The Third Reich at War (review)

The Third Reich at War is the final segment in Richard Evan's excellent three-volume history of Nazi Germany. The author, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, combines narrative history with first-person accounts to provide a holistic description of what life was like under Nazi rule. The Third Reich at War is not a comprehensive history of World War II in Europe. Rather, Evans focuses on key turning points: the conquest of Poland, the fall of France, and the Battle of Britain in the first year of conflict; the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad on the Eastern Front; and the strategic bombing of German cities. He provides a more complete treatment of the mass murder along racial and ideological lines of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically handicapped, and others deemed unfit to live in the new order of the Third Reich. Extensively researched from published German and English primary and secondary sources and exceptionally well written, The Third Reich at War is an excellent account of the Third Reich during its final years that belongs on the bookshelves of all serious students of World War II.

Evans provides just enough narrative of military operations to keep the reader engaged as to the broad sweep of events. He is at his best when describing the impact of occupation on the peoples and areas conquered by the Wehrmacht. In Poland in the last quarter of 1939, for instance, we learn that the Germans murdered 65,000 Poles and Jews, a down payment on the genocide to come. Poland was a model for what would happen in the East in Hitler's new order—its population enslaved, its territory either annexed or stripped of usable resources, and those deemed racially unfit summarily shot or hanged. By 1943 the Germans had ethnically cleansed millions of Poles and others to make room for German settlers, had suppressed local culture and learning, and had Germanicized the language in preparation for the area's eventual incorporation into the greater Reich.

The Nazi order made a sham of the rule of law in Europe. Heralded as a functional, disciplined, efficient governing system, Hitler's Germany was instead riven with criminality and corruption. In every society touched by Nazi tyranny, years of antisemitic and racial propaganda encouraged German soldiers to treat the local Jewish and Slavic populations with contempt and brutality. Nazi policy mandated the concentration of Jews into ghettoes in Poland, where hundreds of thousands died due to disease and starvation even before the final solution sent the remainder to death camps.

Hitler's ideology drove his actions, to include the planning for the most important campaign of the war—Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The German people needed lebensraum—living space—and the German economy needed the resources of Eastern Europe. The Red Army, in Hitler's view leaderless since the purges of the 1930s (as proven by its disastrous performance in the Russo-Finish War in 1939-1940) and composed of subhuman Slavic soldiers, would quickly fold. Since the conquest would take no more than a single campaign season, the prospect of a two-front war did not factor into German strategic thinking. The vaunted German General Staff posed no objections.

The treatment meted out to the Poles was now replicated on a much larger scale in the Soviet Union. German troops summarily shot political commissars (a loosely defined term), starved prisoners, and subjected Jews to a massive genocidal campaign instigated by SS Einsatzgruppen and aided and abetted by the regular army. Given Nazi ideology and propaganda, it was a small step from the mass killings of Jews in the East to a more organized system of mass murder in killing centers in Poland. Although Hitler never signed a written order mandating the extermination of the Jews, his oral pronouncements were clear enough and provided all the guidance his subordinates needed to initiate the Holocaust.

As the war dragged on, Hitler's mismanagement of...