Richard J. Evans has never had any time for historical myths or alibis. Long
before he was cross-examined by David Irving in 2000 for five days in the
witness box of the High Court on the matter of Irving’s Holocaust denial, he
had weighed into the debate that rocked Germany in 1986, about the “past
that would not go away”. He took on, among others, the influential editor of
the literary supplement to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and biographer
of Hitler, Joachim Fest, arguing that he was guilty of a form of
neoconservative romanticism.
In 2000, the High Court found that Irving crudely distorted facts, peddling a
ten-fold inflation of the numbers killed in the Dresden bombing raids and
then reducing the numbers killed in Auschwitz by a factor of ten in order to
establish a moral equivalence between Allied bombing and the murder of the
Jews. Fest’s gloss on the Nazi era was altogether more subtle and
well-founded. He played up Hitler’s irrationality, so that the German people
would appear as both his dupes and his final victims, implying they had been
no more than innocent bystanders to Nazi atrocities. In its most vivid form,
this is the myth of the Führer raving in his bunker in Berlin, bent on
taking the German people to their deaths with him, the shuffling, shaking
figure played to perfection by Bruno Ganz in the film Downfall, a film whose
script was written in the main by Fest.
Evans has no doubt that Hitler was, as he put it in his second volume of his
history of Nazi Germany (of which The Third Reich at War is the completion),
“in the driving seat”. Hitler personally decided to invade Poland, to kill
German psychiatric patients, to declare war on the Soviet Union and the USA
and, whatever the complex dynamics within the regime, to kill the Jews. But
this is not the ground which conservative romantics have traditionally
focused on in Germany: it is not the genocidal and ultimately
self-destructive quality of Hitler’s grand policy decisions which have
preoccupied them, so much as his conduct of the war against the Red Army.
Fest’s version of the endgame in Berlin built on the myth that Hitler’s
generals told the West German public in the 1950s when they published their
memoirs. It is the alibi of the incompetent corporal meddling in military
matters he did not understand and preventing them from winning the war.
Professor Evans is no admirer of Hitler’s intelligence, but he is careful to
show that his military interventions were not particularly irrational. Two
which have been much debated were delaying the assault on Moscow in August
1941, until the Ukraine had been conquered, and pulling out of the Battle of
Kursk two years later. Evans shows that the German generals did not have
much better plans of their own: they too thought that the Soviet Union would
be much easier to defeat than France had been. And above all, they
subscribed to a Prussian tradition of looking for the decisive battle which
would destroy all of the opposing forces. They too pushed on recklessly in
1941, instead of slowing down their advance by making the preparations they
needed to weather a Russian winter.
Indeed, drawing on the newest German research, Evans revises standard accounts
of the Battle of Kursk to depict a pyrrhic victory, in which Soviet losses
of men and machines were between six and ten times those of the Germans. The
factors that guaranteed the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany lay
elsewhere: demography and economics dictated that the Germans were unable to
go on sustaining their lower losses. Evans writes about the individual
military campaigns with verve, and leaves the reader in no doubt that the
Third Reich collapsed only when it was defeated and occupied. Nonetheless,
he is also clear that this outcome could not have been avoided by more
competent commanders, and the Germans were not Hitler’s unwitting victims.
Like other historians writing during the past decade, Evans draws attention to
the fact that the public, murderous violence of German troops began, not in
the middle of the war with the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, but at
the very beginning, with the invasion of Poland. The German assault on
Poland was not just the beginning of the Second World War. It was also the
start of Hitler’s bid to create a colonial empire on the European continent.
The scale of brutality and the racial re-ordering of populations had no
precedent, even in the earlier German annexations of the Czech lands. German
troops looted, robbed and attacked civilians with impunity, raping women and
torching Polish villages where German units had been attacked.
“Pacification” of the conquered territories combined with Hitler’s orders to
“liquidate” the Polish elites and to clear the annexed territories of
western, and later central, Poland for German settlement.
Hermann Voss wrote in April 1941 that he “really liked the town of Posen”.
Recently appointed to a chair in the Medical Faculty in the newly founded
Reich University there, Voss had joined the intellectual elite spearheading
the much-trumpeted “re-Germanization” of western Poland. By the time he
arrived, hundreds of thousands of Poles had already been driven out of their
homes and either dumped in the “native reservation” (as Hitler called it) of
the General Government, or sent to work in Germany. In all, some 900,000
Poles would be expelled from the western Polish territories which Hitler had
decided to incorporate directly into the “Great German Reich”. But there
were still too many Poles for Voss’s liking. A month later, he noted that
the university crematorium had been handed over to the Gestapo: “The Poles
they shoot are brought here at night and cremated. If one could only turn
the whole of Polish society into ashes!”.
In a classic piece of doublethink, the Strength through Joy leisure
organization arranged tours of the Warsaw Ghetto, “where”, as Evans puts it,
“the conditions the Germans themselves had created confirmed visitors in
their sense of superiority over the ragged, starving and disease-ridden Jews
they encountered”. Since the 1980s, left-wing German historians like Ernst
Klee have written about the hordes of German soldiers, snapping photos at
the mass executions of Jews and other civilians, as “execution tourists”.
Pursuing this image further, Evans shows how typical German reactions to
their war in Poland and later in the Soviet Union fitted into a pattern of
“negative tourism”: everything from lice and dirt to the lack of running
water and the fearful, “deceitful” faces of the local population confirmed
Germans’ belief that their own land was better, purer and more beautiful,
and hence justified their treatment of the locals as “sub-humans” without
rights.
Citing numerous examples in which “ordinary” Germans went on the rampage
against the “Eastern Jews”, Evans writes about this orgy of violence with
great power and moral force. It is also central to his interpretation of the
war as a whole. What was first tried out in Poland served as the model for
racial and colonial policy later in Eastern Europe and the conquered Soviet
territories. The brutality of this war of conquest, which was conducted not
just by the whole of the German state but also by much of German society, is
what gives Evans’s final volume its drive and unity.
Whether the focus is on the massacres carried out by the SS and the ethnic
German militias, or on the actions and reactions of rank-and-file troops,
Evans is surely right that the differences between what they did in 1939 in
Poland and in 1941 in the Soviet Union were more of scale than of kind.
True, there were military protests in 1939 and 1940 which were completely
absent in 1941, but the Wehrmacht also cooperated and participated in much
of the early violence: by the time it handed over control to the civilian
administration on October 26, 1939, a mere eight weeks into the war, it had
burned 531 towns and villages to the ground and killed thousands of Polish
prisoners of war, all this without any of the special orders which prefaced
the attack on the Soviet Union. In both cases, this was an ideological war
of conquest and colonization, and was quite unlike the war Germany waged in
the West. It also created the preconditions for the murder of the Jews
across the entirety of occupied Europe, a secret that could not be kept from
German society at large.
Perhaps the oldest myth of all about the Third Reich is the one Germans told
each other and Allied re-education officers in the wake of their defeat: “We
didn’t know anything about the genocide of the Jews”. Against the plea of
ignorance, Evans agrees with Saul Friedländer that the murder of the Jews
became an open secret in wartime Germany. What that meant is much less
obvious. Friedländer saw this as a key element in radicalizing German
society and, steeped in a common culpability and fear of post-war
retribution, tying it to the regime to the bitter end. Although Evans finds
evidence of widespread fear of Soviet revenge, his interpretation is much
closer to Ian Kershaw’s than to Friedländer’s, emphasizing a more passive
sense of guilt. Like Kershaw, too, Evans sees 1943 as the turning point for
German morale in the war. Whereas Kershaw has emphasized the defeat at
Stalingrad, however, Evans focuses on the British and American air raids on
German cities as the key to alienating Germans from the Nazi regime and
convincing them that the war was lost: “Fear and guilt were driving the
great mass of Germans to dread the retribution of the Allies. From 1943
onwards, they were mentally preparing themselves to deflect this retribution
as far as they were able, by denying all knowledge of the genocide once the
war was lost”.
As the home front became more war-weary, both the shrillness of Nazi
ideological exhortations and police terror increased. But Evans is far too
careful a historian to plump wholeheartedly for the line established by
Martin Broszat that German society was kept in the war by terror alone, a
view that merges too easily into an alibi story of its own. Evans argues
convincingly that terror was central to establishing Nazi rule in the 1930s
and played an important role in the war, too. But he shows that attaching
the death penalty to “spreading malicious rumours” did not lead to its
automatic application: usually a warning concluded denunciations of this
kind. Those Germans who were condemned to death for passing defeatist
remarks in the middle years of the war often had a prior history of
“opposition” to the Nazi regime; and, although the reports on public opinion
are rife with defeatist remarks by Germans, capital punishment on the home
front was meted out disproportionately to forced foreign workers. All this
makes sense in a regime which used terror far more selectively against its
own than against those lower down their racial hierarchy, such as the
Czechs, Poles, Russians and, after 1943, the Italian military internees.
At least as important as terror was entertainment. Evans shows us a society
which waged the most brutal of wars while attending the music hall and
watching escapist films. An accomplished pianist himself, Evans is
particularly attuned to changes in the musical repertoire. As news from the
front got worse, at Bayreuth the Götterdämmerung gave way to the brighter
colours of the Meistersinger. But by this time even Hitler, the festival’s
greatest patron, had given up listening to his recordings of Wagner for the
operettas of Franz Lehar.
It is hard to do justice to the humanity and scholarly range of The Reich at
War. Evans is equally at home dissecting the state of the war economy as he
is narrating the daring rescue of Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny and German
glider troops; writing about the petty humiliations meted out to the
composer Richard Strauss by Joseph Goebbels and the persecution of his
Jewish daughter-in-law; or the failure of German physicists to develop their
nuclear programme and the concentration camp prisoners who built the V-2
rockets in the tunnels of the Harz. Underneath this well-paced narrative,
Evans has gathered and probed the enormous literature on Nazism, the
Holocaust and the Second World War, in order to test historical arguments
against the facts of policy implementation, social profiling and economic
statistics. He carries the huge load lightly, but, for those who read
endnotes avidly, it is there.
A number of guides help to keep us on track, as Evans intercuts the panoptic
vision provided by hindsight with the glimpses of contemporary diarists and
letter writers. General Heinrici is there, representing the older generation
of conservative generals, whose nationalism kept him loyal to the end. Luise
Solmitz, who performed much the same role for Protestant middle-class
housewives in the pre-war volume, is forced gradually and painfully to
surrender her illusions, as both her Jewish husband and half-Jewish daughter
became ever more “the playthings of dark and malicious powers”. Wilm
Hosenfeld, who gained posthumous fame in Roman Polanski’s inspirational film
The Pianist, as the good German who protected Wladyslaw Szpilman in the
ruins of Warsaw, brings a rare timbre of self-accusation at the German
conduct of the war, so striking because it is discordant amid the torrent of
propaganda reiterating soldiers and officials. The acute observations of
Victor Klemperer in Dresden are matched by those of the equally critical and
self-critical Polish doctor Zygmunt Klukowski in Szczebrzeszyn. They give
much more than human interest to Evans’s narrative, providing an essential
individual and moral scale to a war which destroyed and defied most senses
of proportion.
Richard Evans published the first volume of his trilogy in 2003. Five years
and some 2,400 printed pages later, The Third Reich at War brings it to a
triumphant completion. This is both a masterful historical narrative and the
most comprehensive account of Nazi Germany, which will rank alongside Ian
Kershaw’s Hitler as the first port of call for scholars and general readers
alike.
Richard J. Evans
THE THIRD REICH AT WAR 1939–1945
878pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 713 99742 2
US: Penguin Press. $40. 978 1 594 20206 3
Nicholas Stargardt teaches Modern European History at Magdalen College,
Oxford. His most recent book is Witnesses of War: Children’s lives under the
Nazis, 2005.
