Publisher Description
There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.
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“This is the first book in Richard J Evan’s Third Reich trilogy, and it is a brilliantly written, thoroughly researched, and engrossing journey through the history of Germany from the nineteenth century to 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. Evans has a particularily unique backstory as a historian. When the so-called historian David Irving, who was a blatent Holocaust denier, sued some of his collegues for accusing him skuing historical sources to make his arguments, Richard J. Evans was asked by the court to be the expert witness for the plantiff in the case. Evans was then tasked with reading all of Irving’s books, tracing back all of the sources that he was citing, and writing a memorandum for the court detailing all of the instances in which Irving skued valid historical sources in order to back up his Holocaust denying arguments. Evans then completed his task and even underwent cross examination in court, quite literally defending history, and Irving lost his defamation suit. Quickly thereafter, Evans was elavated to being regarded as one of, if not the world’s leading scholar on the Third Reich, and has now presented us with this remarkable trilogy.
Unlike William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, this is not a biographical study of the rise of the Nazis with Hitler as the central character, rather it is a thorough history of Germany, and how Nazi ideology weaved its way into this highly cultured, industrialized, moderan nation. Hitler doesn’t even appear until page 165. In this volume, Evans takes the reader through the German unification under Bismark, the development of the underground racist volkish movement resulting from both the emancipation of Europe’s Jewry coupled with the 1873 economic depression, to the Spirit of 1914, and through the shock of Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Then with the stage set, Evans takes you to the southern German state of Bavaria, where the fear of the spread of Communism from the Russian revolution, merged with the rising ideolgies of the volkish movement, coupled with bitterness over Germany’s loss of the war, which produced an environment of nationalist extremism and racism, perfect for the Nazi movement to grow. Evans then closes his story in 1933, with Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor.”
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Jeffrey (5 out of 5 stars)
