The Coming of the Third Reich

Omer Bartov

Evans has accomplished his goal of writing a readable account of the origins of the Third Reich from the unification of Germany in 1871 to the establishment of the Nazi regime in 1933. He provides many insights into the political culture of imperial and Weimar Germany, the mentality of the Nazi storm troopers and the impacts of the inflation of the early 1920s and the depression and unemployment of the early 1930s.
— The Washington Post

The New York Times

Richard J. Evans's Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis -- knowledgeable and reliable, and playing to the author's strengths as it highlights the interconnections between politics and society. Evans, the author of several books about Nazi Germany, reminds us at the outset that we should not read too much into the activities of nasty but small anti-Semitic and nationalist extremist groups before World War I. Instead he underscores the importance of the postwar crisis, a Germany left bitterly divided between Social Democrats and Communists, an economy ravaged by unemployment and a country led astray by a political and industrial elite with no real commitment to democracy. This is a vivid although familiar account of why the Weimar Republic collapsed. Evans shows how the ingredients for Nazi triumph were assembled and what was needed to make them jell: add war and depression, cook in a turbulent political atmosphere for several years and serve hot. — Mark Mazower

New York Newsday

Evans asks, in different ways, whether the movement's rise to power was as irresistible as the Nazis tried to make it seem.

Publishers Weekly

On March 30, 1933, two months after Hitler achieved power, Paul Nikolaus, a Berlin cabaret comedian, wrote disconsolately, "For once, no joke. I am taking my own life.... [U]nfortunately I have fallen in love with my Fatherland. I cannot live in these times." How Germans could remain in love with their fatherland under Nazism and even contribute willingly to its horrific extremism is the subject of Cambridge historian Evans's gripping if overwhelmingly detailed study, the first of three projected volumes. Readers watch a great and historic culture grow grotesquely warped from within, until, in 1933, a dictatorial state was imposed upon the ruins of the Weimar republic. A host of shrill demagogues had, in the preceding decades, become missionaries to an uneasy coalition of the discontented, eager to subvert Germany's democratic institutions. This account contrasts with oversimplified diagnoses of how Nazism succeeded in taking possession of the German psyche. Evans asserts that Hitler's manipulative charisma required massive dissatisfaction and resentment available to be exploited. Nazism found convenient scapegoats in historic anti-Semitism, the shame of an imposed peace after WWI and the weakness of an unstable government alien to the disciplined German past. Although there have been significant recent studies of Hitler and his regime, like Ian Kershaw's brilliant two volumes, Evans (In Hitler's Shadow, etc.) broadens the historic perspective to demythologize how morbidly fertile the years before WWI were as an incubator for Hitler. 31 illus., 18 maps. (Feb. 9) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

This first part of what will be Evans' three-volume history of Hitler's regime is the most comprehensive and convincing work so far on the fall of Weimar and Hitler's rise to power. Unlike past accounts suggesting that things could have turned out differently had some of the key players been less foolish, Evans builds, stone by stone, a monument to prove that Hitler's ascent was the only possible outcome even though the Nazi Party never captured an absolute majority of votes. He begins with the legacy of the past: how "mainstream parties" adopted anti-Semitic ideas; how pseudoscientific notions of racial hygiene developed starting before 1914; how Germany's defeat in World War I allowed Nazism to emerge as a serious political force by causing Germans to seek "an authoritarian alternative to the civilian politics that seemed so signally to have failed Germany in its hour of need." He finds the Weimar Constitution no worse than many others, but "the fatal lack of legitimacy from which the Republic suffered magnified the constitution's faults many times over." With that lack of legitimacy compounded by hyperinflation, depression, and cultural clashes, the Nazis managed to prevail through a deadly combination of violence and propaganda, both unprecedented in their intensity.

The last part of the book is a detailed, depressing account of Hitler's transformation of Germany in a few months in 1933, including the "cultural revolution" in which both Martin Heidegger and storm troopers played key roles. The Nazi "revolution," Evans concludes, was meant to be "the world-historical negation of its French predecessor," offering "a synthesis of the revolutionary and the restorative." Unconcerned with overthrowing the social system, Nazism focused on "race, culture and ideology"-and on creating "a dictatorship the like of which had never yet been seen."

Library Journal

Do we really need another history of the Third Reich? Evans (history, Cambridge Univ.; Lying About Hitler) answers that while studies of Nazism have proliferated, what is lacking is a narrative and analytical history directed at the general reader. His projected trilogy aims to provide just that. This impressive first volume covers the period from the founding of modern Germany (1871) through Hitler's coming to power (1933). Evans argues that to regard Hitler's rise as the logical by-product of a fundamental flaw in the German character often requires bending evidence for this thesis from disparate events and themes throughout German history. Although Evans does not regard Nazism as inevitable, he does not lose sight of the myriad anti-Semitic movements that populated the German landscape, along with the various forces-militarism, socialism, capitalism-vying for influence in German society. Germany was an industrial giant by 1914, yet paradoxically its economic success concealed the fact that it had not yet completed the process of nation building. Evans argues that during the crisis of 1933, the leaders of the Weimar republic assumed that the Nazis had at least "a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic politics." Hitler, however, was adept at using democratic institutions, while planning their destruction. Recommended for all libraries.-Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible. But by no means inevitable, writes Evans (History/Cambridge Univ.; In Defense of History, 1999, etc.); indeed, many of the material and cultural conditions for the rise of a regime that "would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and kill nearly six million in the process" were more pronounced in France and Russia than in Germany. Yet, he notes, "Nazism, while far from being the unavoidable outcome of the course of German history, certainly did draw for it success on political and ideological traditions and developments that were specifically German in their nature." Some of those traditions arose during the reign of Otto von Bismarck, who, in unifying Germany, universalized military service and "saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state," answerable to a strong leader alone. Others welled up from Social Darwinist thinkers who believed that the fittest should survive and the weakest be eliminated, thus improving racial stocks and building supermen. The early Nazis found comfort in the example of Weimar leader Paul von Hindenburg, who "had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies"; they found more comfort in the brutal example of the Russian Revolution and the Leninist state, which threatened to spill over into Germany and drove many a middle-class man and woman far to the right. All these strains came together such that there was "substantial overlap between the Nazis' ideology and that of the conservatives [and] even, to a considerable extent, that ofGerman liberals"-opening the door to the Nazi ascendancy while offering hope to many Germans of the time that their country's future would be one "in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome" and prosperity and national pride restored. A peerless work, the first of a projected three volumes. Of immense importance to general readers-and even some specialists-seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.