Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a superb book. The writing is outstanding, the book is thoroughly researched, the photos are unusually good, and overall it offers a new perspective on Germany and Germans during the war. It's over 500 pages, and Stargardt's ideas take some time to develop, so this is not an easy read. It's another book that the "I love it" phrasing with 5 stars is not very helpful; this is not a topic one loves, as a great nation engages in a destructive and evil war, on a course to catastrophe. I find it not so easy to tell why I think this is a superb book, and why it stands out it a category of books that must total in the thousands (I've read scores of related books). Some of it is the wonderful way the story is told. Stargardt uses period letters and journals to follow a number of actors through this story--their story and Germany's story. The author manages to integrate large-scale events with the personal, and the result is a deeper understanding of what it was like for Germans engaged in the war than any other book I have read. It's also the range of stories. There's a good deal of discussion of how German religious figures related to the war (mostly fatalistic patriotism, for lack of a better phrase). There are some touching stories: a soldier writing home to a deeply loved spouse is touching, even if the soldier is fighting in an evil cause. This last is an important point. Stargardt pulls no punches, and this book in no sense attempts to mitigate German atrocities--he even makes a solid case that knowledge of the atrocities (including mass murder of Jews) was rather widely known. What the book does is humanizes people caught up in a pending catastrophe not really, for the most part, of their own making. Stargardt says that when the war broke out it was deeply unpopular in Germany. There was little of the wild enthusiasm that characterized 1914. Instead it seems most often to have been a grim recognition of the necessity of responding to aggressive enemies, particularly Britain--propaganda helped create this view, but so did memory of the "stab in the back" and the second war was apparently widely seen as a necessary correction to reclaim German greatness. The book's analysis of all this, and of propaganda, is superb. The Nazi state was of course coercive, but Stargardt makes an excellent case that coercion was not the main element. The idea of most Germans as victims of a murderous regime, forced into a war, is an old argument that has lost its force. Germans fought willingly, for the most part, not because they were forced to. The regime was admired by some, loathed by others, but until well into 1944 there was little sense that it was an illegitimate government. Hitler was widely admired and the ideology of world Jewish conspiracy was widely shared. Here's one of the many stories contained in the greater story, one I find fascinating. Anton Brandhuber, an Austrian, got tired of fighting and decided to stop. He managed to travel west from the front, 3,000 kilometers to Switzerland and spent the rest of the war there, surviving into very old age. That is not the kind of story one expects from a terroristic police state. Some of the chapters are fascinating. Chapter 5 looks at how German soldiers sent home luxuries from France and Belgium--some plunder, some purchases, aided by clever manipulation of currency. The same chapter discusses more blatant plunder, of apartments and goods taken from Jews sent to the camps. A detail I can't quite comprehend is that it was common for soldiers to have cameras, and the rolls of film were sent home for developing. Many soldiers took photos of executions and murders, and knowledge of these would have been spread to the photo processors and people at home. There was also surprising frankness in solders' letters home, so again awareness of the conduct of the war (and the problems that soldiers experienced in Russia, such as cold, lack of equipment, savage fighting) was common--this in a state I had always thought had a rigid censorship. One chapter is especially touching. Chapter 10, "Writing the Dead," includes stories of wives and family members of dead or missing soldiers continuing to "write" them in the form of journals and other writings. Another chapter details in an intriguing way the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets, discovered and used adroitly for propaganda purposes by the Germans (in this book, Goebbels is portrayed as a master manipulator). I could add more and more detail, but you'll have gotten the point by now. The master story is partly comprised of a number of overlapping stories of real people caught up in the larger story of Germans at war. Particularly engrossing is the last hundred pages or so, dealing with impending collapse and then catastrophe, how people managed to live with their world collapsing around them.