The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

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The concept of evil is mushy and ill-defined, but if there is such a thing as “evil,” it was personified by the Nazis. With the Communist Party effectively suppressed, Nazis were able to gain a majority vote but was still short of the 51% required for an absolute majority. The first book of what will ultimately be a complete three-volume history of Nazi Germany, The Coming of the Third Reichis a masterwork of the historian's art and the book by which all others on this subject will be judged. If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans BOOK REVIEW: The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans

Evans has also taught at the University of Stirling, University of East Anglia and Birkbeck College, London.The consequences of this assault would change the world in ways that we will always have to live with. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence. In the context of the Industrial Revolution, Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin? Antisemitism was no more widespread than in many other countries, representative institutions were thriving, political parties and elections an accepted part of constitutional practice.

The Coming of the Third Reich: Richard J. Evans

He was also instrumental in Germany not participating in the wild colonial acquisitions that the rest of Europe obsessed about. French soon formed treaties with Britain and then Britain with Russia, thus forming the Triple Entente. Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.

But the biggest thing was that regardless of why these economic crises were taking place, there started to be a trafficking in a narrative of conspiracy theories that angrily blamed specific groups for the suffering, for the political/cultural/economic degradation of Germany. This volume runs up to Hitler's accession to power in 1933; the second will cover the prewar period of Nazi rule, while the last volume will deal with the apocalypse of Hitler's Germany between 1939 and 1945. Evans was educated at Oxford, has taught at Columbia and the University of London, and is currently the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. The origins of the beginning of a sense of German identity began with the Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther that resulted in the spread of a standardized common German language and literature. Only when Allied bombing raids began to shatter its cities did Germany awake to the horrors it had unleashed upon itself.

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans | Goodreads The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans | Goodreads

Nevertheless, the vote was passed and the Act gave the Nazis complete legislative control for the next four years. The Nazis, indeed thought of themselves as undoing all the work of the French Revolution and rolling back the clock, in a political sense at least, much further to the early Middle Ages.There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time. follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead.