Book Review: The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans

Book Review by Bud Gundy

Books about the Third Reich can be deathly dull.  I know – what could be dull about a regime as savage and brutal as the Nazis?  I can understand why military historians and WWII buffs might find the details of troop movements and minor political intrigue fascinating, but for most of us, so much information can weigh a book down like a battleship anchor.

I’ve started any number of books about Germany before and during WWII, only to put them down in less than a hundred pages, weary with the dull recitation of facts that so many war historians seem to feel is a necessary antidote to the subject.

There are exceptions, of course.  In the past several years, the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s majestic two-volume biography of Hitler stands out, along with his account of the fall of the Nazi regime in The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany.  The Long Night by Steve Wick was another recent account of the Third Reich and the chronicler William Shirer that was immensely satisfying.

I can now add The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans to the list of books on the subject that, while rich in historical context and meticulously detailed, offered an accessible and readable account of these years.

I’m no expert on this subject, so I can’t say if Evans plows new ground.  Yet he writes this story – this massive, unwieldy, many-layered story – with an insight and command of the facts that is often breathtaking.

As the third volume in his series on the Third Reich, this book focuses on the war years alone – 1939 to1945 – only describing earlier events to provide context.  I was grateful for this compartmentalized approach, since nothing is quite as inscrutable as the politics of National Socialism.  However much material is at hand to condemn Hitler to the ignominious depths of historical contempt, he was also a deeply irrational man and his political machinations are painfully boring.

So Evens spares us these details and begins his account with the initial German invasions that succeeded with such stunning rapidity that they inflated an enormous reservoir of adulation for Hitler that he began to suck dry almost immediately afterwards.  His armies of adoring fans – in the party, the military and among civilians – are detailed with none of the nationalized gloss and economic excuses I’ve read elsewhere, and devotes itself to the disquieting sadism that would lead to one atrocity piled upon the next.  You squirm for the first third of the book since, however horrifying the tales of German war crimes in Poland and Russia may be, you know that worse it to come.

In a riveting and sickening section devoted to (and named) The Final Solution, the brutality of the holocaust is examined with unflinching honesty.  There is, of course, no other way to deal with this subject, but while I’ve read several accounts of the holocaust, this was the first to really reveal its slap-dash and sloppy procession.  I had always thought that the initial experiments of gassing victims in mobile vans (where the exhaust was used to kill the passengers) ended with the introduction of Zyklon-B and the building of the gas chambers, but Evans shows that this method was used until the end.  Mass shootings, burning victims alive and hangings were never put aside as inefficient methods of genocide – all were employed throughout the territories controlled by Hitler.

The numbers of victims stagger the imagination.  You can read, in one or two paragraphs, of several mass murders that consumed the lives of tens of thousands of people in a territory.  Then you read one or two more paragraphs and get another such list.  Then another.  And another.  And on and on.   I defy anyone to read this section and not come away feeling anything but terror for the wanton savagery lurking in human nature.

As the war progressed and Hitler’s boasting predictions of easy victory over the Soviets and the British (sound familiar?) failed to materialize, German society began, slowly, to transform.  Grim resignation replaced the giddy sense of superiority that so many Germans recklessly embraced, and anxiety replaced the sense of adventure that easy victory had falsely promised.

I was shocked to learn that many senior Nazis realized as early as 1941 that German would lose the war.  Not only were the Allied armies vastly larger, but Germany’s manufacturing industry had no hope of competing with the combined industrial output of Russia, Great Britain the US.  As soon as Stalin and his armies put up a resistance that Hitler never expected (he thought Stalin would lose power the moment he invaded Russia) Germany’s savvy officer corps realized that the long-term situation was hopeless.  Again, they realized this in 1941!

As Germany hurled toward the abyss, Evans takes time to pause and look at some of the individuals – the doctors and scientists and others – who blindly followed, assuaging their intellectual support for such unspeakably hateful leadership with nothing more than lazy rationalism.  I found this section utterly absorbing.

But by far, the most riveting account is the downfall of Nazi Germany.  An endlessly fascinating topic, Evans details this period with the suspense of a finely crafted story.  Everywhere, Germany was in retreat.  Oil stocks were low with no hope of replenishment.  Nightly bombing raids destroyed cities and towns.  Hitler rarely ventured into public in these years, giving an occasional speech broadcast on the radio that was greeted, more and more, with scorn by ordinary Germans.  Yet still, the Nazi regime held absolute power, now inflicting its well-honed terror techniques on so-called Aryans.  One story will always stay with me: in the final months of the war, school girls were now called on to help with war effort and at a training camp, an allied bombing raid caused one girl to flee her post in fear of her life.  She was summarily executed in front of the other girls.  After so much murder, this one death does not shock the reader, but it shocked the girls and illustrates the frantic attempts by Nazi leaders to cling to power. What else could such monumentally guilty men do?

Perhaps the most illuminating detail is that Hitler only openly admitted the war had been lost one week before his own suicide.  One week.  I don’t have the time to ponder what that might reveal about such a monumentally self-centered and supremely stupid man.  How could anyone worship such a person?  Don’t ask me.

The Third Reich at War is a long read, but more than worth the effort.

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