The Third Reich at War

The History of the Third Reich #3

by Richard J. Evans, Sean Pratt (Narrator)

The final volume in Richard J. Evans’s masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, the mobilization of a “people’s community” to serve a war of conquest, and Hitler’s campaign of racial subjugation and genocide. Already hailed as “a masterpiece” (William Grimes in The New York Times) and “the most comprehensive history… of the Third Reich” (Ian Kershaw), this epic trilogy reaches its terrifying climax in this volume.

Evans interweaves a broad narrative of the war’s progress with viscerally affecting personal testimony from a wide range of people - from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives. The Third Reich at War lays bare the dynamics of a nation more deeply immersed in war than any society before or since.

Fresh insights into the conflict’s great events are here, from the invasion of Poland to the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler’s suicide in the bunker. But just as important is the re-creation of the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime, staggering under pressure from Allied bombing and their own government’s mounting demands upon them. At the center of the book is the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, set in the context of Hitler’s genocidal plans for the racial restructuring of Europe.

Blending narrative, description, and analysis, The Third Reich at War creates an engrossing picture - at once sweeping and precise - of a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking much of Europe with it. It is the culmination of a historical masterwork that will remain the most authoritative work on Nazi Germany for years to come.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Germany, War, European History, Politics

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The legacy of the Third Reich…extends far beyond Germany and Europe. 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. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted…”
- Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War

The Third Reich at War is the capstone of Richard J. Evans’s ambitious, massive trilogy of the abbreviated lifespan of Adolf Hitler’s thousand-year empire. The first volume began in 1871, with German unification, and ended in 1933, with Hitler assuming the Chancellorship of the Weimar Republic. Volume two covered the years 1933 to 1939, when the Nazi Party thoroughly – and in a stunningly short time – replaced democracy with a murderous authoritarianism based on race hatred, genetic purity, and an unwavering belief that Germans were the fittest of all the peoples on earth.

In this final volume, the wind has been sown, and all that remains is the reaping of the whirlwind. It begins in September 1939, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and ends in May 1945, with vast swathes of Europe turned to rubble and ash.

Like its predecessors, The Third Reich at War is a very good book. At times, it is thoroughly engrossing, especially when Evans looks in unexpected corners. Its only major fault is not really a fault of all, but a fact: these wartime years have been thoroughly covered before, in hundreds of other books, many of them excellent. With that said, Evans’s nearly-two-thousand page trilogy is a near-masterpiece, and this provides a fitting – if downbeat – end.

***

As in his prior books, Evans utilizes a mixed approach that he describes as narrative interspersed with description and analysis. In reality, though, The Third Reich at War can more aptly be described as description and analysis, interspersed with some narrative.

Structurally speaking, The Third Reich at War is divided into seven big parts, each of which contain smaller chapters delving into various aspects of the Nazi regime. There is an overarching chronological framework, as the book begins in 1939, with Germany breaking really bad, and concludes with Hitler’s cowardly final days, skulking around in his bunker like a crazed rat, throwing tantrums and issuing delusional orders, before finally engaging in the one positive act in his life: ending it.

Within each of these parts, however, there is an interior timeline relating to the topic at hand. For example, there is – unsurprisingly – a long section devoted to the Final Solution, the Nazi attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews, as well as other innocent human beings deemed undesirable. In this segment, Evans traces the evolution of the Holocaust from ad hoc killing squads in the Soviet Union, to the mechanized murder in slaughterhouses such as Auschwitz, where trainloads of people arrived by train, were led to the gas chambers, and then were incinerated in nearby crematoria. All this is described in one place, rather than interspersed throughout the book.

Importantly, despite the relative complexity, Evans’s presentation is never confusing. Sometimes it creates odd quirks – for instance, Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated in Prague, then is back to life later in the book – but it works really well once you get used to it.

***

As I’ve noted in my reviews of The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, Evans is not a dramatist. For the most part, he does not attempt to create lasting images, build a scene, or provide in-depth characterizations of the men and women involved. Even when he does engage in these things, it is not his strength. To take one example, Evans decides to make a centerpiece out of the 1942-43 battle of Stalingrad. Obviously, this was a hugely important clash of arms, and many historians see it as a turning point in the war. However, the tale of Stalingrad has been told many, many, many times before, and Evans really adds nothing to do it.

Evans’s strength is his thematic discussions, where his keen insights lift the material, and makes you think about things you perhaps haven’t thought about before. Like Nazi sex ed.

In particular, Evans does a marvelous job handling the Allied air war over Germany. Very good historians – such as Max Hastings and Richard Overy – have really made a hash of this subject, deprecating its efficacy, and decrying the senseless slaughter, all while confusing the evidence. Evans rightly notes the tremendous human toll of the bombing campaign in places such as Hamburg and Dresden. However, he also accurately describes how it shattered German production, wiped out the Luftwaffe – denuding the Eastern Front of airplanes – and tied up tremendous amounts of manpower.

I also appreciate how Evans gives extended space to moments that tend to be overlooked or overshadowed. More specifically, I’m thinking of the T4 euthanasia program, in which Germans engaged in the wholesale killing of the disabled. At any other period in history, the physician-assisted, state-sanctioned execution of hundreds of thousands of innocent patients would have been unparalleled. Unfortunately, in the Nazi regime, it was just another week at the office. While most people have likely heard of Aktion T4 – especially given the psychotic Nazi branding of “life unworthy of life” – it tends to get folded into the larger Holocaust. Evans gives it the singular attention it deserves, while also observing that it engendered the strongest resistance to any of the Third Reich’s policies.

***

In closing his magnum opus, Evans sanguinely states the impossibility of any Fourth Reich ever coming into being. Written in 2008, he also confidently asserts the inability of neo-Nazism to ever gain any political legitimacy. It’s a precarious stance for a historian to take, especially one such as Evans, who knows full well what mankind is capable of doing to itself.

To be fair, Evans is technically correct about any exact reincarnation of Hitler’s doom-bringing kingdom of barbed wire, Zyklon B, and violent expropriation. The circumstances that led to Hitler’s power-grab were unique, involving a hugely destructive world war, insane hyperinflation, and a worldwide economic depression, all occurring in sequence within fifteen years. Likewise, the unfolding to Nazi policy, and its terrible execution, are unlikely to be repeated chapter and verse.

That said, it is important to remember that the Third Reich thrived on disbelief. It did not happen all at once, but occurred in stages. Germany’s leaders – a collection of flabby, weak-jawed men obsessed with physical perfection and bereft of basic morality – were always testing the waters, to see what they could get away with. At every step on the path to destruction, decent and virtuous people stood by and watched, saying to themselves and to others, with absolute conviction and sincerity: It can’t go any further. They have to stop now.

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The politics of consumption.

This is the final installment in Evans’ phenomenal series about the Third Reich called The History of the Third Reich. I highly recommend you read all three. It is a phenomenal overview of one of the worst events that has ever happened to humanity: Nazi Germany. No, it’s not hyperbole. The Third Reich is almost indisputably the worst thing that has happened to humankind in history in terms of breadth, depth, depravity and loss of human life. Have there been tyrannical regimes before? Yes. Did they have the impact on as many nations, peoples, ethnicities and lives? I really don’t think so.

This book focuses on Nazi Germany from 1939 to its demise in 1945. Let’s first go over the timeline of these years.

Hitler annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia without resistance under the pretense of protecting the ethnic purity of his people. It was when he invaded Poland with his famous Blitzkrieg tactic that they were finally cooking with gasoline and forced the hand of France and England to declare official war. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was broken by Hitler which then got Stalin all riled up who also annexed parts of Poland and invaded Finland. According to Hitler, the Poles were to be eradicated. Over 500 Polish towns were burnt to the ground as a merciless genocide ensured. Ghettos were created in Warsaw where disease, poverty and death were widespread. The eastern Soviet side was no better as mass extermination of Poles and Jewish poles was swiftly underway.

The Soviets invaded Finland although the Finns were able to maintain some sort of independent state while the Russians occupied and used the country for military purposes against Germany. A Norwegian fascist politician, named Vidkun Quisling, then convinced Hitler that the allies were going to invade Norway which gave Hitler the impetus to go ahead and invade Norway which he did, much to British discontent. Germany invaded Belgium, placed Leopold under house arrest and then they just kind of waltzed into France and Paris.

Now, at this point, you’d think completely upending and conquering almost all of Eastern Europe AND France might have made Hitler stop and revel in his accomplishments and call it a day for at least a decade. And if he had stopped there and focused on defense and domestic stability, it’s very possible he could have marched on and conquered England and its satellites years later. But he didn’t do that because he was an insane evil piece of shit and so he went ahead and tried to conquer everything else.

His first real blunder was air fights early on with England which did not initially go well. Hitler wasn't able to gain traction in the skies and halted a planned land and sea operation on England. Hitler tried to get Franco’s support but he didn’t offer him anything for the support and Franco shrewdly declined fearing that the US would get involved and that Churchill would just retreat to Canada to put up resistance if Hitler invaded England. Hitler and Mussolini were already bosom buddies and so joined their aspirations together. Fortunately for everyone else, Mussolini was a total and complete idiot. Germany and Italian forces joined together to annex French and British colonies in North Africa which did not go well. Against Hitler’s, advice, Mussolini invaded Greece which was a total disaster. Italy lost 40,000 men and Mussolini was humiliated. The British knew all of Mussolini's plans and even got back control over Ethiopia and reinstated the Sovereign there while also getting control over all of the other African colonies. Later on, Mussolini was politically ousted by his own party and imprisoned. Hitler then sent a secret mission that broke Mussolini out of prison and then Hitler installed the idiot into a puppet regime in Northern Italy that Hitler still controlled. Later, once things fell apart for Hitler too, Mussolini was hung by Italians and his body was desecrated.

But back to the other insanity. At first Yugoslavia was going to cooperate with Hitler but then some Siberian royalty got crowned and was defiant, so Hitler invaded there and crushed both Yugoslavia and Greece but there was lots of hardened resistance. A fascist Croat leader was installed who backed Hitler and did plenty of Serbian ethnic cleansing, probably history that carried through to the 1990s conflicts…

And then Hitler, like a crazed lunatic, invaded Russia. Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion in world history and completely destroyed the Red Army. For a hot minute. Stalin was totally flat footed and it looked like Hitler would also succeed in Russia. Hitler thought it would be a permanent victory. Yet… the Red Army wouldn’t just die. The Eastern Theater became the main part of the war. 80% of all combat was there. ← Read that again. 80%. Most of WWII was between Hitler and Stalin. 30 million died in the Eastern Theater alone, 9 million were children.

This is when things got bad for Hitler. His attempt to invade Stalingrad was an utter disaster. Soviet and British production ramped from the 1940s onward and Germany was always behind. Lots of Nazi leadership knew years in advance that they would lose, hence the multiple assassination attempts, trying to wrestle power away from the crazy lunatic. But of course, Hitler kept living, most of the time within the delusions of his mind. Britain out produced air warfare and obliterated many German cities like Frankfurt and Dresden. Around half a million German civilians were killed from the air raids. German morale and Hitler popularity plummeted. The allies invaded Italy. With Mussolini gone, the Italian just became another indolent and racially impure people to Hitler who also sought to eradicate them (there was a whole biological warfare the Nazis did in Italy with malaria). Hitler then made all civilian men, aged 16-60, to go march and die in a war that was already over.

And then he just killed himself, leaving his destruction for the rest of the world to deal with, including up until this moment.

This book spends a great deal of time with not only the ghettoization but extermination of Jews, Poles, the mentally ill, physically disabled, homosexuals, Gypsies and basically anyone that wasn’t of the Aryan race. The Third Reich lived and died on the blade of ethnic purity. And that is what a Nazi is and the underpinning of both Hitler’s rise to and fall from power: Aryan race superiority over the Jews. That sums up Nazism fairly completely. But you don’t have to be a Nazi to be a fascist or to be a Neo-Nazi. Neo-Nazis just take the Aryan race superiority thing and apply it to themselves and their respective ultra nationalism.

Look, let me just cut to the chase without being coy: neofascism is happening now. Okay? Yep, it is. Now is the Third Reich on the rise? No, not precisely. And it is within that imprecision where current neofascism lives: under the ambiguous banner of free speech. These people use free speech as a rhetorical trap to justify their hate speech, spreading that bigotry and racial superiority to the mainstream. It is happening right now. If you don’t see it, then you either don’t know what fascism is or you fully support it.

How does it end?

Poorly. Very poorly.

This is a phenomenal book and it can be read on its own but I suggest you read all three books. The only really big thing missing was the Pacific Theater which is forgivable because this book is about the Third Reich.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is too much of an overview to suit my need for detail. The selection of which items to include is sometimes surprising.

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Undoubtedly the war years are the greatest challenging to approach from a fresh angle, but with his focus on the inner workings of Nazi Germany, Evans rejuvenates the bombing war by placing us under the cross-hairs in a shelter. The guns of the Eastern Front rumble at a measured distance, felt mostly in their effect on the Home Front. Similar whispers of a different sort trail out of the Holocaust - another well-trodden ground, yet one which keeps yielding fresh ashes.

Could Germany win the war ? the first wave of rationing between the Poland Campaign and Christmas says no. Did Germany believe it could win ? Below, only if every citizen was as monolithically fervent as Goebbels' propopganda wished him to be. In reality, the encoroaching deprivations were shouldered as an individual or close-knit primus vindendum . Above, the statistics surrounding the failure to create a war economy spelled frank defeat as early as 1942, while the popularity of Hitler and the egime could no longer be cranked up sporadically by victory.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final book in Evans' Third Reich trilogy was bound to be the most crisply written, if only because the subject matter demanded it. With a long and complex war to cover in less than 800 pages, the author simply didn't have the time to expand into realms that occasionally bogged down the first two books.

Evans makes clear in the introduction that this is not a book about the war itself, nor about the Holocaust. That is particularly evident in the former point. While detailed observations of the Eastern Front are provided, useful for American readers who don't hear enough about Stalingrad or Kursk, we get almost no sense of the Allies' move into North Africa, Sicily, and Northern France. FDR and Churchill are not merely bit players in this book, they are dim images, scarcely viewed over the horizon. The book is more Holocaust-centric, but focusing less on particular suffering that the Holocaust-tome industry has provided, and more on mass-murder as a government bureaucracy.

Even though many of these events have been covered ad nauseum, Evans gives us a fresh look at how the Nazi infrastructure swelled during the invasions of Poland and France, and how the beast slowly died from 1942 on. He shows that there were no written orders turning a Jewish eastern deportation into a death-camp industry, but that the interpretation of the hints of the Fuhrer left little doubt that facilities like Treblinka would be created, used, and destroyed as efficiently as possible.

While all three books in Evans' series gives unique insights into Nazi Party evolution, the third book scarcely wastes a word in bringing us to the inevitable climax of terror. Goebbels and Goring emerge as real characters, and the evil of Heydrich is adequately described, though Himmler still seems a mystery.

Evans cuts the average German in the street less slack than some historians. While the murder of Jews was not front-page news, most citizens knew of it and chose not to know. Most citizens chose to bring Hitler to power in a bid to recapture imaginary German honor. And far too many Germans continued to believe in Nazi philosophy, and in a secret global Jewish-Freemason conspiracy, long after the war is over.

While "Third Reich at War" can be read on its own, the trilogy is best read in its entirety, even though the first two books are a bit slower moving than this one. The author dissects how a movement, a party, and a nation at large can fall victim to a belief system that is overtly deranged. Useful lessons for us all.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Of the three volumes, I think the first remains in all aspects the best. But the whole trilogy is excellent and a sound corrective to Kershaw. It is the best and most judicious survey of the whole topic in English that I am aware of. That said, it is a long trilogy, and it is nice to have it behind me rather than before me.)


This book, as expected, is excellent -- and marks the entire trilogy as a valuable achievement. Evans is best when dealing with the more granular -- his treatment of the broader events of military/geopolitical history is solid, but appears derived. This is not, however, to detract from the value and interest of this book. In particular, Evans now represents the fullest and most modern refutation of the 'structuralist' approach favored by Kershaw, Broszat, and others -- according to which the Nazi's merely 'stumbled' into their crimes and misadventures. (See my reviews of Kershaw and MacGregor Knox)

His broad thesis here is as follows: The astounding success of German arms from 1939 through Summer of 1941 was ultimately due to their speed, boldness, and audacity -- applied to an unprepared opponent. But then in the summer of 1941, when the Central Group confronted the bulk of the shaken Soviet army before Moscow -- which was slowly beginning to firm -- Hitler blinked. He diverted troops to Group South to the Caucasus to secure the Romanian oil fields -- and by the time he returned them in the Fall -- the Soviet troops had stiffened, the rains had begun..., and winter was upon them. Momentum was stopped cold. And at this point, it became a war of attrition (371f.)

But a war of attrition is something the Germans could never win. To give just two sets of statistics: Airplane production. By 1943, Germany was producing about 26,000 aircraft per year. But in that same year, the British produced 35,000, the Russians produced 37,000, and the U.S. about 100,000. Combined allied machine gun production that year was over 1.1 million; Germany production just 165,527 (332f.). The GDP of the Allies to that of the Axis (combined) was never less than 2:1 and, by 1944, was more than 3:1

And so, by 1941 Winter, the War was essentially lost -- a massive push the following year (Stalingrad) notwithstanding.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Third Reich at War: 1939-1945, by Richard J. Evans, is the final book in The History of the Third Reich trilogy, and an excellent conclusion to the series. Evans has written a magnum opus on the Nazi's rise to power (The Coming of the Third Reich), their rule (The Third Reich in Power), and finally, the world war they initiated, and eventually lost (this title). The Third Reich at War examines the Nazi's opening of the Second World War, beginning with political maneuverings before the war, Hitlers incessant want for confrontation with the Allied powers, and continuing with the reordering of Europe, the war with the USSR, and the eventual destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, and the long road to complete defeat following. Evans also, throughout the book, examines the Nazi's ideological push to reorder Europe in its own image, working to destroying people groups like the Jews and Gypsies completely, smashing Communism and propping up Fascist governments in France, Norway, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and so on.

Evans does an excellent job examining first the complete and total victory of German armies at the wars introduction. The lessons learned in Poland in regards to Blitzkrieg were utilized first in Western Europe to great effect, defeating France, Belgium and the Netherlands quickly. Yugoslavia and Greece fell soon after that, and the USSR was successfully pushed far back in the opening year of Operation Barbarossa. Denmark and Norway fell to Nazi troops as well. However, the German army suffered from a number of issues, not least the interference of Hitler and the upper brass of the Nazi party. German army staff also began to take too much stock in what they considered to be their "invincible" fighting force. This zealous mirage came to a screeching halt at Stalingrad, and it was only downhill from there as Soviet troops, who quickly recovered the loss of much of their industrial base and a million dead and more captured of their soldiers, to push the German's back farther and farther, eventually overrunning most of Eastern and Central Europe.

Europe under occupation is also examined. No history of Nazi Germany is complete without a close examination of their brutal racial ideology, and the attempted (and in some cases successful) destruction of the Jewish population in conquered territories. The German occupation was marked by extreme martial brutality. Partisans who fought the Germans often had to watch local populations wiped out in reprisal for the death of German soldiers. Jews were often targeted straightaway, and sent to concentration camps and death camps all over Europe. Evans details the invention of gas trucks, gas chambers and crematoriums used to kill millions of innocent Jewish peoples, elderly and crippled Slavs, political prisoners and Soviet POW's. Evan's also examines the companies behind these disturbing innovations, with car makers, furnace companies and industrial-chemical firms creating the products of death (some, like the makers of the gas vans and crematoriums, were aware of what they were doing, some like the makers of Zyklon-B pellets, may not have been).

Germany's allies and puppet states often eagerly participated. Vichy France sent thousands to death camps in Poland. Dutch SS also took part in brutal and sadistic killings. Local populations in Eastern Europe who felt mistreated by the Soviets often willingly participated, with Ukrainian militias, residents of the Baltic states and so on engaging in deadly raids on Jewish villages in an attempt to participate in the Final Solution. Romania eagerly participated in early days, and the 400+ thousand Jewish Romanians killed in World War II by that regime was second only to Germany. Croatian government officials and the Catholic Church collaborated to send Croatian and Serbian Jews to the camps of the Third Reich, with Serbia being one of the areas eventually considered "free of Jews." Some, however, resisted. Fascist Finland refused to send Jews to Germany (except for a small number of foreign partisans) even as it allied with Germany to take on the Soviets. Belgium residents, church groups and so on conspired to hide many of their Jewish residents from German SS. Denmark was able to send almost 90% of its Jewish population to neutral Sweden, with the help of the local German governor, who wished to avoid local insurrection (he ironically proclaimed the area "free of Jews" later on).

The economic issues of the Third Reich are examined in detail as well. Albert Speer took over much of the Reich economy in 1941 and oversaw massive improvements in efficiency, military production, and economic exploitation of conquered territories. However, Speer and other German armaments and economic politicians foresaw Germany's defeat as early as 1941, as the Soviets, Brits and Americans easily outproduced Germany in most categories. As the German's tightened the screws on their allies, and governments in Europe that were previously collaborationist began to realize Germany was going to lose, acts of resistance began to grow. French, Polish, Soviet and Yugoslavian partisans began to have an effect on German logistics and supplies to the front, and helped to tie down German soldiers in policing duties. Bombing from allied long range bombers began to eat away German industry. The USA's entry into the war really kicked the wind out of most of the German people's hope for a favourable conclusion. Finally, the Soviet victory in the grinding war of attrition in the steppes of Russia destroyed the morale of the German army, erased its image as an invincible fighting force, and turned many German's away from supporting the Nazi regime.

Finally, the conclusion of the war brought to horrifying light the atrocities of the German regime and those of its allies. Millions of innocent men, women and children were killed by brutal extra-judicial killings in Eastern Europe, by industrial death camps built to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe, and by starvation. Indeed, the Nazi regime planned to starve out the Slavic population of Europe by re-prioritizing supplies for the German armies in the area. The Reich's plan to create a New Order in Europe, by controlling the economic and political spheres of most of the continent, are detailed. There was no place in this Order for those considered racially inferior, ideologically intolerable, or suffered from disabilities. As Allied and Soviet troops advanced into the Reich and its occupied territories, these atrocities began to come to light. After their destruction in 1945, much of the upper echelon of Nazi society was put to death in the Nuremberg Trials.

Evans book is a detailed look at this tumultuous period of history. As in the past books, he mixes first hand accounts of the Reich's history by local people's, soldiers, politicians and occupied citizens with detailed history, archival sources, policy papers and so on. Evan's trilogy, and this book, seem to be the most detailed work on the Third Reich yet available (outside of academic sources). It's depth, clarity, tone and detail all combine to make a work so fascinating and so intricate that it is a truly interesting read. He details all of the aspects of this time period in the Third Reich, no matter how difficult and disturbing. This trilogy should be rightly considered the best work on Nazi Germany written so far (and that is saying something, dozens of books are released a year on this topic). If you are going to pick up a couple of books on Nazi Germany, make sure they are Richard J. Evans The History of the Third Reich series. These books are highly recommended.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard J. Evans concludes his trilogy on Nazi Germany with The Third Reich at War. It might seem a fool’s errand for even a gifted historian to publish another book about World War II, and Evans admits that he’s covering ground much more familiar than the bulk of his earlier works. Hitler’s stupendous early military victories in Poland, France and the Balkans, his failures to subdue Britain and catastrophic invasion of the Soviet Union, and the long, slow and painful turning of the tide are all chronicled here, ably if not outstandingly. The book rarely spends much time on military tactics (only Stalingrad and Kursk, the two largest battles on the Eastern Front, receive detailed analysis) because Evans shows more interest in the effects of battles rather than their blow-by-blow details. A war that’s reduced to tactics and tanks risks becoming merely a game; a war's immense human cost is worthy of study outside chat rooms filled with History Channel buffs. And Evans does an exemplary job detailing the horror the Second World War wrought both in Germany and the countries it attacked and occupied.

Certainly, the most destructive war in history bore an immense cost. And Evans brings it home: from the war’s very beginning, German bombers terrorized Poland as soldiers massacred civilians, losing any pretense towards honorable conduct. This method continued into Operation Barbarossa, which quickly descended into an all-out race war between the Germans and Slavic Russians, whom Hitler saw as the embodiment of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Soldiers often massacred prisoners, and those Red Army troops who were captured suffering starvation, killing and forced labor in Germany; civilians were subject to rape, pillage and murder (which the Soviets, when the war’s tide turned, repaid in kind). Meanwhile the SS Einsatzgruppen swarmed behind the line of advance, massacring hundreds of thousands of Jews. The latter was the first staged Hitler’s “Final Solution,” an increasingly organized, systematic destruction of European Jewry and other “undesired” groups that resulted in an unfathomable death toll. But, as Evans makes clear, the regular Army was perfectly capable of committing their own atrocities: the “clean Wehrmacht” was itself waist-deep in blood, while the German people raised little outcry against the Holocaust.

One throughline of previous volumes is Evans’ commentary on the ambivalence of ordinary Germans towards the Nazis. This carries through here, even at the apex of fascism’s national madness. Certainly Germans were ecstatic at Hitler’s early, bloodless conquests, but the onset of war with Poland was received with a grim resignation by most Germans. The regime’s propaganda convinced them that it was a war of national defense, not imperialist aggression, and the population responded with acceptance rather than enthusiasm. As the war dragged on, the German public began to see through the regime’s lies: civilians traded caustic jokes about incompetent generals and the Nazi leadership (jokes which seemed less funny to Hitler’s henchmen as the war went sour) while desertions rose and volunteering reached a standstill. Germans were willing to defend their country against Western “encirclement” and Stalin’s Bolshevik hordes, but they were less excited to die in the charnel house of Eastern Eruope for a dimly defined New Order whose main characteristic seemed to be killing.

And as Allied bombings brought destruction home to Germany, Evans argues, the public’s resolve grew weaker still. In this Evans does differ from most accounts of the war, which often argue that Allied terror bombing stiffened rather than weakened German resolution to resist. But the government’s inability to protect its own people further demonstrated how little Hitler and his circle cared about the average German (a point brought home by the Fuhrer’s rantings about Germany’s failure to serve him). As thousands perished in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and other infernos, public disillusionment turned not against the Allies (although downed pilots were often lynched by angry mobs) but against the Third Reich itself. Unable to cope with destruction or food shortages, the regime resorted to bombastic propaganda which no longer seemed attached to reality - and fanned the public’s ambivalence.

But “ambivalence” doesn’t mean open hostility, either. Most Germans inured themselves to the war with “dull conformity,” unhappy with the regime but not willing to act. Organized resistance against the Nazis was nearly impossible at any rate: the few who tried were arrested or summarily executed by a police state that honed repression to a science. Catholic bishops protested the T4 extermination of the mentally disabled but were silent on the destruction of Jews; the military complained about Hitler’s tactics but proved reluctant to move against him so long as victories piled in. The most effective resistance cell, the leftist “Red Orchestra,” provided valuable intelligence to the Soviets but did little to directly challenge the regime. Youth movements like the “Swing Kids” and Sophie Scholl’s White Rose provided minor headaches at best. When the military finally steeled itself to move against Hitler (the 20 July plot), their coup was so mismanaged that failure became inevitable. In turn, the failure of Stauffenberg and Co. triggered a massive wage of purges, excelling even the Night of the Long Knives, that eradicated perceived and real enemies to the Reich. Thus Germany was forced to fight to the last man as the Allies converged on it, with Hitler playing out the Reich's absurd final act in the Fuhrerbunker.

By war’s end, Hitler had laid waste to an entire continent. Jews, Romani and other groups had been virtually exterminated; tens of millions of Russian and other Soviets had been killed; countries from France to Belarus were leveled; Germany’s public had been traumatized, its cities destroyed and image irrevocably stained. It took years of occupation, education and self-reflection for Germans to accept their complicity in Hitler’s regime and rebuild themselves into a liberal democracy. Perhaps it’s trite for Evans to end on a message that what happened to Germany could happen anywhere; the precise events that gave rise to Hitler are hard to replicate, even if modern rightists provide shuddering reminders. Even so, it’s useful to recall that Germany, an advanced country with proud traditions of art, intellectualism and progressive thought, fell under sway of reactionary, racist madness that its people did precious little to impede or oppose. Sadly, it’s a lesson humanity seems determined to ignore.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final volume of Evans' trilogy on the Third Reich, starting with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and concluding with its end in May 1945.

The atrocities of 1940-1945 had their start in 1939 with the invasion of Poland: enslavement, mass murder, all were well-established policy and based upon racial ideology. This was done with the support of the Nazi party, the army, and masses of ordinary civilians. It was Nazi beliefs on race that accompanied the need to avoid the national humiliation and material deprivation which they remembered so bitterly after the end of the First World War. The creation of a racial underclass and the plans for genocide began, says Evans, in Poland 1939.

By 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union changed wars of movement into wars of attrition. While the combined forces of Germany and its allies outnumbered the Soviet forces in June 1941, by the end of July some 10% of the invading force was dead, wounded, or missing. Evans even goes so far as to say that with the Nazis so decisively outproduced and outnumbered, the war was lost by December of that year. But they fought on out from their prejudices and again from the fear of 1918.

While still a broad overview, Evans includes some useful descriptions; of the Battle of Kursk, the T-4 forced euthanasia program, popular culture, aerial bombing, and the narrative of Albert Speer's command of the German war economy - before Adam Tooze et al. challenged that. He includes useful testimonies, letters, and diary extracts.

That said, Evans doesn't have much of a conclusion or idea behind the narrative of the war years - besides the standard. The first volume was most useful in that way, in his understanding of how the different social groups of Germany worked or made themselves live with Nazism. But here?

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I genuinely ask the question, what more could anyone ask for in a 3 volume history of the Third Reich? Exceptional.

[Blamp Head · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please be aware that the following includes some disturbing and graphic (violent) text.

This year (complaints/observations of my own, or of people I have spoken to / seen in the news)
And back then (quotations from the book)



I ordered my lunch on UberEats and it took 45 minutes! God I was STARVING by the time it FINALLY--
"Over 300,000 Red Army prisoners had died by the end of 1941. Wilm Hosenfeld was shocked by the way in which the Russian prisoners were left to starve, a policy he found ‘so repulsive, inhumane and so naively stupid that one can only be deeply ashamed that such a thing can be done by us’."


Amazon's next day delivery service is bloody hopeless now, takes way longer--
"German jeep and truck production was still relatively low despite the motorization drive of the 1930s, and motor vehicles in any case were restricted in their use by the shortage of fuel. In these circumstances, the German and allied armies relied heavily on horses– at least 625,000 of them on the Eastern Front– for basic transport, hauling artillery pieces, carrying ammunition and pulling supply carts."


Yeah, it's just so easy now to just get a vasectomy or take the pill, so then after you've had kids you don't have to worry about accidentally--
"On 14 July 1933 the regime had introduced compulsory sterilization for Germans considered to be suffering from hereditary weaknesses, including ‘moral feeble-mindedness’, a vague criterion that could encompass many different kinds of social deviance. Some 360,000 people had been sterilized by the time the war broke out. In 1935, in addition, abortion on eugenic grounds had been legalized."


Racism is still prevalent here in Australia. It's, like, 2020 and we're still treating some people like--
"The General Plan for the East, now the official policy of the Third Reich, proposed to remove between 80 and 85 per cent of the Polish population, 64 per cent of the Ukrainian and 75 per cent of the Belarussian, expelling them further east or allowing them to perish from disease and malnutrition."


The government border system - is that run by Nazis? We're not even allowed to--
"‘We [soldiers] and the SS were merciful yesterday, for every Jew we caught was shot right away. It’s different today, for we again found the mutilated bodies of 60 comrades. Now the Jews had to carry the corpses out of the cellar, stretch them out neatly, and then they were shown the atrocities. Then after inspecting the victims they were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. Up to now we have sent about 1,000 Jews into the hereafter, but that’s too few for what they’ve done.’"


The media is so biased and shouldn't be allowed to--
"On 3 May 1943, Goebbels issued a confidential circular to the German press demanding that more attention be devoted to attacks on the Jews. ‘The possibilities for exposing the true character of the Jews are endless,’ he opined. ‘The Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.’"


I've never eaten at such a terrible restaurant, portion size was okay but, goodness me, it tasted like absolute--
"‘I myself,’ he recalled, ‘came across a Russian lying beween piles of bricks, whose body had been ripped open and the liver removed. They would beat each other to death for food… They were no longer human beings. They had become animals, who sought only food.’ It evidently did not occur to Höss to give it to them. Of the 10,000, only a few hundred were left alive by the following spring."


More has to be done by governments across the globe to protect the population from Covid19 (there are some obvious examples of where government response hasn't been nearly adequate), and to assist those affected by--
"Over the whole period of the camp’s existence, at least 1.1 million and possibly as many as 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 90 per cent of them, probably about 960,000, were Jews, amounting to between a fifth and a quarter of all Jews killed in the war. They included 300,000 Jews from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from Holland, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Czechoslovakia (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), 27,000 from Slovakia, 25,000 from Belgium, 23,000 from Germany (the ‘Old Reich’), 10,000 from Croatia, 6,000 from Italy, the same number from Belarus, 1,600 from Austria and 700 from Norway. At a late stage in the war, as we shall see, some 394,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the gas chambers and put to death. More than 70,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 people of a whole variety of nationalities, mainly East Europeans."


Nationalism is sweeping the globe again. We're more introspective, more selfish, than we've been in a very long--
"Speaking in Posen in October 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.’"


We are really lucky where we are to have low rates of infection; elsewhere there's been--
"One young soldier reported that his company had been given only a single loaf for six men to last three days. ‘Dear Mummy… I can’t move my legs any more, and it’s the same with others, because of hunger, one of our comrades died, he had nothing left in his body and went on a march, and he collapsed from hunger on the way and died of cold, the cold was the last straw for him.’ On 28 January 1943 the order was issued that the sick and wounded should be left to starve to death. The German troops were in effect suffering the same fate that Hitler had planned for the Slavs."


I've heard it said that nations need strong leaders willing to make the really hard--
"The power of nationalism had also been broken, so thoroughly that when elderly Germans came towards the end of the century to look back on the Third Reich and ask themselves why they had supported it, they could no longer remember that one of the main reasons had been because they had thought that it made Germany great again."


OMG work is like a prison--
"At Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler, mustard gas, which had caused such suffering in the First World War, and which, it was feared, might be used in Allied bombing raids, was injected into some inmates, while others were made to drink it in liquid form, or forced to inhale it. Some had wounds inflicted on them and infected with the gas."


We need to find out who is responsible for the pandemic and--
"The Allies concluded that the best way to stop the genocide was to concentrate everything on winning the war as quickly as possible. Bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz and other camps would only have achieved a temporary respite for the Jews, and distracted attention and resources from the larger purpose of overthrowing the regime that was killing them."



~~~~~~~~~
Every now and then when I'm feeling upset I read some highlighted sections from this book, as it reminds me that things I face could be worse. I find a little perspective goes a long way. This is not meant to detract from struggles we all face but I find it useful to consider the struggles of others when coming to terms with my own (and to be fair my own struggles are feeble - I've led a very easy life so far). Indeed, it can be empowering to remember what humans can overcome and overthrow - but it also serves as a reminder of what a lack of humanity can achieve.

For me, the book (the third in a trilogy of books on Nazism) strikes a superb balance between detailing perspectives of "everyday Germans" and those at the top of the regime. These are dense tomes though, and incredibly shocking and disturbing. Topics are discussed thematically, not chronologically, and mostly deal with Germans and their perspectives. If you're after a quick and sharp overview of WWII this is probably not for you.

Highly recommended.

[Boudewijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is (in the words of the writer) about the Germans and Germany, not about the Second World War. Having read a lot of books about the Second World war, I have found it very refreshing and interesting. It covers a lot of topics that are usually not touched upon in a book about this area. It handles the German conquests, the treatment of the Jews and other minorites by the Nazi's, every day life for the Germans during the war and economic, social and cultural consequences. If you're into history and especially the Second World War, this is a book for you.

[Rodrigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es la mejor historia del Tercer Reich que he leido. Muy bien informada, rigurosa, bien escrita y atenta a la línea establecida por el autor desde el inicio.

[Patrick Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updated: Dec, 2023: Re-read this for a class I'm teaching. Now that I'm much further removed from the world of graduate school, it's hard to identify with some of the historiographical posturing(always somewhat caricatured) in my initial review. I still stand by the positive comments.

Also -- and this is neither criticism nor praise-- it is impossible to read the trilogy back to back in a few weeks without noticing that Evans uses the word "moreover" perhaps more frequently than any other writer.

Sir Richard Evans is the leading Anglophone proponent of a certain school of history. This might be termed neo-empiricism or neo-Rankeanism. He has famously defended his approach, in somewhat curmudgeonly fashion, in his book 'In Defence of History', which is widely assigned to first year undergraduates in history departments throughout the Anglophone world (and perhaps beyond). Suffice it to say that, as an academic historian of a rather different period, I have serious methodological disagreements with Evans' 'just the facts, ma'am' approach to historiography. Even if I had no other objections to this approach, it would, applied to my own period, make the writing of history virtually impossible.

However, it cannot be denied that, when applied to an area with such a plethora of documentary evidence as the Third Reich, this approach produces results. This book is stunning. It is also very easy to read, or at least as easy as any 950 page book can be. Evans is not an exciting or colourful prose stylist in the manner of Hugh Trevor-Roper (or Peter Brown, to use a less loaded example), but he writes with a consistent clarity that will be accessible to any general reader. Finally, Evans has, in the best sense, a clear view of the moral duties of a historian. This is a masterpiece that will endure for many years.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three thick volumes is the new minimum for a survey of Nazi Germany geared toward the general reader. The final installment of this series seamlessly continues the story to its conclusion, which is welcome indeed. Being steeped in Nazi history for the duration of three long books is a fatiguing exercise in misery; one can only imagine what it must have been like to actually live (or die) amongst the carnage of such a hideous moral vacuum. "The Third Reich at War" does a spectacular job answering the basic questions of how and why the Nazi regime (and greater Germany itself) was able to indulge in genocide, unprecedented levels of military violence, and all other manner of horrors. Highly specific geopolitical considerations and deep analysis of military tactics are largely glossed over in favor of a wider (and more inclusive) cultural perspective; this is principally an effort to illuminate the forest without entirely dispensing with the trees.

The pace and style throughout is consistent, smoothly erudite, and unflaggingly interesting. It is especially helpful to have previous histories and perspectives reevaluated and subtly adjusted (or refuted) by diligent and meticulous data mining. The overall effect is one of volatile history settling - at long last - into a semblance of substantiated truth.

[Themistocles · Rating 2 out of 5]

After Evans' two first books in the trilogy, this came as a disappointment. I had very high expectations to read about the conditions in the Third Reich during war, learn something new about the social, economical, political etc process that took place during the war years. Instead I got a mash-up of various topics that totally lack focus and do not add much to the historiography of the third reich.

The first 400 pages, for instance, are almost wholly devoted to the war in the East and the Jewish question (excuse me???!!!). From thence on it gets somewhat better, but not much. Evans starts hopping around, dealing with various issues - from the naval war (including the U-boat story, all in a few short pages!) to the battle of Kursk, to a statistical analysis of the men comprising a typical german division. Trying to cover all those issues (that need book(s) of their own to be described) in a short chapter or two ends up, unsurprisingly, as wholly inadequate.

There are some nice snippets here and there but, in the whole, I didn't feel I learned much new about any of the issues that he touched. What's more, in a few places Evans seems to want to overthrow common beliefs - which is fine, and he may be right in his conclusions, but his explanations are not nearly enough.

Oh, and what is it with translating the "Fuehrer" into "Leader" and other such german terms (like Volksturm) that have survived as they are? This is plain silly… hence we get "Hail, Leader" instead of "Heil, Fuhrer", the Leader Bunker etc etc. Why would he chose to do something like that, other than differentiating himself from the rest of the authors, eludes me, but the result is silly, to say the least.

What a shame…

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest puzzles in history is how the society that produced Goethe, Beethoven, Schiller, Einstein, and so many other thoughtful geniuses who shaped world culture ended up by devolving into Nazism. Richard Evans’ definitive ‘Third Reich Trilogy’ gets you as close as anyone ever will to answering that riddle, but by the end you are still left shocked that an advanced civilization like Germany could end up utterly devastated and guilty of committing many of the worst crimes in human history. Perhaps the riddle of Germany’s descent points to a horrible inherent vice of civilization itself that is ineradicable even through the highest achievements in learning, science, and arts.

The scope of these volumes is comprehensive and Evans masterfully weaves personal diaries, letters, and stories of individuals with industrial statistics, demographics, and sociocultural trends.

A few things especially stuck in my mind, randomly presented here and drawn from across the whole trilogy:

- The younger generation were more likely to be committed Nazis than the older people who lived before WWI and absorbed prewar cultural values. Many of the latter were horrified as they watched their own children or grandchildren descend into inhumanity, but were browbeaten or terrified into submission. Of note, most of the Nazi leadership was fairly young at the onset of power. Youth is no guarantee of moral progress, whatever we take the term to mean.

- The paralysis and infighting of Weimar Germany’s left/center played as much of a role in Nazism’s seizure of power as any actual support that they had. Communists fought Social Democrats and believed, based on the immutable laws of Marxism, that Nazism was a temporary acceleration that would collapse and lead to their triumph; therefore, they had no need to cooperate with their cousins in the Social Democrats. The latter were demoralized by their recent failures and the horrors of the Great Depression, which led to vacillation. If the left/centrist parties had United, Nazism would’ve been smothered in its crib.

- War ruins humanism and moral values. The Nazis were terrible even before they had power, but almost all of the worst aspects of their regime occurred during the war: ‘expediency’ and the brutality of modern warfare allowed them to get away with unparalleled atrocities. However, even then they usually tried to hide their worst deeds and, when they could not be hidden, masked them in legal jargon and bureaucratese.

- I am absolutely amazed that the Soviet Union survived the initial onslaught of Operation Barbarossa, and then went on to survive and win the war as a whole. They lost at least 30 million people in the five year conflict. 30 million men, women, and children. The number boggles the mind. The war could not have been won without their sacrifices; most of Europe would probably still be under German rule.

- Nazi Germany was much shabbier and more corrupt than is often understood. Thanks to Riefenstahl’s propaganda, even diehard anti-Nazis usually think of the regime as highly orderly and disciplined (“the trains ran on time!”). It was not. They duplicated most institutions as a way of controlling society (Nazi courts vs. regular Courts; the SS vs. the Army, etc.) and typically improvised these sloppily. All were riven with infighting, inefficiency, and corruption.

- The war was over by 1942. Most German planners understood that they were going to lose once the invasion of the Soviet Union failed. The entry of America, with our unprecedented industrial might, made it plain as day. Even the British home island by itself was outproducing the Nazi Empire by 1942. So were the Soviets after their heroic relocation of industry to the Ural Mountains. Enter America: it was over. Hitler was desperate to split the Allies apart, knowing that the Anglo-American alliance with the Soviet Union was awkward, but they hung together and were therefore unbeatable.

- On this point, Britain deserves a lot of credit. It would’ve been very easy for them to sue for peace on favorable terms and save themselves while letting Europe (and the world) fall to Nazism. Had they done so, the Soviet Union probably would’ve fallen in 1941 and America would’ve had no base from which to fight Germany. Churchill himself, for all his many flaws, made one of the most heroic decisions in history by insisting on continuing to fight the Nazis, which was certainly not as easy or obvious in 1940 as it is now. He was also right to insist on keeping British troops in North Africa, despite the dire need for defense at home, since this ultimately prevented the Germans from seizing the middle eastern oil fields.


—-

Evans’ analysis is always insightful, but he never gets carried away into excessive abstraction or pet theories: the facts often stand by themselves.

And those facts are often so terrible that I had to pause this audiobook a few times; had to find ways to retain some kind of faith in humanity, no matter how terrible. As Vassily Grossman taught me in ‘Life and Fate’, and this series reaffirmed, ideology is utterly destructive of the human soul — be mindful that you do not let any grow too strongly within you (many will try, often imperceptibly), for a noxious weed can sprout from a minuscule seed. While we must all be watchful of the dangers in our own minds, I can only pray that we do not have to learn the lesson at a civilizational level again.

[Luiz R · Rating 5 out of 5]

São três tijolos de mais de 1000 páginas, mas vale a pena dedicar um tempinho pra ter um panorama abrangente sobre o período nazista.

[Matthew Castorina · Rating 5 out of 5]

We don’t hate Nazis enough.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

When reading this book, the third volume of Richard Evans’s massive study of the Third Reich, scenes from the TV show "The Man in the High Castle" kept flashing before my eyes. That show (based on a Philip K. Dick book) posits a Nazi victory in World War II, and depicts how the postwar Greater German Reich affects the people who live under it. The problem with Evans’s book is that it fails to paint such scenes for the actual Third Reich. Rather, it is an endless litany of dead innocents and how they were killed, mixed with occasional talk of political and military happenings, along with a tiny bit about daily life for average civilians. And while listing how millions of innocents were killed is certainly a task that could fill many, and longer, books, after a while it becomes merely a chronicle of atrocity, not a work of synthesized history.

Thus, I will not specifically review this book, because if you want to know more details about Nazi crimes, you now know where to go, and there is little analysis to add. At times I had to force myself to return to the book, not because the writing is bad (it is very competent), but because it was depressing. This emphasis on innocents killed by the Nazis is a change from older writing. For example, if you read Robert Ergang’s "Europe Since Waterloo," 800 pages, published in 1954 and a standard textbook of the 1950s and 1960s, there is no talk at all of the Holocaust—not by name, certainly, since the name is a neologism first widely used in the 1970s, nor by any other mention. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws are mentioned in passing, but no other mention at all is made of the Jews, or of any other group that was the focus of Nazi persecution. The 1946 Nuremberg Trials are covered, but there is little discussion of the charges, other than “war crimes, atrocities, and acts of aggression on a vast scale.” Some of this difference in emphasis is due to many new sources of evidence since 1954, based on efforts made since the 1960s; some of it is due to changing fashions. William L. Shirer’s classic" The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," published just a few years later (in 1960), covers the Holocaust in some detail. But Evans’s book swings the pendulum too far to the other side; it drowns broader history, and critical history, in a sea of undifferentiated blood.

Of course, there is theoretical societal value in the feeling of being overwhelmed by atrocity—it impels the reader to a visceral conclusion of “Never Again.” Unfortunately, there is little indication that theoretical value is ever transformed into action. From Rwanda to Syria, millions of people are slaughtered all the time. Even in Europe, a lethal combination of Muslim dominance and supine Europeans has created a resurgence of anti-Semitism that has led many of Europe’s remaining Jews to flee, justifiably afraid of the future. Never again is, very often, instead right now, and that is true in no time or place more than America today, where every year millions are killed through abortion. We have met the Nazis, and they are us.

My purpose here is to draw the analogy, exact in all relevant ways, between the modern American system of abortion and similar Nazi killings. The parallel is not to the Holocaust itself. It is true that the Holocaust (correctly defined as the attempt to exterminate Jews) is generally analogous to our abortion practices, differing most obviously in that more people have been killed by abortion (although it is idle and foolish to rank evils based on the number of dead, as if we were grading on a curve). But the Holocaust is not the most direct Nazi analogue to our abortion program. That non-honor goes to the earlier Nazi efforts to kill the mentally and physically handicapped, generally labeled the “Aktion T4” program, which in the late 1930s killed something more than 100,000 people, many children, and laid the groundwork for the subsequent Holocaust.

The T4 program was strikingly similar to the abortion regime currently imposed on the United States. It used ideological justifications, language, procedures, and practices remarkably similar to our abortion industry, and it was participated in and defended by the same types of people, using much the same arguments, as our abortion regime. While superficial differences arising from time, place, and victims exist, there were are only two material differences. First, the ideological justification of the Aktion T4 program was an unhinged emphasis on collective national purification; for those who imposed and impose abortion on America, the ideological justification was and is primarily an unhinged emphasis on individual autonomy, so-called “choice” (with a side order of collective purification, through killing “populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” as Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently slipped up by commenting). And unlike abortion, which has lasted for decades, the Aktion T4 program was stopped relatively quickly, by effective action taken at great personal risk by Catholic bishops, whose successors today, with a few exceptions, are mealy-mouthed, weak and fearful men.

As Evans relates, the genesis of the T4 program was the forced sterilization program begun by the Nazis as soon as they came to power. That program was designed to eliminate “hereditary weakness,” and was no different in kind than the program being implemented at the same time and earlier in the United States, led by the Progressives and such people as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (“planned” there meaning “the elimination of the ‘feebleminded’ and of black people”). The Nazi sterilization program included allowing abortions, otherwise illegal, for “racial health” (and Jews were actively encouraged to obtain abortions). As always, fond of taking things to their logical conclusion and having the power to do so, the Nazis very early on considered expanding this to killing of mental patients and other “defectives,” using the same ideological justification as underlay the sterilization program. By 1935, Hitler was telling his doctor, Karl Brandt, that he planned to radically expand the program during wartime, when it could be done without garnering attention. Long before that, though, propaganda began to be disseminated about “life unworthy of life,” and the necessary administrative structure put into place, including pressure to transfer institutionalized patients to facilities run not by the Church, but by the SS.

As he had promised, as soon as war arrived in 1939, Hitler moved to implement his program of murder, under the aegis of the “Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses.” (Whether it’s handicapped people or guns, allowing grasping big government types to register anything is always a mistake.) The killing program was run directly from the Chancellery, Hitler’s personal administrative apparatus, rather than through the Party or the civil service, in order to speed the process up and avoid inconvenient objections from those with moral qualms. The focus initially was on children—those “suffering from Down’s Syndrome, microcephaly, the absence of a limb or deformities of the head or spine” and so forth. Not children in institutions, though—rather those at home, living with their parents, who were told that their children were going to a “specialist clinic” to receive treatment to improve their condition—where they would die of “natural causes,” as their parents were informed, as they received random ashes from the crematoria identified as the remains of their child.

The ideological justification for this was, as I noted above, part and parcel of the Nazi program of “improving the race”—both in general, and to aid in fighting the war. But ideology was only part of the T4 program. Personal enrichment also entered into the picture. Doctors and midwives were paid for reporting children to be killed. They “sent lists of the infants in question to a postal box number in Berlin,” where bureaucrats arranged for the “nearest public health office [to] order the child’s admission to a pediatric clinic.” True, the payments per head were a mere two Reichsmarks, a far cry from the luxurious enrichment of those who participate in America’s abortion industry. As we learned in the summer of 2015 (not that it was much of a secret before), most of America’s abortion industry participates for personal gain, while mouthing, like the Nazis, propagandistic language of “women’s health” and “choice,” and arguing that their actions improve the lives of the nation as a whole. Evil individuals running Planned Parenthood, such as Deborah Nucatola, hope to earn enough money by selling the body parts of dead babies to buy a Lamborghini. So, as often happens, ideology shades into corruption, reinforcing the evil that men do.

Evans notes that within the medical community, the T4 program was no secret—the medical establishment was largely or wholly perverted, just as much of our medical establishment is perverted today with respect to abortion. It is true that most American doctors refuse to perform abortions, but the medical establishment that controls medical schools enforces a radical pro-abortion line, and doctors are increasingly threatened with loss of licenses for opposition to abortion, or for refusal to arrange for someone else to do the killing if they will not. “A large number of health officials and doctors were involved in the [T4] scheme, whose nature and purpose thus became widely known in the medical profession. Few of them objected. . . . Virtually the entire medical profession had been actively involved in the sterilization program, and from here it was but a short step in the minds of many to involuntary euthanasia. . . . Many of those doctors involved spoke with pride of their work even after the war, maintaining that they had been contributing to human progress.” We can only wonder whether the same will be true in a future post-abortion world.

The T4 program was quickly expanded to older children, adolescents, and adults. Given the large numbers projected to be killed, starvation and other slow methods were not adequate, so the doctors in charge, such as Victor Brack and Werner Heyde, developed methods of gassing groups of people, later used on an even greater scale in the Holocaust, and then ways of burning the corpses en masse. These methods were used to empty the mental asylums and other institutions, where there were no parents or guardians nearby to object to what was obviously happening (most parents objected to the T4 killings when they suspected their real nature, although some were happy to participate in “improving the race” and “making sure every child was wanted”). Those who implemented the T4 program also showed the same ghoulish enjoyment of their killings as the Planned Parenthood employees we saw on video in the summer of 2015. “At Hartheim [one of the asylums with crematoria newly built in] the staff held a party to celebrate their ten-thousandth cremation, assembling in a crematorium around the naked body of a recently gassed victim, which was laid out on a stretcher and covered with flowers. One staff member dressed as a clergyman and performed a short ceremony, then beer was distributed to all present.”

The program was kept quiet by the Nazis, outside the medical profession—as with today’s abortionists, the program was kept hidden from the public by the use of pseudonyms, innocuous titles and nondescript buildings, and sloganeering in response to inquiries. The press cooperated, of course. Public objections were rare. When one local judge, Lothar Kreyssig (a Confessing Church member) voiced his suspicions to the Justice Minister (here, of Brandenburg), the Justice Minister’s response “was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda.” Instead, as before, the program was run extra-legally by decree out of Hitler’s Chancellery. Kreyssig continued to complain, including to State Secretary Roland Freisler (later the infamous chief judge of the “People’s Court”), and was forcibly retired and silenced as a result, while the Justice Ministry assured judges and prosecutors that Hitler was well aware and approved of the murder program, even though it was technically illegal, as well as extra-legal. (Kreyssig’s silencing is directly analogous to the machinery of the American state currently being used against those who have exposed the true nature of America’s abortion regime, such as the heroic David Daleiden, who faces trumped-up criminal charges—more personal punishment than Kreyssig faced.) The whole legal structure of involuntary euthanasia, therefore, was very like the program of unrestricted abortion we have in America, the most extreme in the Western world, which was similarly imposed illegally and extra-legally. In our case it was not the party in power, but the unelected Supreme Court, which imposed abortion, through its creating out of whole cloth a phantom right to kill babies and reading it into the Constitution. The only difference is that our equivalents to Roland Freisler, such as Harry Blackmun and William Brennan, took their actions publicly and to open accolades. And unlike Freisler, they died in their beds, though presumably to go to the same reward as Freisler.

We should not ignore the personal responsibility of many parents in both abortion and the T4 program, even if we recognize and acknowledge the possible emotional burden an unwanted or handicapped child places on a parent. The initial steps in actually implementing the T4 program were internally justified by a 1939 letter from a father, Richard Kretschmar, to Hitler, wanting his infant son (“lacking a leg and suffering from convulsions”) killed, but his doctor refused, afraid not of the act, but of a possible prosecution for murder. Similarly, while traditionally and rationally parents have been regarded as less morally culpable for abortion than the person who performs the murder for money, this distinction should not hold in all cases. Sometimes, as was Richard Kretschmar, a parent who kills his baby is just as morally culpable as the abortionist, especially in this day of ultrasounds, where a heartbeat is clearly seen at less than five weeks after conception.

On the rare occasions that abortion proponents are actually willing to debate the substance of abortion, rather than chanting inane and meaningless slogans to drown out rational thought, you sometimes hear that one cannot compare abortion to the killing of someone able to appreciate what is happening to him, mentally deficient or not. This, of course, ignores partial birth abortions, as well as tends to rely on politicized science about at what point an unborn child can feel pain. But such arguments revolving around consciousness are, on a deeper level, profoundly stupid. They suggest that there was nothing wrong when Jewish children were removed from Auschwitz, “between the ages of five and twelve,” and “taken on 20 April 1945 to a sub-camp at Bullenhuser Damm.” There they “were injected with morphine, after which an SS man accompanying them hanged the sleeping children from a hook one by one, pulling on their bodies to make sure they would die.” The reality is that the only difference between an abortionist today and that SS man is that the SS man knew for certain his victims couldn’t feel their own deaths. The moral quantity is the same.

The Nazis, as is well known and Evans discusses at length, were violently opposed to Christianity, and had by 1939 long been actively persecuting both the small number of Protestants uncooperative with the Nazi program (mainly embodied in the Confessing Church) and the much larger number of uncooperative Catholics. The Pope had repeatedly and formally censured the Nazis, in this area specifically with regard to the sterilization program. Nonetheless, most priests and bishops were afraid, for good reason, both of their personal safety and of further suppression of the Church, since many priests were already in Dachau. And quite a few bishops supported other goals of the Third Reich. But it only took a few months, until mid-1940, for the Catholic hierarchy to get wind of the murders being conducted under the T4 program, in part through the voiced concerns of parents and also through the Caritas Association, which ran asylums.

Bishop Clemens August von Galen led the Catholic response, initially through official channels, but he was stonewalled by the Ministry of the Interior and received limited support from other bishops, some of whom were afraid of further persecution of priests, especially those already imprisoned in concentration camps. Nonetheless, in August 1941, he explicitly identified and publicly reviled the T4 program from the pulpit, and demanded that Catholics censure and avoid those involved in it. Galen printed his sermons and distributed them widely. “The sensation created by the sermons . . . was enormous.” The Gestapo arrested the priests in charge of printing, as well as others who spoke out in response. But other bishops took up the cry from the pulpit. “This was the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any Nazi policy since the beginning of the Third Reich.” And, notably, it took place at the height of the war and Nazi success in it, which was not the time most people were speaking out on topics the Nazis didn’t like. Galen himself expected he would certainly be killed, or, more precisely, martyred.

But that didn’t happen, because “so huge was the publicity he had generated that the Nazi leaders, enraged though they were, feared to take any action against him.” Despite pressure to hang him from Martin Bormann and others, Hitler and Goebbels simply didn’t dare to (although they had explicit plans to do so immediately after the war). Given backbone and courage by Galen, Catholics across the spectrum moved to obstruct the T4 program, in ways overt and covert. Anti-Nazi sentiment began to rise, and muttering directed at Hitler (who many believed did not know about the program, but they were beginning to change their minds) increased. Thus, by August 24, the T4 program was shut down (although sub rosa killings on a smaller scale of “life unworthy of life” continued until the end of the war). The lesson learned by the Nazis, though, wasn’t not to kill people—it was “just in case a future action of this kind against another minority ran into similar trouble, it was inadvisable to put such an order down in writing.” The machinery of extermination, including the means to kill and dispose of large numbers of people, had been developed, and soon enough, the Nazis had a new use for it.

[Review continues as first comment.]

[Gabriel Gomide · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esse foi o último livro da trilogia. Mesmo tendo uma introdução enorme para me adiantar para o que iria ser narrado durante os anos da guerra não estava preparado para a brutalidade da história da invasão dos países da Europa oriental. Durante alguns trechos tive que parar pelo enjoo físico que eu sentia.

Agora, colocando as minhas sensibilidades específicas de lado, o livro foi tudo que eu esperava. Excepcionalmente explicativo, claro e profundo. Com diversos excertos de diários de agentes que sofreram a repressão do regime na pele. Um perfeito capitulo conclusivo para a trilogia de Richard Evans.

Como nota importante, gostaria de ressaltar que o livro é sobre o Reich na guerra, ou seja, não se aprofunda tanto assim nos quesitos da guerra. Por mais que algumas descrições de batalhas no fronte oriental tenham sido bastante elucidativas, mesmo no primeiro capitulo o autor já indica que para uma exposição digna dos acontecimentos da guerra um livro inteiramente sobre isso seria necessário. O foco aqui, como nos outros livros é na Alemanha nazista.

[Edmond Dantes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terzo e finale caputolo della storia intrecciata di Nazismo e Germania dal periodo Bismarckinano al 1945 (e oltre...)
Poco o punto storia di guerra e battaglie, e solo, per mostrare il riflesso sulla società tedesca e sul "morale" interno.
Il vero secondo fronte per tutta la guerra fu per Hitler quello interno; ossessionato dal crollo del 1918 volle evitare il più possibile (ai soli tedeschi ariani) le durezze e le privazioni della guerra , con il risultato che il poco (oltre co sconclusionato) piano di produzione bellica aveva già fatto perdere la guerra a fine 1942...
Dettagli della distruzione dell'Europa da parte dei nuovi barbari che, comunqwue, contarano , salve poche eccezioni, sul silenzio complice di tante "autiortià costituite" tedesche, chiese (Cattolica e Protestante) in Primis....

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Those giving this work four or five stars can only have done so in order to have congratulated themselves on having had the persistence to slog their way through this tedious long work which is totally inept from beginning to end. The Third Reich during WWII is a very crowded field and every other work that I have read on the topic is dramatically better. William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" has best focus and narrative force. Volume II of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hiltler "Nemesis" provides a much better portrait of the inner workings of the Nazi party. However, Evan's is revealed at its weakest when compared to Mark Mazower's "'Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe" which does a far better job at explaining how the Nazi's ruled the various territories that they conquered.
Evan's very best work is "Death in Hamburg" which won the 1989 Wolfson demonstrated his extraordinary talent for conducting primary research and using secondary materials to support his investigations in the archives. For the "Third Reich at War" which is purely a work of synthesis history there was no structured primary research project while his choice of secondary sources was capricious at best. Using is deep understanding of Germany, he writes with sensitivity and insight on the "White Rose" resistance movement which was nonetheless a very marginal phenomenon. Evans, however, has virtually nothing to say to about the very large and active partisan groups in Poland, Yugoslavia and Russia. He very rightfully draws attention to the extraordinary insights into occupied France that can be obtained in Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise" but otherwise ignores the abundant material from the French literary community on occupied France.
In my opinion, Evans is at his very worst in his treatment of Poland and the former Yugoslavia. Because Evans very reasonably feels that the Endlosung (a.k.a. Shoah a.k.a. Holocaust) was one of the dominating aspects of the Third Reich. Thus he spends a great deal of time on the events in Poland where the extermination camps were created. He gives a solid if not brilliant history of the camps but everything else about Poland is garbled. He makes no mention of the "Zegota" and other groups that operated in Poland for the purpose of hiding and rescuing Jews. His version of the Warsaw uprising is garbled at best . Evans is even worse in Yugoslavia where he discusses only Ante Pavelic's Ustase movement and government in Croatia giving no space to either Tito or the Royalists.
Go ahead and read this book if you have already bought it. It still contains numerous pages where Evans drawing on his great knowledge of Germany to provide insight about the country during WWII. Evan's greatest sin is not arriving at the wrong conclusions, it is rather his erratic way in what he chooses to cover. If you have not already spent your money, there many better books available about the Third Reich that you could buy.

[Daniel Zadravec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard J Evans three part series on the Third Reich is a brilliant synthesis on German history, and he takes the reader from the earliest days of the Third Reich to its very end, and beyond. Looking at how the Nazis slowly gained influence and controlled aspects of all daily German lives, Evans shows how the Nazis changed and adapted their message in the turbulent nineteen twenties, until they connected with enough Germans to come to power. From there, he shows how the Nazis insidiously infiltrated German lives, until there was only the regime and the Leader, and Hitler's mad dreams of German conquest could be realized.
Evans portrays the maniacal dictator at the heart of Nazi Germany in full display, first exposing the charisma and oratory skill that allowed Hitler to climb to the head of the Nazi Party. From there, he shows the, political maneuvering, machinations, and good fortune, and above all, incessant violence and hatred inflicted upon his enemies that allowed Hitler to climb to to head of the German government and country, readying the country for war.


In this book, Evans pens the story of the Third Reich at war, from the triumphal beginning of rapid victories in Poland and France, and the long awaited invasion of Eastern Europe and Russia, where the Nazis genocidal madness and horror would be unleashed in full force, leading to some of the most morally repugnant actions in history. After this victorious beginning, Evans shows the barbarity of the Nazis and Germans in their conquered territory, especially in Eastern Europe, and the slow turning of the tide during their fateful push deeper into Russian territory, at the failing to capture Moscow, and the catastrophic German defeat at Stalingrad, all which served to pause the German advance across Eastern Europe and allow the full industrial might of the US and the Soviets to come to bare.

He then explores the military defeat of the German army abroad, and the societal defeat of the Nazi Party in Germany. As Allied bombs fell over their heads, Germans slowly lost faith as their Leader increasingly disappeared from public life after devastating German losses, while privately Hitler raged at the supposed incompetence and treacherous nature of his generals, all the while drawing up plans to push back the invading Allied armies encircling Germany, all to fail in the end. In the end, the great Leader of the German Reich shot himself, leaving subordinates to surrender Germany to the Allies.

Most masterfully, and importantly of all, Evans shows why the tale of the Third Reich endures, of how a people can embrace, or at least fearfully accept a fanatical regime appealing to the worst parts of humanity. Of how hatred and barbarity and vileness can come to rule a society, and how these impulses of hatred and death upon Germany's enemies can be fanned and flamed, until the fires of war rage across the world, burning a madman upon the pyre of the World.

[David McGrogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of the three volumes of this trilogy is excellent, but this is probably the best, if only for the sheer feat that it represents - condensing so much historical incident into an (admittedly long) 760 pages. What is perhaps most notable is its insistence on the centrality of the Holocaust to WWII. Quite rightly, Evans eschews much in the way of military history; the war was lost as soon as the Nazis invaded Russia simply by dint of lack of resources. The real story is the way in which an entire society was transformed from the centre of European civilisation to a nihilistic, moral void in the space of less than a decade. Evans recognises this, and brings the sheer enormity of it home in a very calm and understated way.

[Donato Colangelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a magnificent conclusion to the Third Reich Trilogy. Many of the events here told can be found in other books on the same topic, of course. And yet the book has its own identity, its own testimonies, its own stories. Klemperer’s story, which started in the first book, is here brought to the end. Through all the three books, contributions from his diaries make the narrative a vivid, terrifying experience. The same applies to the entries of the other historical actors which are called by Evans to testify.
Overall, a great opera, fully integrated with an extended list of references and enriched by many maps.
It deserves a place on the library of those interested jn understanding the Third Reich, why it sprang from German society, how it gained momentum, how it changed the course of history, how it failed.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve now read the complete trilogy and this one took awhile, I needed to just put it down at times. Not a trilogy everyone would choose or want to read but important nonetheless, and especially now. To quote the final 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 us all…It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face…conformity or resistance, action or inaction…” I hope we choose resistance and action.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars. While there are certainly aspects of Evans's book that remove it from the typical broad appraisal of the Nazi period, there are points where he relies upon old saws, as well as some peculiar opinions, somewhat understandably but still distracting. On the whole, however, it's a very capable work and worth reading for a general understanding of the regime and the peoples who lived through it.

[Russ Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book with only a vague sense of whether I would read books 1 or 2 in this series. Reading the last book first was not a problem if the reader has a general sense of the history. However, I am now reading the others and they do build in a well structured flow.

Structured flow, well constructed, and organized are in deed words that describe this book. It is one of the best histories I have read on the topic. Mr. Evans explains the underlying motivations, the nuances and of course the details of the Third Reich’s actions from 1939 to 1945. In depth analysis of the racial policy, armaments industry, politics, warfare etc. are all covered in interesting detail. This goes a long way in making facts into a compelling storyline. I’m not saying it’s exciting like a novel but for the history enthusiast, I would strongly recommend. As mentioned, I am reading books 1and 2!

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best (and most brutal) volume of Richard Evans's largely impressive Third Reich Trilogy, covering 1939 to 1945. It's odd to me that Evans has dogged on William Shirer, even though he leans heavily into Shirer's diary (along with that of Victor Klemperer, as he has in the first two books). But no matter. Evans's great skills as a historian serve him well in showing how systemic cruelty developed in the Nazi regime's final days. He traces the use of mechanized genocide from the equally evil Aktion T-4 program. And his narrative strategy in sticking with the German perspective reveals the horrors perpetrated and suffered by the German people. One of the great thorny moral issues in studying World War II -- and this has been argued by historians since the last several decades -- is whether the revenge that the Red Army took against the Germans after the war with their rampant rape and murder was justified. Evans reminds us just how much Russia suffered during Operation Barbarossa. It is believed that three million Red Army soldiers perished because of the cold and slave labor. Evil perpetuated evil. And certainly the evil of the camps, which wiped out so much of the Jewish people, was unambiguous. Much of the material here is truly horrifying and it was impossible to read this volume without taking breaks -- even though Evans has written a tremendously gripping volume. I was greatly impressed with just how much Evans was able to pack in -- although I think he could have added more material about the game-changing battle of Stalingrad. Above all, Evans' final volume in the trilogy reminds us of how swiftly the baleful impetus of genocidal and totalitarian evil can perpetuate itself upon a continent. It also documents how little Hitler was prepared for Russian resilience, as well as the influx of ordnance and aircraft from the Americans. The bombing of Hamburg likewise did a great deal to destroy German morale, creating an epidemic of homelessness and death which the Nazis were unable to remedy, causing widespread discontent towards Hitler that was not allowed to bubble up until the war was become more of a decisive victory.