FACE 3RD REICH

The author, Joachim Fest (b. 1926), mentions in the Preface to his book-length biography Speer: The Final Verdict (German publication in 1999, English translation published in 2002) that Speer requested him as an advisor while working on his books Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Fest has also written a biography of Hitler, and Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of German Resistance. The book under review is the first by Fest I've read. This book, The Face of the Third Reich, is a collection of character analyses of the following people: Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Borman, Ernst Röhm, Franz von Papen, Alfred Rosenberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, Hans Frank, Baldur von Schirach, Rudolf Hoss, along with analyses of members of the Officer Corps, the intellectuals, and of wives and mothers. The style is clear, analytical and rational. This is not written in the style of a popularization, nor is its purpose to introduce the Nazi leadership to those unfamiliar with their history. Two quotations summarize the author's view of the Nazi leadership. "What is again and again manifest among the figures surrounding Hitler is an empty but dogged will to power, which is so often combined with extreme servility. ... The lack of independence and poverty of personality of so many of [Hitler's] leading supporters was a prime means of preserving an attachment to Hitler's person through all humiliations, and a general search for a father figure found its deepest satisfaction in the consciousness of Hitler's close presence. The stringency and caprice with which he treated his entourage merely confirmed and strengthened this feeling." (page 298) "The elements of the man willing to put himself at the disposal of totalitarianism may all be traced back: his poverty of personality, his lack of background, his weak contact with others and his emotional instability, his aggressive prejudices, his subservience to his impulses, his split mind, and his deification of the leader matched by his contempt for humanity." (page 303)

Fest provides the reader with a well-written summary of the high-ranking and crucial members of Nazi Germany. This book is a good background for the general reader on the Third Reich and is an essential first-step in any investigation into the period.