Customer Reviews

Daily Life in Hitler's Germany

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I really thought this would be a book to add to my studies of Germany during the period of the Third Reich. Not to be. The narrative is very amateurish and sounds more like a script directed at the mentality of people who enjoy watching commercial television. A big disappointment but maybe they thought that would help to sell more books.

I must agree with with other two reviews of this book about the rather poor text. While it does occasionally bring up an interesting point, a number of its arguments are discredited by a large number of contrasting studies.

That said, what is important are the photographs. Here is the face of Nazi Germany. One of the most frightening pictures was of the young men, students and SA, burning books outside the university in Berlin in May of 1933 (page 94). The expressions of pure predatory joy are typical of ideological "true believers." The thuggish brutality of the SA is brought out in another photo, which at the same time hints at the more subtle evil of the SS (page 90). Pages 47 and 51 give evidence of the deadness, normally seen in revolutionary art, of Nazi high art. An entire chapter is devoted to the Hitler Youth; showing the indoctrination of the young by dressing them the same, having them beat drums, and march chanting political slogans.

Hitler came to power promising to save Germany's middle class, though his base was initially among the prolitariat. In the beginning the laboring class was largely split between left and right. The National Socialists started as a rightist labor union. Attaining power, they outlawed all other unions. While working conditions before the Nazis weren't good, from the pictures, one gets the impression that they slipped even before the Allied bombing campaign.

Buy this book for the pictures and buy "The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945" by William Sheriden Allen (available from Amazon.com) for the text.

Nazi Germany and its bloody social engineering are bad enough but this book and its extremly shoddy scholarship on dayly life for the average german really does honest scholorship a major disservice.

A lot of good pictures though.