Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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 drained 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.