Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As another reviewer has stated, this is not a book about which you should say "I love it" -- except to say that one loves getting closer to the truth about one of the most difficult realities in world history, a reality that is still, to this day in October 2015 a few weeks after the book's publication, "current events." At over 500 pages, Stargardt's history have been very well developed, and his sourcing is almost frightening in its intensity (at one point I thought that every paragraph had a footnote, and many many do). But the basic work that "The German War" does best is to continue the debunking of the Cold War mythologies that many of us were plagued with when we were growing up in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s. As Stargardt's research makes very very clear, the German war was a war supported, even after the Wehrmacht began retreating following Stalingrad and Kursk, by the majority of the German people (the "Volk") and by a probably greater majority of their various leaders -- religious, social, political, and especially in the entertainment industry. The German people who formed the base for the worst the Nazis did in the 1930s and 1940s were not "occupied" by Hitler and the Nazi Party. They were willing participants in the project, at almost every level of German society. Years ago, as we were discussing how difficult it was to get a clear understanding of World War II in Europe, a friend of mine quipped, "Ah, the Germans and the Nazis. You can't blame everyone for what the majority did." But we had to wait for a new generation of historians, willing to plow through an enormous amount of material following the end of the Cold War, to get something that provides even the casual reader with the depth and breadth of what Stargardt's work gives us in The German War. Told from the points of view of a number of "rank and file" average Germans, "The German War" shows confusion and complicity on the part of the men, women, and children who provided the base for Hitler's attempts to conquer a large part of the world and rid the world of "Jewry." The two projects, both of which were outlined in Mein Kampf, grew from an intelligent understanding of imperial history -- especially the histories of the British and American empires. This is just one of the things that "The German War" brings home to the attentive reader. Hitler was very bright, and a master actor. With the almost as brilliant aid of Josef Goebbels, he was constantly adapting the bases of the Nazi project to the shifting possibilities provided to him both within Germany and by those who might have slowed him down much earlier. As the book shows, "Munich" was part of a process that had begun long before Chamberlin went to Bavaria in 1938, weighed down with the weights of British mega-deaths from the first World War. Did all the German people support the Nazis? Of course not. But the claims that the Nazis were "losing ground" in 1933 and 1934 are largely irrelevant, as Stargardt's meticulous unfolding shows. Hitler and his organization were consummate opportunists, adapting as necessary to the shifts of their opportunities. As the future "allies" allowed the Germans to encroach across central Europe, each new almost bloodless "victory" silenced another possible internal opposition to Nazism. And the fact -- a huge fact -- that the majority of Germans who were not Jews were either active or complicit in their silence as the "final solution" evolved has to be studied in even greater depth than in Stargardt's work here. Although the horrors of the Final Solution did not completely come about until 1942 and 1943, the seeds were there from the very beginning, from the opening of Dachau and the use of the concentration camps to murder the best organized opponents of the Nazis -- not the "Jews" but the Social Democrats and Communists. Stargardt's research also reminds us that the development of the methodologies of mega murder perfected by "Auschwitz" began much earlier, as the German leadership experimented on how much it could get away with by murdering the unfit (i.e., those with disabilities) and the unwanted (up to a certain point, mostly the Roma, or gypsies). It's chilling to read the words of the majority of the Catholic and Protestant clergy in support of the Nazi project throughout the period. Again -- not everyone, just the "majority." By focusing on the lives of individual German men and women, many of them memorialized in their diaries and letters, Stargardt's history gives us a very good look at life at the "grass roots" during the entire Nazi era. Among those who should get the historical credit they deserve is Goebbels, who was able to shift the propaganda project of the Hitler regime to fit into the evolving new conditions faced by the German people as the alliance against them and their armies solidified. The bombing campaign against German cities (and hence, German "civilians") proves to be both a curse to the people and a blessing to the regime. Over and over, as Stargardt's work shows, Nazi propaganda was able to hold together the German people based on the new narrative -- that of the Germans as the "victims." And this is probably the most amazing "take away" I get from this significant and impressive work of history. One other thing worth noting: the photographs. Seldom does a work of history make such a good use of available photographs. By mining the personal archives of individual Germans (those he cites in the narrative) Stargardt is able to utilize the visuals to add greatly to the story. We are looking at the people he is quoting. One of the most disturbing photographs shows one of his subjects skipping through the ruins of a city in Russia that had been destroyed by the Wehrmacht. These young people were enjoying it -- until they stopped "winning" and began losing big time. As our fathers noted about the final days of World War II, as the U.S. and other armies moved into German and Austria in 1945, the Nazis virtually disappeared. Suddenly, it seemed to many, "everybody" among the German people (those who were left, the Jews had mostly by then been wiped out and the casualties in the military were monstrous) was a non-Nazi or even an anti-Nazi. Even the SS disappeared, although their tattoos were a useful identifier. (My father served with an infantry division, the 44th, that worked its way through France, across Southern German, and into Austria, where their war ended; he taught his children early that the paradox of the Germans was obvious to every GI... Why had the fighting been so fierce if as the Germans seemed to claim at the end, they had always been against Hitler and his clique?...)... This is one of the few books of history that deserves a second reading. The first is go get through the basic reality it reports. My second reading will be too remind myself of all the propaganda we had to suffer through during the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War version of the "German Miracle." I'm thankful Stargardt's work is now in print and available. My sons will be able to learn from it if they ever ask the questions I had to ask my own family as I was growing up. Being a "Schmidt" and an American, we had a special way of being reminded of the paradoxes of our lives. Our fathers, uncles and (in my case) mothers had fought The Germans, not just "Nazis" during the Second World War. The complexity of that reality has been hard to understand during the past 60 years, but historical work like Stargardt's helps a lot. Thanks. This is not a work to "love," but to appreciate greatly -- as the truth always is when we get closer to it.