The Third Reich at War
Book Review (Richard J. Evans)
The end of the end
As I finish up listening to the third volume of Richard Evans' trilogy on Nazi Germany, the best way I can think of to describe the work as a whole is to say that it shows the vast, complex, variegated nuance of the Third Reich.
Evans tells you that in this volume he is definitively not telling you a military history of World War II. And, indeed, while he necessarily discusses and relates the campaigns on the Eastern and Western Front, the air war, the development of significant weapons and technologies, and so on, they are not the real focus of the book and I'd be hard-pressed to give any comprehensive account of them. The book says very little about the war in the Pacific and the role of Japan.
What he never ceases to do is to relate every aspect of German society through the war period. That includes the economy, the leadership, the arts, food, education, the army, and of course the grimmest of realities - the camps, the mass murders, the genocide, the Holocaust. At the same time this is not exactly a history of the Holocaust. As magisterial as Evans' work is, in weaving a comprehensive and holistic narrative of 1939 to 1945, it can never entirely do justice to any particular piece of the whole.
Yet it does succeed in painting that whole picture, and doing so in a way that speaks to nuance. From the inhumanity of the camps, to the failing support for the regime, the internal criticisms, even the expressions of regret and solidarity, small as they were, of some Germans for some Jews. Some of this is brought to life with diary entries and letters, especially where we regularly 'pick up' the story of a figure like Victor Klemperer.
Evans isn't in the habit of drawing moral lessons from the history, which I think is a somewhat correct way to write history. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be drawn. For one, there is a reminder here that it does not take much, to make people truly evil. And the depths of evil of which we are capable of, are truly profound.
At the same time, humans are surprising creatures, of hope and kindness. Despite our worst, sometimes the best is to be found in us.
Thirdly, fortune is a fickle creature. It's long been a thought of mine that we live in an age that thinks everything is controllable, and that if you just try hard enough and long enough, and smart enough, you will succeed in bending reality to your will and 'succeeding'. And in so thinking we have lost the sense that luck or fortune or providence plays any meaningful role in the world. In this, I think we are wrong. And more than a few incidents in Evans' story highlight this, not least the many plots to kill Hitler.
So much of our lives, and indeed the history of nations and the lives of millions, can rest on the smallest of details.
In the meantime, I will be taking a break from reading about the atrocities of humanity. I have a number of shorter, less soul-sucking books to read on the pile ahead of me (alas, some books that are perhaps equally depressing about other parts of human life, past and present).