The Third Reich at War

I don't know why the image comes out
with red.  It's bright Penguin orange.

 The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans

It took me a good six weeks, but I did it!  I finished the Evans trilogy.  This is a huge book, 760 pages without all the notes and such, and I tried to read one sub-section per day.  I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but have had trouble getting around to writing it up, and now we're seeing Putin try to pull some of the same moves that are chronicled at the start of this book.  So I guess it's appropriate.

Evans offers a solid analysis of everything Germany did, with (I think) something of an emphasis on atrocities and the Eastern front.  There is not quite as much about the Western side of the war, possibly because most people already know more about that, while the eastern side has been less known until pretty recently.  We don't see much of the US part of the war, and there's nothing about the Pacific arena since Germany wasn't involved with that.

He gets right to the horrible stuff.  The first chapter has 4 sections: killing as many Poles as possible, killing even more Jews and Roma, and killing the disabled.   Evans makes it quite clear that just killing people they didn't like was a major Nazi goal, even when it got in the way of their other goals like conquering all of Europe.  Nazis were a curious combination of straightforward and cagey about the Final Solution; they made it perfectly clear amongst themselves what they were planning, but Hitler was pretty careful not to spell things out so obviously that it could be blamed on him.  Thus you still get a few people arguing that he didn't know, or that it wasn't really real.  But it was, of course.

Throughout, the numbers are just staggering.  The numbers of Russians killed or taken prisoner; the numbers of other people killed or taken prisoner or turned into slave labor -- just enormous numbers that make me wonder how on earth it could even be done.  If you take a couple of hundred thousand people prisoner, more than live in my entire city, how do you feed them?  (Answer: you mostly don't.)

I'm again reminded of Hitler's decline in health.  When I read Blitzed, I learned about the many injections his personal doctor gave him -- not just glucose and vitamins, but eventually drugs.  Evans acknowledges this but also points out that Hitler was developing Parkinson's, and in his mid-50s was an aged, shuffling shadow of his former self.  He lost his public speaking ability and rarely spoke to the German people after 1942.  By the end, he was living in a fantasy world, shoving non-existent troops across the maps and giving orders that couldn't be followed.

Evans also discusses Germany's self-destruction as the war came to an end.  Nobody believed the propaganda any more, and officials resorted to terror, killing thousands of their own soldiers and citizens they deemed insufficiently committed to victory.

This book is just stuffed with fascinating information, so I have a ridiculous number of markers in the book, but will try to pick just a few quotations:

Romanian troops [fighting for Germany] were joined by a small force of Hungarians, but the two forces had to be kept apart because of the poor relations between the two countries.  Most of the Hungarian forces' equipment was obsolete, the rifles used by the infantry frequently jammed, they had only 190 tanks, which were also out of date, and six of the ten 'Alpine' battaltions that joined in the invasion of Russia were mounted on bicycles.

Goebbels at the end of 1941, blaming the victims: "As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Leader is determined to clear the decks.  He prophesied to the Jews that if they brought about another world war, they would thereby experience their own annihilation....The world war is here, the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence....Now that the German people have lost another 160,000 dead on the Eastern Front, the engineers of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives." 

The V-2 was thus, as its historian Michael Neufeld has remarked, 'a unique weapon: more people died producing it than died from being hit by it.'

Hitler's backing [of research into a nuclear bomb] was also no more than half-hearted, because he still believed at bottom that nuclear physics was a Jewish discipline, as did the Ministry of Education, which did nothing to support research in this area.

It took me over a year, but I've now read the entire trilogy, and I'm here to tell you that it's excellent.  Required reading for those who want a good understanding of what happened.