Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertainties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'.
—Richard J. Evans
A splendid set of books!
The first volume deals with the coming in power of the Nazi party; the second volume is about the social, political and many other dimensions of German life under the Nazi rule and, finally, the third volume describes the expansion of the Third Reich and its subsequent downfall in 1945. I liked these books for a number of reasons:
First, without obsessing over the brutality and sadism of individual Nazi party members, this series provides a complete and unnerving account of how the Nazis, after coming in power, "won" the support of German people. It portrays the contribution of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Propaganda minister, in mobilizing the people to a war for the "Living space".
Second, the series provides a rare glimpse into the life of the common members of the Nazi party, Nazi party bosses and, also, ordinary German folks. How did the Germans react to the overbearing regime of the Nazi party? Were they happy under its rule? Did they share the murderous attitude of Nazi party towards "subhuman(!)" Polish and Slovakian people and, worst of them all, according to Nazi ideology, Jewish people? As expected, these questions do not have a binary answer and the author explored them with the help of many diaries (most notably, a jew's—Victor Klemperer's—and a Nazi party member's, Melita Maschmann's).
Finally, it's reassuring to learn about humane actions done by some Germans to help the oppressed and to observe that the Germans did not lose their sense of humor even under such oppressive regime, as evidenced by many jokes mentioned in the book. Though, let me be clear, this does not at all means that Evans has tried to defend the German atrocities committed during the war. Quite contrarily, he devoted almost 40% of the third volume detailing the massacre brought upon by the military and the SS on the civilian of the conquered countries.
Highly recommended to all interested in the perilous journey undertaken by mankind during WW2.