The Third Reich at War (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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)
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From The Washington Post

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 944 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (March 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202060
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202063
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,093 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough, informative and very grim reading, March 20, 2009

By	Graham (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful, Horrible Book about World War II Germany, April 4, 2009

By	John E. Mack (New London, Minnesota United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 sadists who were more than willing to conduct them?

In the final analysis, this is a cautionary tale about the potential depravity of the human spirit. There are Germans everywhere in the Western World, including millions of German ancestry in the United States. Arguably, the greatest (ethnically) German general of World War II was named Eisenhower. The great majority of ethnic Germans, including those in Germany and Austria before 1900 and after 1950, behaved much like other decent and rational human beings. The fact that some of them, for a few decades, could behave like monsters is warning to us all.

Incidentally, while I can see how one reviewer could rate this book as a "1" because of techical difficulties in the Kindle edition, I cannot for the life of me see how reviewers could have given such a superbly written and researched book a "1" or a "2" on the merits.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The sleep of reason breeds monsters", May 11, 2009

By	Keith A. Comess - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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"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 this history. While Evans' books lack some of the immediacy of William Shirer's eyewitness account ("Rise and Fall of the Third Reich") and the intricate quotidian detail of Victor Klemperer's diaries, Evans successfully conveys a barrage of factual information, pithy insights and incisive judgments in a highly readable fashion.

So, if it isn't already obvious, Why read this long and detailed history? Prior to WW-II, Churchill observed that "wars between peoples will be worse than wars between kings". What this war, a real venichtungskreig, illustrates is that wars between ideologies are worse still. As such, this war deserves careful, scholarly scrutiny. But, will there be another worldwide ideological war, undertaken with genocidal intent, like the Hitler War and, if so, is that the final reason for reading this book? Obviously anticipating this question, Evans, in the concluding chapter to this volume, notes that there will "never be a Fourth Reich". Hopefully, he's correct in that assessment and, while we may never see a Fourth Reich, we'll witness plenty more ethnic, religious, inter-communal conflicts, some of which (in my estimation) have the potential to ignite a global conflagration. If for no other reason than that one, the Third Reich deserves intelligent study and it always will. There is another reason, to wit the irrational atavistic mindset that lies just beneath the veneer of civility. In other words, Hitler's war illustrates Goya's adage that "The sleep of reason breeds monsters". Evans' trilogy is probably the best place to start realizing that fact and to consider its implications, past and future.