JUST AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the attempt to overthrow Hitler on July 20, 1944, a young German wrote in his diary: “The Nazis want to sacrifice an entire people just to postpone their own downfall a little longer.” Later that year, the SS reported people as saying: “The Führer was sent to us by God, not to rescue Ger-many but to destroy it. Providence has decided to annihilate the German people, and Hitler is its executioner.”

This realisation of the fate that awaited Germany brings us back to the key question. Why had that critical mass of the German people, so desperate for order and national pride, followed unquestioningly to their doom the most reckless criminal that the world has ever seen?

With this third volume, Richard Evans has accomplished a masterpiece of historical scholarship. It answers almost every possible aspect of that question. His excellent preceding volumes, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, laid the groundwork for what becomes both the triumph and nemesis of the Nazi dictatorship. The story is familiar, but with wisdom, good construction and admirably clear prose, Evans has produced the best and most up-to-date synthesis of the huge work carried out on the subject over the past decades.

Hitler, assisted by the evil genius of Goebbels, manipulated his audience by playing on their resentments and fears through a deliberate confusion of cause and effect. His strategy was to involve the state and military hierarchy and then the population at large in the crimes of his regime. This had to be done step by step, making them accustomed to larger and larger doses of inhumanity and illegality. The first step was almost bound to be the most dangerous. His euthanasia programme, putting an end to “life unworthy of life”, although unpublicised, soon provoked criticism. This was partly for religious reasons, but also because the “feeble-minded” and handicapped victims selected were from German families. Nazi impatience to purify the blood of the race had to be curbed for the time being.

The increase of economic and bureaucratic persecution of the Jews proved much easier. For the unthinking majority, even those who were not particularly anti-Semitic, the idea of supposedly rich Jews being given a hard time was clearly appealing after the hard years the average German had gone through. That German Jews might have suffered equally was again a target for Goebbels, who first had to persuade his audience that the Jews were not German, and then that they were not human. Like all fanatics, the Nazis never allowed truth or logic to impede their ideology.

Hitler knew that only a war could produce the conditions to allow him to annihilate the Jews: emergency decrees to defend the nation; propaganda that could not be questioned without accusations of treason; and a security regime behind which the enorm-ity of the crime could be hidden.

Again confusing cause and effect, the Jews would be blamed for the war that Hitler had started. The Nazi conspiracy theory linked the Jews of Wall Street to the Jews of Moscow in a plot to destroy the German nation. But, as Evans demonstrates so well, Nazi racial mania proved completely counterproductive to the achievement of its war goals.

Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had four aims: to destroy Bolshevism; to create an eastern empire; to force the British to seek terms; and to annihilate the Jews and other “inferior” races. Under the banner of total war, these civilian victims could be portrayed as partisans. To make the German soldier pitiless towards “beasts in human form”, Goebbels perceived that to instil hatred was not enough. What was needed was a blend of hatred and fear, with fear as the detonator.

There were many terrible paradoxes. When the Germans captured Kiev, 33,000 Jews turned up for “evacuation” unaware of their fate because Hitler's anti-Semitism had been suppressed during the period of the Nazi-Sov-iet pact. Meanwhile, the Nazi idea that a Jewish conspiracy dominated the Stalinist regime was grotesque. I will never forget Stalin's grandson boasting in Gori that his grandfather “really sorted out the Jews” because the country had been run by them since 1917.

In any case, even those Soviet citizens who loathed Stalin and the Communists and welcomed the German invaders, soon discovered the realities of their rule. Inhuman crimes forced them to support the Stalinist regime and produced a savage partisan war. Recommendations from the Abwehr in September 1941 that a Ukrainian army should be raised to help to defeat the Red Army were rejected by their political masters. For some time, those Soviet citizens who were armed by the Wehrmacht had to be referred to as “Cossacks” so that the regime could somehow clas- sify them as non-Slavs. Hitler was never happy with the idea of putting Slavs into Wehrmacht uniform.

With military logic and poetic justice, the Nazi “race war” on the Eastern Front proved the greatest self-inflicted disaster in modern history. Even with all the statistics - and Evans is an exemplary guide - the true degree of suffering that the Nazi invasion caused is beyond the grasp of anyone brought up in the post-totalitarian age. One may talk of 26 million Soviet citizens killed, but civilian statistics register only death. They can never tell us about the tens of millions of survivors whose lives were wrecked by their own horri-fic experiences and by the murder of their families. History may move on in the minds of younger generations, but the example of the Third Reich must never be forgotten. As Evans puts it at the end of his book: “It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others.”

The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans
Allen Lane, £30 Buy the book

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