The Third Reich: A New History

"The Third Reich: A New History" does not emphasize Hitler , nor the politics or personalities within the Nazi party itself, and, consequently, Burleigh rushes through the Nazi seisure of power. The book, rather, concentrates on the impact National Socialism had on the lives of people both within Germany and throughout Europe. To learn about Hitler, the Nazi organization itself, or how Hitler molded the party to his will, you will need to go to other sources; Bracher, Stern, and Kershaw, for example. But to read about the destructive effects the Nazi regime had on the lives of everday people, there is no better source than this new book. As one reviewer remarked, Burleigh has demonstrated an "extraordinary mastery of an immense monographic literature." Through it all Burleigh maintains a judicious and balanced approach to his subject, yet he does not hesitate to pass judgment. Burleigh's keen and always balanced evaluation and insight make the work more than a mere compilation. Early on he presents an excellent analysis of the various classes, occupations, and professions and why National Socialism appealed to them. With keen psychological and sociological insight he is excellent in his presentation of the various Nazi strategies for appealing to the differences in people. He shows, for example, how the Nazis were selective in their use of antisemitism. Yet, the heart of Burleigh's book is what he considers the defining characteristic of the Nazi experience; "the supercession of the rule of law by arbitrary police terror." He is strong on the Nazi approach to the law and the politicization of the police. He is strong on the Nazi attempt to purge what they believed are the "Jewish elements" within Christianity and the degrading effects the Nazi regime had on the churches and the clergy. Burleigh reveals the effects of the Anschluss on radicalizing Nazi anitsemitic policies, but he also clearly reveals that there were many other groups singled out for persecution and elimination than the Jews. The author is especially good at describing the Nazi euthanasia program in regard to the disabled and retarded. The author is also very strong in his discussion of the occupation of various parts of Europe and how Nazi policies differed from country to country. He reveals the extent to which the occupied countries engaged in their own ethnic housecleaning once the Nazi invasion undermined their stability. Through it all Burleigh does not condemn the German people as such, he doesn't portray them as morally bankrupt beings of a kind different than you and me. To the contrary, he reveals how the German people became the "emotional casualties of their own actions." He illustrates how good people felt corrupted by the Nazi regime and how people struggled with conflicting emotions under the terrible circumstances they found themselves caught up in. In the end the Germans became a people "bathed in narcissistic ethno-sentimentality." This was c

The literature on the Third Reich and related phenomena is immense; there are tens of thousands of books on the Holocaust alone. Michael Burleigh has done a superb job of distilling this complex literature and providing a clear way of understanding the phenomenon of Nazism. Readers picking up this book should be aware that this is not, however, a conventional narrative history. Rather, it is a series of chronologically ordered and thematically linked essays on various aspects of the Nazi state. This book presupposes a fairly good knowledge of 20th century German and European history.... The central theme of the book is that the phenomenon of Nazism can be understand only as a 'political religion', an ideological movement with many of the trappings and elements of religion but oriented towards a form of salvation mediated by the state. Inspired by the work of scholars such as Fritz Stern and the late George Mosse, Burleigh sees Nazism as an irrational millenial movement offering simple and brutal answers to complex questions. Burleigh describes the seed bed of Nazism in the Weimar state, the Nazi seizure of power, and the ruthlessness exhibited by the Nazis as they exploited all the resources of the modern state to achieve their depraved ends. Following his masterly description and analysis of how Nazi ideology penetrated every aspect of German life, Burleigh proceeds to describe the murderous foreign policy of the Nazis, a bid for European and world power based on their bizarre and horrifying ideas of racial conflict. Burleigh's descriptions of life in occupied Europe, the invasion of the Soviet Europe, and the Holocaust are both precise and powerful. Burleigh is a skilled and vivid writer.Burleigh is not one of these who believe that Nazism arose from unique features of German culture nor does he regard Nazism as an aberration from the rest of German or European history. He is very good at showing the specific, and contingent, historic events and features of recent German history that provided the opportunity for the growth of Nazism in Germany. At the same time, his concept of Nazism as a political religion links Nazism to a broad range of political and religous phenomena that have characterized many societies. This is a warning that phenomena like Nazism are part of the potential of all human societies. As shown by the examples of Cambodia and Rwanda, Burleigh's conclusions are inescapbly and painfully correct.

As a general reader with only an occasional interest in this period, I was drawn to this account as a result of the many glowing reviews, both here and elsewhere. I hoped to find the answers to the perennial question, "Why?" and amazingly found it - in its many shades - in this book. Indeed, this interpretative history seems to me to be more preoccupied with the "How?" and "Why?" issues than simply the dry retelling of the "When?" and "Where?" narrative.On occasion this approach led to some small frustration. I am not a scholar of the period and the author's tendency to occasionally gloss over specific detail of some infamous events on the assumption that the reader possesses the requisite detail (of the beerhall putsch or the burning of the reichstag building, for example) sometimes left me wishing for an occasionally more fullsome account in these instances. Nevertheless, the basic outline of these events, and certainly their motivation and impact is never unclear.Referring to one or two reviewers above, I greatly enjoyed the author's prose, combining at turns the academic with the anecdotal, the formal with the personal. This gave me the sense that I was in the company of a real human being, learned, but never indifferent. It also provided a real sense of outrage - all the more so because of the author's restraint - at the bestial behaviour described. This book is often uncomfortably, grimly compelling.I don't know whether "The Third Reich, a new history" is a "classic" of the literature or not - I haven't read enough of this stuff to compare. But I do know that it is a most profoundly insightful and detailed account of how social, philosophical and economic forces combined at a particular historic juncture to produce a window of opportunity for a small group of criminals to sieze their moment and steer a nation, sometimes willingly, sometimes passively, towards its darkest imaginings. An important revelation.

When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches.Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives. In one of the more striking quotes in the book, one that Hoffer would have noted, Burleigh cites Hitler favorably discussing Roman Catholicism : Be assured, we too put faith in the first place and not cognition. One has to be able to believe in a cause. Only faith creates a state. What motivates people to go and do battle and die for religious ideas ? Not cognition, but blind faith.Over the course of the book, Burleigh demonstrates the gradual process by which the German people's faith in Hitler and Nazism grew, supplanting their belief in Christianity and vitiating their sense of morality. Where Goldhagen showed the German people to have been generally amenable to Hitler's exterminationist program, Burleigh shows them to have participated in, or at least to have acquiesced in, a truly totalitarian program which replaced every aspect of traditional German culture and society with Nazi beliefs.This idea, of Nazism as a religion, gives the book a helpful focus and a unifying theme around which to organize the enormous amount of information which Mr. Bur