The Third Reich in Power (The Third Reich Trilogy) Paperback – Illustrated, September 26, 2006

I am exhausted after finishing this second massive work by Richard Evans. I don’t know if I have the stamina or the stomach for book three, the war years. The depth of his research is really extraordinary.

This is the middle volume of a Nazi trilogy. Part 1 is the way to power, part 3 is the war. The middle part covers the years 1933 to 1939. Evans has decided to arrange the vast material by subject matter rather than chronologically. This proves to be a wise choice. We have the option to choose individual chapters like independent shorter books. The book is highly recommended to anybody who has an interest in the subject. It serves as a myth buster in several interesting ways. My review will give a short summary of key points of the chapters.Chapter 1 is about fear and terror. Unruly internal competition is killed off early; opposition parties are banned, their leaders and activists arrested and many killed; growth of SS, Gestapo, special courts for `crimes against the people'; denunciation as tool of control; block wardens; concentration camps; manipulation of plebiscites by intimidation and falsification. Never believe anybody who claims that Hitler unified the German people!Chapter 2 on propaganda addresses that question. Goebbels' aim was winning the mind of 100% of the people, not just the 37% who had voted for the Nazis at their peak. All media are brought under full control. Art is dealt with on a broad scale. Apart from the conflicts with artists, there was the internal struggle among the Nazis. We catch ourselves taking sides with Goebbels, who was willing to support some modernists. The boss himself was a pure square in art matters.Chapter 3 deals with education and religion. Very interesting: the narration on religious groups and the Nazis' attempts to replace allegiance to churches with something else. Simplified views of Nazism like to claim that it was atheist. In fact, the Nazis tried to unify German churches, which were split on a roughly 2:1 relation between Protestants and Catholics. Their power base was among Protestants. They tried to take over this church and then lure the Catholics into the fold. This failed, mainly due to resistance from inside the church. The Catholic Church first helped the Nazis to power (by the Center Party's refusal to resist), but then put up many small non-cooperation hurdles. In the end, the Nazis tried to develop their own neo-pagan style, which never fully succeeded. Sad truth: the only religious group that wholeheartedly resisted Nazism on all levels was Jehova's Witnesses.In the field of education, the 30s saw a steep decline in academic standards and also in student numbers. The drop in birth rates during WW1 plus the party's anti-intellectualism, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism combined towards creating a bleak outlook for Germany's academic future. Applied research was treated differently and especially militarily relevant subjects were lavishly funded, but outside universities.Chapter 4 on the economy shows how the myth of the end to unemployment was based on a combination of partly successful Keynesianism with fortunate trends of the time, plus statistical manipulations, and not to forget: the re-militarization of Germany, including conscription. All state interference was related to re-armament. The economy was initially left to run as a `free market', but markets were manipulated and directed. Re-militarization was the overriding concern. By 1936 it became clear that the speed of the development was behind schedule, so the economy was more radically transformed into a war economy. Technocrats like `economy czar' Schacht were sidelined.Chapter 5 deals with various fields of social engineering. A backbone of support for the regime was the so-called Mittelstand. That means, in a narrower sense, all independent small businesses, including land-owning farmers. In a larger sense it would include professionals, civil servants, and white collar workers. Enthusiasm and illusions were grand among these people. Reality clashed with the overriding re-armament policy, which damaged many small businesses.The living standards of the working classes had not improved over the pre-depression level by 39. Consolation prizes were given via the Strength through Joy program, which was widely recognized for what it was: eyewash, substitute for real improvements. At the same time the corruption level of the Nazi run labor organization was spectacular. Only Third World dictators can be that shameless.Chapter 6 is about `racial hygiene'. Germany's laws favoring compulsory sterilization for carriers of inherited illnesses, and for other undesirables, were by no means unique in the international scenario. From here it would progress towards euthanasia in later years. Minorities were systematically harassed: Gypsies, homosexuals, mixed descendants of various combinations (like offspring of black French soldiers after the Rhineland occupation, or kids of German colonialists with African women), and then mainly Jews. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 introduced drastic interferences in personal lives by excluding Jews from social activities. After the 1936 Olympics, anti-Jewish violence grew towards the peak of Reichskristallnacht in 38, the `night of broken glass'. `Drive Jews out of Europe within 10 years' was the declared vision, before the goal shifted to annihilation.Chapter 7 describes war preparations. War had been Hitler's declared goal always, and all declarations to the contrary were just obfuscation, as was the peace agreement with Poland, the naval pact with Britain, the Hitler-Stalin-Pact. Step by step the thugs went forward: quitting the League of Nations, a triumph at the Saar plebiscite, diplomatic support for Italy's Ethiopia expansion, occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland, material support to Franco's insurrection in Spain, invasion and annexation of Austria, the invasion and annexation of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, the annexation of the Lithuanian region of Memel. Britain and France watched. Then came the invasion of Poland... (to be continued).Superb organization of the huge subject make the book a brilliantly brief overview, despite it's over 700 pages. What is missing? I would have wished for a special chapter on the military and its reconstruction. There are aspects that are totally neglected, like the cooperation with the Chinese Nationalists.

Volume 2 of 3.... continues meticulous scholarship combined with tight focused writing. BUT all but one of the numerous maps are included in the wrong orientation! All but one off by 90', a stupid and sloppy mistake. Some other formatting issues, including mispunctuation of quoted material. Still a great resource but lack of basic editorial oversight for Kindle is disappointing.

Evans deftly distills decades of research from English and German sources, mainly secondary but some primary too, in this masterful account of the years 1933-1939 in Germany. As a lifelong WWII buff, I learned a lot from this book.In the preceding volume, "The Coming of the Third Reich," Evans describes the conditions that led to the rise of Nazism up to 1933. This book picks up where the preceding one ends. In some ways, both books (which I've read) can be read separately. If you've forgotten some of the finer points of the first volume, Evans provides a helpful summary of it in this volume, as well as footnote references to that work, if you're inclined to flip back and forth.Describing how the Nazis implemented their policies in this period, and how the German public reacted to it, is a massive subject, and in many ways summarizing this work does a disservice to it. Instead, it's perhaps better to focus on the themes that emerge.First, Evans shows that various policies were willingly embraced by the German public in many ways, but only up to a point. This is clear on certain things like policing and justice, schools, and industry. Cops stood by while SA men beat up Jews, teachers taught anti-Semitic works to their students, and workers and business owners all benefited from Nazi arms production. However, Evans also carefully distinguishes between these public manifestations of support and some unintended consequences; namely the individual's retreat into a focus on job security, enjoying vacations thanks to Strength Through Joy, and sharing their reservations and doubts in private with loved ones at home. Germans did support the regime, but only so far. So, despite what you might think from years of watching enthusiastic, Sieg-Heiling Germans in documentaries (and there were those, no doubt), Evans shows that the Nazis failed to get complete, whole-hearted support from everyone. The Third Reich aimed to be a totalitarian society, but didn't quite achieve that. There's a timeless lesson here about the human desire for total control and how humans frustrate that goal.Second, it becomes clear that the Third Reich was focused on war. And not just a European war, or just a war for lebensraum in the east. These were first steps toward what Hitler really wanted: Germany's global domination. I think it's helpful to understand Hitler's desire for autarchy (economic independence), as it informed much of his foreign policy thinking and even some of his wartime decisions later. The Third Reich's leaders were motivated, and constantly hamstrung, by a lack of workers and raw materials as they prepared for war. Their solution: take these resources by force, as loot. (Among other things, the corruption and looting that went on, from the top down, as an adjunct of Nazi policy is a sub-theme). We start to see this in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and it's easy to make the connection to later developments like slave labor and oil-seeking enterprises like Case Blue. From all this arises one of the essential contradictions of German war planning (such as it was): wanting autarchy, and using war to get it, but never having enough material resources to fight this ever-expanding war successfully. The German war effort was flawed by this fundamental problem as soon as it began, and we see the origins of it here.Third, while the Germans cheered Hitler's early foreign policy successes (the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia), this was partly from a sense of relief that war had been avoided. While the Nazis sought war (Hitler very clearly so by mid-1939), the German people deeply wanted to avoid it. This perhaps reveals the biggest gap between the Nazis and their own people. Again, Evans shows us that Nazi power had its limits; not everyone was a convert eagerly goose-stepping his or her way over the cliff.Fourth, Evans argues quite convincingly that the Nazi state was a modern one, not a traditional conservative one, or even a reactionary one. This difference is clear when comparing the Nazi regime to other European dictatorships of the time. Nazi modernity manifested in a number of ways (it's easy to point to synthetic fuel, ballistic missiles, and jet aircraft here), but perhaps the clearest and most central to the Nazi political state is the party's desire for a racial utopia. Evans carefully shows how the Jews were excluded from German society, step by step, and also picks apart the fundamental contradictions of Nazi policy, as shown most clearly in the Nuremburg Laws. Ultimately, the Nazi definition of Jewishness was in the eye of the beholder, and in the end this was defined as much by religious practice as it was by race. The German pursuit of a perfect society built on a new man and woman was flawed from the beginning.Evans is a clear writer, and he ably pulls together narrative, analysis, and quotes to keep this history informative, lively, and ever human. Typical sources include reports from Social Democratic spies, who sent their observations back to the politicians in exile. Ironically, perhaps, Gestapo reports on the public mood, and the work to be done in molding public opinion further, provide abundant source material for the historian.Evans is even witty at times, which helps break the tension. He also has a patient manner in describing these things; sort of like that ideal teacher you wish you always had. At the same time, the book tends to be thematic and not a straightforward chronology, so this may pose a challenge to some readers, as it was to me at times. Accordingly, some familiarity with events in the 1930s will be helpful before diving into this account, which focuses on events in Germany. The maps looked informative, and they were helpful at points, but they were often too small to see on a Kindle White.