The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

"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 t

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 sa

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.

This magnificent book completes Evans' trilogy on the Third Reich. It covers all aspects of the war including the home front: morale, the role of women, the effect of the bombing, food, wages and conditions. He also examines the roles of the air force, navy and army, and gives us shrewd portraits of the leading personalities in the Nazi state. Nazi ideology blamed the Jews for all ills, including the Second World War itself, and saw communism and socialism as essentially Jewish. Hitler created a genocidal mentality and justified a genocidal policy. The Nazis committed countless atrocities. They killed thousands of handicapped children. They killed as many Gypsies as they could. They deported Jews from all the countries they occupied to death camps like Auschwitz. They murdered six million Jews and four million Soviet prisoners of war. The war they started killed 50 million people. Evans nails the lie that Nazism was in some sense socialist; he shows how "Germany was still a capitalist economy, dominated by private enterprise." Hitler's policies were not `autarchic', which means `self-sufficiency as an economic system'. Nazism was not contained in one country but expansionist, predatory and aggressive. It never relied on its own national resources but on stealing other people's equipment and materials. Nazi Germany extracted more than 30% of the wartime national production in the occupied countries of Western Europe. Nazi Germany "invaded Russia, unprovoked, and caused an almost unimaginable degree of death, suffering and destruction." But Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union caused his downfall. The battle of Stalingrad was the decisive turning-point of the whole war. As Evans writes, "What happened on the Soviet Front dwarfed anything seen in France, Denmark, Norway or the Low Countries. From 22 June 1941 onwards, at least two-thirds of the German armed forces were always engaged on the Eastern Front. More people fought and died on and behind the Eastern Front than in all the other theatres of war in 1939-45 put together, including the Far East... It was in the end on the Eastern Front, more than any other, that the fortunes of war were decided."

Richard J Evans concludes his monumental history of the Third Reich with a monument in itself: 764 pages (not including notes) treats the experience of Germany and the Germans from the lightening fast invasion of Poland and its brutal occupation that commenced the second world war through to a concise and thoughtful treatment of the Third Reich's aftermath - in part an account of what happened to some of the personalities that recur in his narrative (famous and not so) and a consideration of Germans' coming to grips (or not, as the case may be) with their devastating recent past. Evans' view is broad: we get more than a military-political narrative (nor is that narrowly focussed on Hitler), but a panorama of the activities of the Third Reich at home and abroad during the conflict, and responses to those activities by Germans. One central theme is that the economy doomed Germany's chances of winning: they were simply never going to outproduce the USSR, let alone the Americans. One consequence of this thesis (which is convincing to my mind) is its exposing the delusions of the German generals who argued after the war that Germany could have won had Hitler allowed them full control over the military conduct of the war. Maps prove a useful aid to the narrative - visualising military-political developments but also, e.g., the targets of the Allied bombing raids and the locations of concentration and extermination camps. Evans exploits well the letters and diaries of contemporary Germans (ranging from Field Marshals to `ordinary' folk), Poles, and Jews (Klemperer's diaries are worth reading in their own right) and appears up-to-date in his secondary reading (some titles from 2007 are cited). Never afraid to question a received argument or assumption Evans' judgements are nevertheless carefully weighed and executed without undue polemic. This final volume can be read alone as a history of Germany during the war - but the first two volumes, executed with the same narrative clarity and breadth of treatment, are well worth the read.