The Coming of the Third Reich

This text is incredible. Its breadth and depth are unsurpassed. This is scholarly analysis at its very best.That said, this text is written for those who are serious about understanding the war in Europe. It is not written as "popular history." If you are not seriously committed to studying and understanding the history of the Second World War, then this book is not for you. If you have very little knowledge of WWII and world history in general, this is not the book you are looking for. This is not a beginners' history book. This is not an introduction to the history of World War Two. This is a very scholarly text that goes into its subject matter in great depth.

What a great book. Couldn't put it down. Very informative and the writing is very easy to read. So many similarities of Nazis coming into power and the USA under Trump. Banning books, art, movies...changing history books. Its uncanny. Looking forward to the other two volumes.

Because we are marking the 100th anniversary of WWl and because I knew little about the War and its causes I embarked on a reading journey about a year ago to fill the gap. I began with Christopher Clark's excellent "The Sleepwalkers" to learn of pre-War events and causes, followed with Tuchman's "The Guns of August" and I was off to the races - but things quickly bogged down. Tuchman's book was literally about the month of August 1914, but hey, there was still another 4 years of war to follow. What happened? So I read more books, and noted references to the forthcoming and flawed Versailles Treaty. Well, you get the picture.But which book to read about the intervening years between WWl and WWll? Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" was clearly the most popular (over 1660 Amazon reviews), but Evans book (200+ reviews) appeared to be favored by critics and students of 20th century world history. One of the most significant criticisms of Shirer seemed to be that he traced origins from Hitler's early years to explain how the third Reich came to be whereas Evans believed that events must be traced back further(Bismarck, 1870s) into German history to explain the German mindset post- WWl. Another reason I did not choose Shirer was that his book concludes with the end of WWll and the scope I was interested in was pre-WWll. Therefore Shirer's book is more than twice the length of Evan's 461 pages; the 670 count includes notes, index etc..Evans book is very comprehensive. Much of the emphasis is on the political parties, and their ups and downs. There were many of them and hence coalitions changed constantly. Leadership was weak, elections were frequent. Economic conditions were appalling, unemployment was high, hyperinflation set in and citizens purchased bread, when it was available, with wheelbarrows full on marks; the next day the same loaf of bread might cost twice as much. And the Bolsheviks were attempting to get a foothold in German Government. And so Hitler's Nazi party was able to gain control of the government after a 10 year battle though winning less than 38% of the vote in every election. And Germany was bound to pay reparations to the WWl victors. Hitler as we all know didn't win because he ran a slick campaign. Violence grew more and more each year. Many opponents were beaten to death by stormtroopers. Many were sent to concentration camps, mostly for months at a time although others had long sentences for their political opposition. Many died in the camps, forerunners of the camps of the Holocaust.The story of course is not just about Hitler's political successes. It covers the economic problems and recovery made by Germany, Germany's focus on nationalism, the origins of eugenics, and of course the steadily increasing portrayal of German Jews as the enemy, an enemy to be driven out of Germany. But not all Jews, at least not right away. Apparently, Hitler was a bit of a pragmatist, and did not want the country to suffer economically with a devastating loss of doctors, bankers and some other professions, at least not immediately. A complex story, told in great detail by Evans. This book ends mid 1933. Evans has two companion books, one on the 3rd Reich in power, and the third at war.I found it difficult to hold my concentration with this book for very long. Lots and lots of text. At times it felt nothing was left out. There were some charts, but most showed how well political parties did from one election to the next. I would like to have seen more economic data, particularly over the 1920-40 span. I would like to have seen less about political parties #6,7,8,and 9 and more about the economy. Especially how a country who lost a major war and owed millions in reparations, suffered hyperinflation, yet managed to have resources in place to launch another major war 20 years later.

It's just the sum of the contingencies of what people and nature do to each other in the irrevesrible course of time. There's nothing `inevitable' in history until it seems so after the fact. "Destiny" is a mere sleight of tongue, and `manifest destiny' is a declaration of intent rather than an anaylsis of past events, which would read truer as `manifesto: destiny.' Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Toynbee and such were theologians, not historians; the `Westward March' of the World Spirit is just a rhetorical parade toward the justification of national misbehavior, whether the music is the Horst Wessel Song or The Stars and Stripes Forever.That's my own formulation, and it might well be too florid to suit Professor Richard J Evans. Nevertheless I think it expresses his fundamental skepticism toward any kind of historical determinism. Evans is not a Marxist of whatever caliber, but he's just as little a Wagnerian Romantic. He begins his detailed account of "The Coming of the Third Reich" by dismissing the notions of a unique German Character and/or a Thousand-Year Mythos of German Exceptionalism, despite the fact that many Germans and especially German hsitorians have subscribed to such ideas.Specifically, he writes:-- "It was this atmosphere [following WW1] of national trauma, political extremism, violent conflict, and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born."-- "Extreme violence against the left had been legiinized, if not encouraged, by the moderate Social Democrats; but this in no way exempted them from being a target themselves ..."-- "Politics, to reverse a famous dictum ... became war pursued by other means."-- "... the anti-semitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politcs that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum."-- "A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of .. investments in the United States, brough widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. Small businesses and workshops were particularly badly hit. In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying thier livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to belive the claims of ... conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame."-- "For the diaffected and the unsuccessful, thsoe who felt pushed aside by the Juggernaut of industrialization and yearned for a simpler, more ordered, more secure, more heirarchical society such as they imagined had existed in the not-too-distant past, the Jews symbolized cultural, financial and social modernity."Can you see where these quotations are leading? Substitute one scapegoat for another, switch all references to Jews to `Liberals' or `Secular Humanists' and you'll notice that the same conditions of overheated Reaction that unhinged Germany in the early 1920s have become prevalent in the USA in the current decade. In fact, one of the best reasons for studying the Coming of Nazism in Germany is to evaluate whether rabid rightwing agitation in the USA really does replicate the conditions that allowed Hitler to claim a mandate. As the novelist Sinclair Lewis realized in the 1930s, observing the rise of Nazism, it's not enough to just shrug one's shoulders and declare that "It Can't Happen Here."Let's be clear that Dr Evans does not address the milieu of extremism in the USA at the turn of the 21st Century. His work is a soberly detailed recounting of political and cultural developments in Germany from the Unification of 1871 to the accession to power of Hitler in 1933. Evans's prose is clear, dry, and cogent; this text might remind some older TV watchers of the `mantra' of a certain LAPD dectective: "Just the facts, Ma'm!" No single fact, or current of facts, explained the rise of ideological tyrannies in Europe -- not only in Germany, but catastrophically also in Russia, Italy, and Spain -- during the First World War and the decades thereafter. The reader of Professor Evan's book will need a capacious, orderly memory to store and evaluate all the threads of contingency and causation that comprise his account. But the effort will be worthwhile; this book is the most coherent and plausible `overview' of the birth of Nazism I've encountered. It's the first volume of a trilogy, by the way. I look forward, after a breather, to reading the continuation, the second volume, dealing with the actual operation of the Third Reich in Power, from 1933 to 1941.