The Third Reich at War - Hardcover

Evans, Richard J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594202060 ISBN 13: 9781594202063

Publisher: Penguin Press, 2009

Synopsis

The final volume in Richard J. Evans’s masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, the mobilization of a “people’s community” to serve a war of conquest, and Hitler’s campaign of racial subjugation and genocide

Already hailed as “a masterpiece” (William Grimes in The New York Times) and “the most comprehensive history… of the Third Reich” (Ian Kershaw), this epic trilogy reaches its terrifying climax in this volume.

Evans interweaves a broad narrative of the war’s progress with viscerally affecting personal testimony from a wide range of people—from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives. The Third Reich at War lays bare the dynamics of a nation more deeply immersed in war than any society before or since. Fresh insights into the conflict’s great events are here, from the invasion of Poland to the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler’s suicide in the bunker. But just as important is the re-creation of the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime, staggering under pressure from Allied bombing and their own government’s mounting demands upon them. At the center of the book is the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, set in the context of Hitler’s genocidal plans for the racial restructuring of Europe.

Blending narrative, description and analysis, The Third Reich at War creates an engrossing picture—at once sweeping and precise—of a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking much of Europe with it. It is the culmination of a historical masterwork that will remain the most authoritative work on Nazi Germany for years to come.

About this title

About the Author

Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defense of History, Lying About Hitler, and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Benjamin Carter Hett

The Third Reich is the historian's Rorschach test. Everyone agrees that Hitler's Reich was evil almost beyond measure, but when it comes to defining the essence of and the reasons for this evil, we tend to see what we bring to the question. Historians have concluded that the crimes of Hitler's Reich were the result of too much democracy, or too little; too much Christianity, or too little; too much sex, or too little. It all depends on who is doing the telling, and more important, when they are telling it.

Now we have the third volume of Richard J. Evans's trilogy on Hitler's Germany, "The Third Reich at War." This is a history of the Third Reich for the early 21st century, a time that has known renewed campaigns of genocide and terror, but not so much "conventional" war.

Fittingly, then, Evans's emphasis is on the virtually inconceivable orgy of violence the Nazis let loose when Hitler launched his war in 1939. Evans makes clear that this is not a history of World War II, and it isn't: A more accurate title might have been "The Third Reich at Occupation." In the first chapter, for instance, Poland has surrendered by page 9, and there follow nearly 100 pages on occupied Poland as a laboratory for the Nazi utopia. Poland's western regions were annexed to the German Reich, and all Poles and Jews in those areas were expelled into the so-called "General Government," while ethnic Germans were brought in from elsewhere to replace them. During the military campaign, special SS killing squads had been turned loose on Jewish as well as non-Jewish civilians. Poland had scarcely surrendered when such infamous Nazi leaders as Reinhard Heydrich began planning to concentrate and imprison all of Poland's Jewish population in "ghettos" in such cities as Lodz, Cracow and Warsaw.

As the grim story unfolds and the Nazis expand their empire over most of the European continent, Evans keeps track of the horrifying statistics: 1.7 million Jews killed in the "Reinhard Action" extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (out of the total of 3 million Jews slaughtered in camps); about 700,000 more murdered in mobile gas vans; and 1.3 million shot by SS Task Forces. The overall total of Jewish victims is probably close to the often-cited figure of 6 million. At the same time, Evans is careful to show how much of a pan-European phenomenon the Holocaust was, as when he notes, for instance, that the 280,000 to 380,000 Jews killed by the Romanians constituted the largest number murdered by an independent European country apart from Germany itself.

Evans's other major theme is that Germany's relative economic and industrial weakness meant that it was all but fated to lose the kind of war that Hitler had led it into. In 1944, for instance, despite the efficient Albert Speer's reorganization of the aircraft industry, Germany was producing fewer aircraft than each of its major enemies, and together, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union outbuilt Germany by more than five to one. The statistics for other modern industrial weapons were similar. When the Germans came up with impressive technological innovations, such as the Me 262 jet fighter, the impact tended to be blunted or erased by political infighting and inefficiencies within the Nazi bureaucracy. "The writing was already on the wall in 1942," as Evans writes, and by 1944 "it was clear for all to read."

Not that Evans's book is all about numbers. He quotes extensively from diaries and memoirs of people who lived through the war -- Germans and non-Germans, Jews and non-Jews -- to give a visceral sense of what these events meant in people's lives. Evans is clearly up on all the latest research on Nazi Germany, no mean achievement in a field in which tens of thousands of books have been published. But his goal is to appeal to the general reader rather than the professional historian, and he succeeds brilliantly, producing a book that is beautifully written and, despite its length and grim subject matter, easily digestible, even gripping.

Most impressive of all are his consistently balanced and nuanced judgments about such emotional and controversial issues as German civilians' responsibility for mass murder, or the role of resistance to the Third Reich. While his book is a remorseless record of the Nazi horrors, Evans never forgets that ordinary Germans were human beings, too, facing hardships and challenges that most of us have never known.

This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed.

Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Evans receives a hero’s welcome in the press as he lays his final World War II tome, a towering, somber achievement of scholarship and narrative, to rest. As in the preceding volumes, Evans judiciously employs first-hand sources, measured judgments, and impeccable research to craft what most reviewers hail as the definitive work on the Third Reich of our generation. Evans never flinches from the gruesome details of this tragic historical period, yet as the Guardian notes, “in an almost Wagnerian way, you need to see the madness complete; you need to watch Berlin burning, a pyre of malevolent dreams. This is the fire Hitler built.” Despite the Spectator critic’s minor complaints about confusing endnotes and maps, that critic’s view represents the others: “If you have the time to read only a single book on Nazi Germany, this is the one.”
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Starred Review. Describing the Third Reich from the height of its power to its collapse, Evans concludes the masterful trilogy that began with The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power. As in those works, Evans demonstrates a fluent style and a sweeping grasp of the Third Reich's history and of the enormous historical literature. The account is peppered with insightful anecdotes drawn from diaries, letters and speeches. What comes across most clearly is the supreme arrogance of the Nazis and the utterly rapacious character of their rule. Evans gives the Holocaust the centrality it deserves, while also depicting effectively the suffering of Poles and many others under Nazi domination. Evans offers a nuanced picture of the lives of Germans, but ultimately, he suggests, the Nazis' racial ideology thoroughly corrupted German society. Evans narrates the Reich's end in gripping fashion as the Allies closed in on Germany. Evans's fellow historians as well as a broader public will read this work, not quite with pleasure, for there is little joy in this story, but with admiration for the author's narrative powers. Illus., maps. (Mar. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Evans is a professor of modern history at Cambridge University. This is the final volume in his trilogy that traces the history of the Third Reich. Like the earlier volumes, this is a massive, comprehensive, yet easily readable and engrossing chronicle. It is also a chilling and often downright sickening account of savagery on a gigantic scale. This is more than a military history, although Evans does an excellent job of explaining the strategies, tactics, and movement of huge armies and naval forces. What makes this account extraordinary are the descriptions of the effects of this war on the lives of ordinary people, both German and non-German. Of course, the efforts to exterminate European Jews are emphasized, and Evans illustrates not merely the horrors of the death camps but the cold, heartless brutality of the special SS units as they hunted down and slaughtered Jews, Poles, Russians, and anyone perceived as threats as the Wehrmacht moved east. As Hitler repeatedly proclaimed, this was a merciless war, and Evans has brilliantly recounted how it was waged. --Jay Freeman

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594202060
• ISBN 13: 9781594202063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 944