Life and Death in the Third Reich (review)

"Do you want total war?" This question, which Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels addressed to a crowd of more than 10,000 Germans in the Berlin Sportpalast in February 1943, met with a resounding affirmative response. The event symbolized one of the most significant developments in the history of Nazi propaganda. Even in the aftermath of military defeats and the escalation of Allied bombing raids, the Third Reich succeeded in rallying public support for the defense of the fatherland. The question of how the Nazis "completely mobilized the ground on which they stood" ( p. 4) to legitimize and protect an embattled state surrounded by a host of enemies stands at the heart of the engaging volume Life and Death in the Third Reich.

The theme of life and death in Nazi propaganda—its importance for understanding what it meant to become a National Socialist—provides readers with a useful framework for examining the process by which citizens chose to reject or support the publicly stated aims of the regime. The book is organized into four sections, each of which represents a critical juncture in the history of the Third Reich: "Revising the Nation," "Racial Grooming," "Empire of Destruction," and "Intimate Knowledge"; the last "investigates how Germans and Jews understood the war, the Holocaust, and the prospects of the defeat of Germany" ( p. 18).

One of the most important contributions of this work lies in its synthesis of leading historians' insights with historical evidence gleaned from a number of sources. Among the diverse sources used are letters, diaries, and other documents authored by Jews, soldiers, prisoners, and ordinary non-Jewish citizens on the home front, and, to a much lesser degree, selections from the collections of Bundesarchiv Berlin, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The author also scrutinizes popular literature of the time for indications of how Germans struggled with the regime's extreme violence and the advent of war. Nazi propagandists frequently exploited the theme of the long shadow cast by World War One, finding a receptive audience among German citizens—many of whom, before and after 1933, debated the war's legacy based on their readings of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on theWestern Front and Erich Jünger's Storm of Steel.

The author's attempt to articulate "just how and why the Nazis yoked together life and death" ( p. 296) does not rest only with these two novelists. The author's purview includes Wehrmacht soldier and future novelist Heinrich BÖll, who struggled mightily with the tensions between his own Catholicism and the demands of living as a soldier under a racial state. But where, the author rightly asks, is the influence of National Socialism amidst this literary escape to a previous war? Who are the victims and the perpetrators? Nazi propaganda exploited a convenient escape from moral responsibility not only for the war, but also for the racist policies that legitimized mass murder under the guise of "racial grooming."

In a sense, this work represents an important contribution to what might be termed "history from the ground up." While periodic references to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels provide something of a larger context on Nazi propaganda, the bulk of Fritzsche's volume remains deeply rooted in diaries and letters of lesser-known German voices. Of all the people whose recollections are cited in this book, Victor Klemperer's voice is heard most frequently. The author effectively interweaves into the text Klemperer's wry and penetrating observations on daily life and the impact of Nazi propaganda. From Klemperer we learn once again that the Third Reich, despite its official policy of ideological conformity and its call for a united front against the Jews, was not a monolithic entity. Fritzsche's emphasis on life and death reveals for readers the broad base of support for Nazi ideals. However, as Klemperer and other writers cited in his book show us...