The Coming of the Third Reich

this book will cover the 18th-century Bismarckian Empire through the Nazi rise to power; it is interested in how they established their single-party system with seemingly little resistance from the German people

aimed primarily at general audiences, not so much specialists; such broad histories are comparatively rare

Shrier's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, while immensely popular with the general public, has been panned by academics for poorly documenting the conditions leading to the Third Reich; even in its own time, it was considered out of touch with scholarship on the subject

Bracher's The German Dictatorship covers the fall of the Weimar Republic in depth and the resulting Reich's foreign policy and culture in somewhat less depth; while it covers the ground left vague by Shrier, it is extremely academic, putting it out of reach of the casual reader

Kershaw's Hitler duology, though it bridges the latter two in terms of style and audience, is much narrower in scope than either

Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History emphasizes the violence at the heart of the Nazi worldview (whereas most academic works tend to abstract it away), but its focus on making moral judgments renders it unable to engage seriously with that ideology

Evans aims to combine these various approaches while reintroducing the voices of those who lived through these times into the narrative; in doing so, he hopes to convey to the reader that these developments were not inevitable

• I think this is an important point: if we accept, as Shrier (allegedly) does, that the rise of Nazi Germany was inevitable, then we will ourselves become unable to meaningfully discuss and halt nascent fascist movements

quoting Ian Kershaw: “For an outsider, a non-German who never experienced Nazism, it is perhaps too easy to criticise, to expect standards of behaviour which it was well-nigh impossible to attain in the circumstances.”