethnic Germans, including those in Germany and Austria before 1900 and after 1950, behaved much like other decent and rational human beings. The fact that some of them, for a few decades, could behave like monsters is warning to us all.

Incidentally, while I can see how one reviewer could rate this book as a "1" because of techical difficulties in the Kindle edition, I cannot for the life of me see how reviewers could have given such a superbly written and researched book a "1" or a "2" on the merits.

"The Third Reich at War" represents the final installment of Richard J. Evans' panoptic on the Second World War. All three volumes are scholarly masterpieces.

Hitler's war has probably spawned more articles and books than could possibly be read and absorbed by even the most insatiable professional historian or dedicated lay reader. In other words, even excepting the barrage of sensational fictional works on television, in the print media and on the "silver screen", there's just far too much serious literature and research for consumption. So, out of the cornucopia of works, even those of that attempt an historical synthesis on a "grand scale", why this one? In a phrase, because its probably the best overview of Hitler's Reich so far published.

Contrary to the title's implication, this book does not present a detailed battlefield analysis of Wehrmacht strategy and tactics. The emphasis instead is on the Nazi motives for the war of aggression; how matters were handled; how ordinary (and extra-ordinary) Germans reacted and perceived events as they unfolded: the how and why, in other words.

As it happens, the central ideological tenants used to justify the invasion of Europe and later the USSR, were far from rational calculations undertaken by reasonable, pragmatic and logical thinkers. Rather, the war was an integral component of a Nazi goulash of popular current eugenic theory, "racial science" and really rank anti-Semitism viewed through a lens of Social Darwinism. As Evans explains it, the ideologies then current in Nazi Germany were so weird, so bizarre, so fantastic and so overweening as to be blinding. Thus, Nazi true believers evidently could not realize the toxic and fatal consequences for Germany which would follow from actually implementing these beliefs. Considered in retrospect, the story of the Third Reich seems like a very bad and frankly unbelievable spasm of poorly conceived fiction. The adherents of Nazi thought and their accommodating fellow-travelers were completely unwilling and perhaps unable to understand the consequences of their actions, even as they witnessed the debacle befalling Germany. Even the feeble (but laudable) eleventh hour efforts against Hitler undertaken by the "Operation Valkyre" conspirators by and large illustrate this observation as well as the hubris repeatedly demonstrated by the Volksgemeinschaft and its aristocracy. Naturally, there were also strong elements of opportunism, mendacity and convenience operating in the Third Reich as elsewhere, but the sense of aggrieved and self-righeous entitlement was perhaps unique to the Germany of that time period. On the other hand, maybe those observations only serve to illustrate the apparently unchanging nature of humanity and to highlight the fact that it could happen once more. Regardless, its all nicely summarized here in Evans' three volumes.

The ineluctable outcome of Hitler's scheme is glaringly evident from reading Evans' the chronolgy developed in this history. While Evans' books lack some of the immediacy of William Shirer's eyewitness account ("Rise and Fall of the Third Reich") and the intricate quotidian detail of Victor Klemperer's diaries, Evans successfully conveys a barrage of factual information, pithy insights and incisive judgments in a highly readable fashion.

So, if it isn't already obvious, Why read this long and detailed history? Prior to WW-II, Churchill observed that "wars between peoples will be worse than wars between kings". What this war, a real venichtungskreig, illustrates is that wars between ideologies are worse still. As such, this war deserves careful, scholarly scrutiny. But, will there be another worldwide ideological war, undertaken with genocidal intent, like the Hitler War and, if so, is that the final reason for reading this book? Obviously anticipating this question, Evans, in the concluding chapter to this volume, notes that there will "never be a Fourth Reich". Hopefully, he's correct in that assessment and, while we may never see a Fourth Reich, we'll witness plenty more ethnic, religious, inter-communal conflicts, some of which (in my estimation) have the potential to ignite a global conflagration. If for no other reason than that one, the Third Reich deserves intelligent study and it always will. There is another reason, to wit the irrational atavistic mindset that lies just beneath the veneer of civility. In other words, Hitler's war illustrates Goya's adage that "The sleep of reason breeds monsters". Evans' trilogy is probably the best place to start realizing that fact and to consider its implications, past and future.