The Third Reich at War by Richard Evans

Over the past week I have been reviewing the recently-completed three volume history of the Third Reich written by British historian Richard Evans. In The Coming of the Third Reich (review here), Evans traced the developments leading to Hitler's appointment as chancellor and the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933. In The Third Reich in Power (review here), he explored the years of Nazi governance which were inexorably oriented toward the conquest of Europe. And in the third and final volume, The Third Reich at War, Evans analyzes the years of armed conflict which opened with the invasion of Poland and ended with the total destruction of the Nazi regime. In his preface, Evans acknowledges the challenges of this effort; after all, there are entire volumes dedicated solely to the war, entire volumes dedicated solely to the Holocaust, and yet Evans must cover both these topics while telling the story of domestic Germany itself and the people who led it:

The central focus of this book is on Germany and the Germans; it is not a history of the Second World War, not even of the Second World War in Europe. Nevertheless, of course, it its necessary to narrate the progress of the war, and to deal with the Germans' administration of the parts of Europe they conquered... At the heart of German history in the war years lies the mass murder of millions of Jews in what the Nazis called 'the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe'... Nevertheless, it is important to reiterate that this book is a history of Nazi Germany in all its aspects; it is not in the first place a history of the extermination of the Jews, any more than it is a history of the Second World War, though both play an essential role in it.

Like the previous volumes, Evans' narrative follows a blended thematic/chronological arc, in which he focuses on particular areas such as racial policy or economics while simultaneously moving progressively forward in time. The book opens with the invasion of Poland, an invasion which set the stage not just for the extension of German military might, but the application of Nazi ideologies about racial purification:

In Poland the Nazis' policies of racial suppression and extermination were applied in full for the first time, in a gigantic experiment that would later be repeated on an even large scale in other parts of Eastern Europe. German rule in Poland was ruthlessly and exclusively designed to further what the Nazis perceived as Germany's interests, including Germany's racial interests. The deliberate reduction of Poland to a state of nature, the boundless exploitation of its resources, the radical degradation of everyday life, the arbitrary exercise of unfettered power, the violent expulsion of Poles from their homes - all of this opened the way to the application of unbridled terror against Poland's Jews.

Of course the early years of the war go rather well for the Germans, with quick success in Poland followed by the conquest of the Benelux countries and then the shockingly rapid defeat of France. But what goes up must inevitably come down:

The conquest of France marked the highest point of Hitler's popularity in Germany between 1933 and 1945. People confidently expected that Britain would now sue for peace, and that the war would be over by the end of the summer. Yet the problem of what to do next was not a simple one. Moreover, Hitler's attitude to the British was fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he admired the British Empire, which in the 9130s and 1940s was the world's largest, still covering an enormous area of the globe; and he regarded the English as 'Anglo-Saxon' cousins of the Germans, who in the end would be impelled by the logic of racial destiny to make common cause with them. On the other hand, he realized there were powerful forces in British politics that regarded Germany under his leadership as a profound threat to the Empire that had to be stopped at all costs.

Of course the planned invasion never comes to fruition, the Luftwaffe having failed to gain air superiority in the Battle of Britain. Hitler's next move was to launch a massive offensive against the Soviet Union, opening up an Eastern Front which changed the face of the war. "[A]t least two-thirds of the German armed forces were always engaged on the Eastern Front. More people fought and died on and behind the Eastern Front than in all the other theatres of war in 1939-45 put together, including the Far East."

With the war afoot, and massive numbers of foreign Jews coming under German control, the Nazis began to implement what was deemed "The Final Solution" to Europe's Jewish population, with the 1942 Wannsee Conference initiating the main phase of wholesale deportation, resettlement, and slaughter. Evans goes into exhaustive, sometimes horrific detail about the Nazi genocide machine:

[T]he extermination programme was directed and pushed on repeatedly from the center, above lal by Hitler's continual rhetorical attacks on the Jews in the second half of 1931, repeated on other occasions as the Jews loomed in his mind as a threat once more. There was no single decision, implemented in a rationalistic, bureaucratic way; rather, the extermination programme emerged in a process lasting several months, in which Nazi propaganda created a genocidal mentality that spurred Himmler and other leading Nazis to push forward with the killing of Jews on an ever-wider scale.

Evans devotes further chapters to the German wartime economy, which ironically became more and more dependent on imported foreign labor as able-bodied German men were chewed up by the war effort. The Germans also were not shy about appropriating the resources of the conquered countries, both in large-scale confiscations of bulk supplies and raw materials and daily small-scale looting by individual soldiers. But despite the best efforts of Nazi leaders like Albert Speer and the limitless ruthlessness of Nazi exploitation, it was a doomed effort:

When taken together with the looting and forced requisitioning of vast amounts of foodstuffs, raw materials, arms and equipment, and industrial produce from occupied countries, with the expropriation of Europe's Jews, with the unequal tax, tariff and exchange relations between the Reich and the nations under its sway, and with the continual purchase by ordinary German soldiers of goods of all kinds at an advantageous rate, the mobilization of foreign labour made an enormous contribution to the German war economy. Probably as much as a quarter of the revenues of the Reich was generated by conquest in one way or another.

Yet even this was insufficient to boost the German war economy enough to enable it to compete with the overwhelming economic strength of the USA, the Soviet Union and the British Empire combined. No amount of rationalization, efficiency drives and labour mobilization would have worked in the long run. The German military successes of the first two years of the war depended to a large extent on the element of surprise, on speed and swiftness and the use of unfamiliar tactics against an unprepared enemy. Once this element was lost, so too were the chances of victory.

Despite its many strengths, this final volume of Evans' masterful trilogy is somewhat the lesser of its two predecessors. Part of this is due simply to the less original nature of the work, as the war years in Germany have received significantly more historical coverage than those that came before. Further, while Evans makes clear in his preface that he does not intend to offer a general military history, there are many times when the text suffers for insufficient explication of the international wartime context. Most of what happened in Germany's domestic sphere from 1939-1945 was inevitably driven by what was happening in the military sphere. This is an easy enough issue to address by coming to Evans' trilogy with a background in World War II history, or by reading a military history alongside Evans' books. Nevertheless, the result is a somewhat diminished comprehensiveness from that achieved in the first two volumes.