Review of Richard J. Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich"

Richard Evans cites some fascinating numbers in the introductory book of his trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi power in Germany: the continued output of accounts of Germany’s part in World War II has been nonstop. We can quibble over the technicalities of what might be meant by “well-understood history,” but most historians would say that we more or less understand the dynamics of the breakdown of Weimar democracy and the rise of the Nazism; some more speculative observers might even suggest that we can definitively account for the rise of a Hitler-like demagogue. Why, then, the constant deluge of historical accounting and recounting? 

Evans suggests that, aside from the consumption of World War II historical as pulp with no properly historical academic value, accounts of it are often riddled with the subjective moralizing of its authors. For Evans, this tends to get in the way of the proper obeisance to history that all historians should pay. In a way, he also wrote the book for the mind-bogglingly stupid “historian” David Irving who claimed during a trial for libel (that he lost) that there was “no general history of Nazi Germany” he [Irving] could recommend - which is of course not to say that a book of clear-minded history has ever disabused a mindless ideologue of his willful abuse of history and disgraceful rape of the public record.

The scope of the book is gigantic, covering pre-Weimar Germany through the beginning of 1933, so it covers approximately fifteen years of German history – culture, art, politics and political opinions and society. In the introductory chapter, Evans attempts to trace certain trends back to the end of the nineteenth century. While it two generations of history doesn’t sound like a tremendous amount, it makes for awfully portentous reading especially when that history, despite the avidity of the historians trying forever anew to revisit it, seems raw and fresh. In tackling so much, however, Evans does a uniquely good job in abbreviating the national “German character” of the time – if such a thing can be imagined divorced from the Nazis’ sense of the term. 

While this volume does not cover the gas chambers or the labor camps that the Nazis built, it does show the careful way in which they destroyed the few legal protections that the Weimar Republic had put in place for all citizens. They then used their combined power of both the police state and their mass media/propaganda machine to destroy long-time political friendships and bonds. Over time, social life in the public sphere consisted of fewer and fewer activities that we not explicitly affiliated with the National Socialist Party. Evans also covers the complicated history of the Church’s role (Protestant and Catholic) in sharing Nazi sympathies.

It would be easy for a book like this to turn into simply a critical biography of Hitler’s rise to power, but to its credit it is so much more than that. It presents, in a word, a “zeitgeist” – not necessarily the only one that could have built up to World War II, but one that allowed history to run the course that it did. Is there a lot of new unearthed information here? No. Is it particularly brilliantly written or historically insightful? I didn’t find it to be either. In fact, it highly resembles many other histories of the time period in subject matter, form, and tone. This doesn’t, however, I think detract from its value as an authoritative, exhaustive historical account by an established scholar with impeccable credentials who has made it his job to fight against the ideological bigotry and hatred of willed historical blindness that can be the only causes of Holocaust denial.