Customer Reviews

Nazi Germany: A New History

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3 star:		(1)
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As the author of "A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days when God wore a Swastika," my autobiographical account of my seven years in the Hitler Youth, I consider Klaus Fischer's book an invaluable work for anybody interested in the history of Nazi Germany. It's comprehensive, lucid,and the best up-to-date account of the Third Reich. I especially like his honest analysis of a complex era that defies easy answers, and I frequently use his book in my own research.

This is an outstanding narrative history of the 12-year Nazi reign in Germany and an exemplary attempt at writing history in the round. Fischer is equally at home in narrative history, political, social, administrative and war history. He also indulges in a fairly convincing use of psycho-history in trying to explain Hitler, Germany's attraction to authoritarianism and the psyche of the Nazi party and its leaders. Although it is a long book, it is readable from beginning to end because Fischer knows how to tell a story. He also understands how to put flesh and blood on it by filling it out with vivid portraits of the protagonists and enlivening it with well written anecdotes. He also has a rare talent for summarising complex issues and developments tightly, often in as little as a single, tightly written paragraph. And if one of the qualities of good writing is density of detail, then this is good writing. Fischer never shirks a challenge, whether it be to describe an administrative structure or a battle. He packs his descriptions with all the details of who, how, when, where, why and what; he names names and sets down even the most horrible details of torture and crime. But it would be wrong to write this off as just another example of good storytelling. This is history in the round and the round includes both intellectual and cultural factors. The opening chapter on the Origins of Totalitarianism is both an incisive analysis of its subject and a cautionary polemic about what to avoid in writing Nazi history. Psychohistory these days generally gets a bad press, but Hitler cries out for it. Fischer's use of psychology is restrained but credible. Similarly, he rarely gets carried away by wild theories when he tries to explain Hitler's and Germany's anti-semitism. Among the many highlights in this book is his riveting account of the Holocaust and his fine narrative of the Allied victory. The book is exceptionally well organised and so is the bibliography. Overall this is a memorable book about one of the most significant periods in the 20th century.

Perhaps Fischer's greatest achievment here is in how much he tells us in so short a book. He covers Nazi and German history from the 19th century to 1945 in under 600 pages!! He shows a special gift for writing the most with the (relatively) fewest words. Even those knowing much about the subject will learn a lot from this volume. And Fischer knows what should and should not be included in a book of this kind. This work will be a valuable addition to any historical library.

I particularly enjoyed the section on the Weimer Republic and the 20's. Most books skip over this period, saying only that the Republic was democratic and flawed, and that Hitler sought to destroy it. Fischer gives us an in depth look at this society, and explains how its insecurities contributed to the disaster to come.

I only wish the book had been a bit longer. There is only so much one can include in a one volume work, I know, but a few hundred more pages would have made it truly outstanding.

For a comprehensive overview of the Third Reich, Fischer's book is one of the best single-volume works on the market. It's eminently readable on all aspects of Nazi society: the sham politics, the ruthless military ethos, the imposition of one man's psychosis on the policies of an entire nation. The opening chapter, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is a cogent synthesis of the historical strains from which the darkest period of the 20th century emerged: Germany's anti-modernism, which stretched back to the Enlightenment; the economic breakdown, political instability, and unraveling of civil society which the Versailles Treaty wrought; and the scapegoating of two groups which Hitler believed were a mortal threat to the country--the Communists and the Jews.

Klaus Fischer's account of Nazi Germany succeeds as a source of basic information, particularly regarding the early roots of the Nazi movement. Since this is its main purpose, it merits consultation by anyone seeking a solid basic grasp of those world-shattering events. However, the reader should be prepared to wade through some fairly archaic, and at times deeply disturbing, ideological baggage that pops up along the margins of the main historical narrative. First, Fischer's fleeting references to Marxism and Communism as historico-social phenomena are shallow, unsubtle and dismissive in a manner only possible for a scholar trained in America (as Fischer was), and thus saddled with that peculiar cultural blind spot of ours. However, this blind spot does not much compromise the narrative, beyond giving the misleading impression that the ideas of Marx are somehow "natural" (as opposed to historical and contingent) breeding grounds for totalitarianism. More disturbing by far is the extent to which Fischer's account of the psychological makeup and personal characters of Nazi party members echoes and reproduces some of the same archaic ideologies for which they themselves were so notorious. For example, Fischer makes frequent use of the term "deviance" to describe Nazi operatives, and explicitly includes under this rubric not only sadism but homosexuality! In his desire to paint the Nazis as twisted fiends, he ends up demonizing gays in much the same way that Jews were demonized by the Nazis. Equally archaic is his reference to facial physiognomy as evidence of criminal character among Nazis. Clearly, Fischer is unaware of the large body of literature (best represented by SJ Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) which documents the intellectual bankruptcy of such thinking. Both of these ideas played a role in the racist, homophobic thought complex which National Socialism inherited from the late nineteenth century and put to such deadly effect. That an historian writing in the 1990s could continue to use ideas that have been so thoroughly discredited by scientific research is unfortunate, and given Fischer's topic, gruesomely ironic. The problems noted here do not distort Fischer's account of matters of public record, but they do raise serious questions about his interpretive competence. In the end, some readers might not have the moral stomach to reap the factual rewards undeniably offered by Fischer's book.

This is an excellent summary on the subject. It would make a first-rate text book.

Much of what Fischer claims about Nazi Germany has been discounted by legitimate historians. For example, the Lebensborn program was not a stud farm for SS supermen and Nordic women to create a new master race, and Ilse Koch did not create lampshades and book covers from the skin of dead Jews.

Every significant figure in the Nazi regime, even those who ultimately had little to do with the persecution and destruction of the Jews in Europe, is portrayed as either a sexual deviant or a sociopath. I seriously doubt the most educated people in Europe would have tolerated such a regime long enough for it to plunge Europe into its most destructive war.

I guess surrendering historical objectivity is a small price to pay to make money and avoid being bullied by the ADL.

Any author who thinks that Hindenburg was loyal to the Weimar Republic is out of his mind. There wasn't a German alive who liked it and to say that somebody was loyal to it is ludecrous. He also implies that Hitler outwitted Hindenburg to gain the chancellorship. That's also crazy. Hitler just got lucky that Papen underestimated him when he used him in his plot to try to gain the chancellorship for himself (which failed obviously). In fact I don't believe that Hitler and Hindenburg had any interaction at all on the subject (except of course when he was sworn in). The matter was proposed to Hitler through Papen. If Fischer could be so off base on such a basic concept, I shudder to think about how acurate the rest of the information in this book is.

NOTE: This is not an uninformed opinion. I have compared this book with others by Burleigh, Kershaw, Machtan, and Turner on similar subjects.

My recomendation is to forget about this book and get Kershaw's book Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. It's actually more of a biography of Hiter's power. I found it to be a much more logical, coherent, and enlightening book.