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The Third Reich: A New History

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"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 central to the problem then, and it is still a problem in today's world.

Burleigh is not one to demonstrate the "positive" impact the Nazi regime had on Germany. Any success in the sphere of economic recovery was purchased at a heavy cost. Throughout the work the author cleary demonstrates the depravity and destructiveness of the Nazi's bankrupt ideology which, centered around the "supercession of the rule of law," became a substitute secular religion based upon bio-racial concepts. The destructiveness of the Nazi regime is always kept at center stage. There is no better summation of the brutality and savagery visited upon everyday people by the Nazis.

Michael Burleigh has written a most scholarly, and yet richly readable, new history of the Third Reich. It is "new" in the sense that he combines a theoretical approach - nazism as a pseudo religious force in its mass appeal inside and outside Germany - with abundant material on the lives of everyday people. His chapter headings are thematic, rather than strictly chronological, and include sub sections such as "See You In Siberia" and "The Generals Who Dithered". The nazi attempts to dominate and exploit the economic life of Europe and beyond are particularly well discussed. The volume is a useful contrast with Ian Kershaw's recent, excellent biography of Hitler since Burleigh has written a more international account: his particular remit is to analyse the impact of nazism as a huge political force across frontiers. He is impressively adroit in tracing the pro and anti nazi sentiment in eastern Europe and Russia. There is, for instance, some fascinating insight into the Tatars of the Ukraine who were deported by Stalin's police in cattle truck journeys lasting up to three months. The author's final chapter covers the years 1943 to 1948 where it is explained that denazification had a short life from 1945 since the allies and the Russians soon had much greater global problems to address. There are a few slips in the text, for example the main Nuremburg war criminals were not hanged "at dawn" (page 804), and this reviewer felt that nazi and anti nazi media propaganda could tell us more of the international dimension than is revealed in the book. None the less, this is an insightful tome, full of sound judgments and interesting sidelights on virtually every page. Just for the record, Burleigh has no truck with revisionist sentiments about the personalities and policies of the Reich. Here is the story of a criminal gang who brought Europe to its knees.

After carefully re-reading this book I came to the inescapeable conclusion that if ever there was a book whose theme revolves brilliantly around the single question of individual complicity with, participation in, and responsibility for the manifestations of evil, it is this one. In a work of amazing breadth and depth, historian Michael Burleigh masterfully weaves together a magisterial and complex theory regarding the nature of economic, social, and cultural life in Nazi Germany, and in so doing provides a convincing and seductive notion as to why the Germans succumbed as a people to the mind-numbing evil of the National Socialist regime. He contends that like communism, National Socialism provided a seductive political alternative to traditional religion, and by doing so seduced the German people into a pact with the devil.

The book spins along with a breathless narrative that shows how the prevailing conditions in post WWI Germany, the history of prejudice, envy and fear of the Jewish people, and the lack of integration in various aspects of German life contributed to the existence of a unique cultural vulnerability, which the Nazis subsequently masterfully orchestrated and gradually integrated into what he contends was a secular religion, replacing the existing welter of beliefs with the singular faith and belief in the sacredness of the "Fatherland" as personified in Adolph Hitler. There is much evidence presented which supports such an interpretation.

Yet, while all of this is brilliantly developed and related by Burleigh, in truth there is also much here that is not new or novel. Like William Shirer's masterful portrayal of the evils of the thugs, slugs, and gutter people who rose to power with the Nazi regime in "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich", Burleigh painstakingly traces the ways in which life as a citizen in the new world of national socialism became more and more oriented around the precepts of fascism. Of course, the Nazis interfered massively with every aspect of society, in ways ranging from encouragement of so-called Aryan art and literature to applied eugenics (Josef Mengele was once a highly admired and respected medical scientist with an international reputation) to the establishment of Hitler Youth Core. In all this Burleigh reveals a people so starved for meaning and identity that they grasped at the straws of greatness that the Nazis dangled before them. Caught in a devil's bargain, of course, they gradually abandoned their traditional values and beliefs in the hopes of participating in the glory and dreams of the Fatherland.

Of course, one does not sense anywhere in this narrative that there is any one critical moment in which they consciously decide to abandon the past in favor of the promise of the Nazi future; instead one gets the impression of a quite gradual, almost glacial drift toward identification with the existing regime and its blueprints for the future. Certainly, however, by the moment in which the terror of events such as the Kristallnacht pogrom, they had begun to realize what they had bought into. By then, of course, it was far too late, for the Nazis had a very firm grip on power and were not afraid to use whatever methods necessary to maintain control. From that point on, there was no turning back.

What seems most unique and convincing here, however, is what historian Richard Overy refers to as "the vast panorama on which it is set". Burleigh writes with convincing authority about the ways in which the secular religion of fascism is sold to the German people, wrapped in the cloak of tradition, folklore, and mysticism. It is no mistake that the Nazi regime seemed Wagnerian; their alignment with such glorious interpretations of German destiny was quite intentional. Seen in this way, the German people were gradually led into subscribing to a whole new culture, one based on the substitution of the Fatherland and its personification in Adolph Hitler for all that had preceded it. Of course, so wrapped in tradition and folklore, the beatification of evil was hardly recognizable at first. It was only with the initial successes of 1939 and 1940 that the truth about the aims and goals and culture of the Nazi regime began to emerge.

It is a truism that Hitler could not have come to power without the tacit consent of a majority of the German people. In this book Michael Burleigh provides a fascinating thesis regarding how that consent was engineered, and the ways in which the German people became involved and embroiled in the most disastrous series of international conflicts in the history of the modern world. While one suspects this is hardly the final word on the subject of the nature of the German state or the people who populated and supported it, this thoughtful and provocative book adds fuel to the fire ignited by Daniel Goldhagen in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", and sets the stage for an even more engaged discussion of the nature of human evil. I highly recommend this book, along with Ian Kershaw's recent two-volume study of Hitler (see my reviews), which also uses the new treasure trove of information newly released by the Russians and others. Together the two authors provide a fascinating and fresh look at the nature of the Nazi regime and the murder and mayhem it spawned.

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. Burleigh has assimilated and lays out here. In addition, where the prior treatment Hitler and Nazism as a historical exception may have acted as a balm to our liberal sensibilities, Burleigh's treatment of them helps us both to understand their similarity to the Soviet Union and Communism, and to understand how such movements could rise again. It's an excellent book, one that benefits greatly from the author's willingness to advance a novel view and to prosecute his case forcefully. If you've developed a palate for the sort of bland mush that passes for popular history these days, you might find it too bracing, but if you've enjoyed such powerful iconoclastic works as those already mentioned, or Richard Pipes's Russian Revolution, or Niall Ferguson's Pity of War , this one's sure to appeal to you also. It seems destined to become a classic if only enough people with open minds are willing to read it.

GRADE : A

I don't mind an academic using fancy words and I didn't need a dictionary more than once or twice (per page, that is). Anyway, I like dictionaries. Nor do I mind a historian positing moral equivalence between Hitlerism and Stalinism. There is an important difference, though: most Stalinists were never held to account for their crimes, and they still have apologists such as Hrycenko (June 12, 2001 below) who gets some cheap mileage out of the author being British.

But while this may be 'writing of the highest order' (Financial Times), not every reader will find it a page-turner. What makes it heavy going is that too many passages turn into a kind of semantic obstacle course - the result not of high-flown language but of obtuse constructions - which can leave readers wondering: what is he trying to say? There have been popular historians capable of trenchant or refined wit (think Taylor or Tuchman) who, not coincidentally, were models of clarity. Prof. Burleigh, on the other hand, could use a good editor. I don't suppose he does this deliberately like some pomo poseur. Then again, some people don't seem to mind.

It's a shame, because he has a vast amount of scholarship at his fingertips and he has genuinely original ideas. His latest book ('Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War', just published in the UK) suffers from the same sort of bafflegab. Like this one it promises to be really interesting, if only you can get past the writing. I will finish it. I will.

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.

Some previous reviewers have complained about the complex style and writing of this book. Although in fact it is not an easily readable book, for the general public, if you have a serious interest about the history of the third Reich, make no mistake: you will not be able to overlook this book, which will surely be a classic. It is a thoroughly well researched contribution about the connection between religious beliefs and mass fanaticism; the interaction between the "new" domestic and international values, based on aggression; and the other causes involved in the rise (and fall) of the III Reich. From a different perspective from other mainstream historians, this winner of the Samuel Johnson prize for non fiction, has accomplished quite an original scholarly feat, one which will enlighten the comprehension of this particular period of history. No wonder many international critics have found the subtitle of this opus -A new History- particularly well deserved. Of great interest is the chapter related with the demise of the rule of law, a thorough analysis of the penetration of the judiciary and the subordination of the police and government to the totalitarian Fuhrerprinzip.

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.

How is a modern industrial, Christian nation seduced and led down the path of evil? Germany with past dreams of glory and empire was humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI . The country was looted for war reparations and occupied. Then comes the world depression and money is not worth the paper it is printed on, people are starving and work is hard to find. Enter a smooth talker with promises to restore Germany to her previous glory. Play on the peoples fears and past hatreds and suspicions. Stabilize the economy and provide jobs by building an arms juggernaut then buy the military by providing them with men and new weapons. Establish a new police force (Gestapo) and new military (SS) that are not part of the mainstream government. Kill or imprison those that don't agree with National Socialists policies or leaders. The people are now working, there is now food, the country is becoming stronger than ever before and the people believe they are saved and a new destiny is in store for Germany. But alas, the Germans have painted themselves into a corner and are too afraid to do anything but go along and ignore the whisperings of dark and evil deeds. This book looks at the rise of Nazism from the end of WWI, through Weimer Republic, the great depression, the gaining of power by Hitler and his cronies, and their disastrous plunging of the world into WWII that cost millions of people their lives and almost totally destroyed Germany and devastated much of Europe and the Soviet Union. (Personally, I think that Stalin topped Hitler as despot of the century.) This book is a bit heavy on the academic side and I found I could only digest it in small pieces and I would not recommend it to a casual reader. But for all that, it is a pretty good one volume history of Nazi Germany and should satisfy those with a curiosity on the subject.

I have found the book immensely rewarding for three reasons:

1. The sensational reviews by world-class specialists such as Saul Friedlander, Omer Bartov, and Niall Ferguson. Their joint praise made me want to read "A New History."

2. As a result, I assigned the book to about 80 Syracuse students in the Fall of 2004. Most undergraduates were positively enthralled by the fast-paced action as the colossal tragedy unfolded. Initially, some students were put off by the length of the book but once they recognized the panoramic view of German society, they became increasing interested in seeing how many more segments of the population would compromise themselves: veterans, Weimar politicians, SA, SS, lawyers, academics, doctors, eugenics specialists, technocrats, bureaucrats, army generals, conquered vassals, industrialists, camp guards, Einsatzgruppen, foreign mercenaries, and so on...Students loved this approach to history combining ideology and concrete behavior.

3. The book is second to none in integrating Eastern Europe in the narrative esp. as regards the planning and the implementation of the Shoah. It is also a profound, uniquely suspenseful depiction of Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front.