Rating: 
Summary: Best book on the subject
Review: Burliegh's book is full of facts, not opinion. The author does provides information which one is hard pressed to find elsewhere. He pulls no punches on the vast crimes of Nazism, but he also provides an overview of the other great crimes (e.g. the genocide of Volga Germans at the same time as the beginning of the Final Solution).
Rating:
Summary: The Third Reich: A New History
Review: Despite the title of this book, it is not a survey of political history but an analysis of major events in the history of Nazi Germany from the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the Allied victory in 1945. Burleigh (Cardiff Univ.) explores conditions in Nazi Germany, focusing on the welfare system, prisons, charity, Nazi manipulation of motherhood, Nazi youth organizations, and religion. The author analyzes eugenics in Germany from the pre-Hitler years on to the sterilization of thousands in one decade. The next step was euthanasia, for which there were soon extermination centers. Nazi prewar foreign policy is scarcely mentioned except for the Anschluss. Burleigh describes in detail the Nazi treatment of occupied Europe, the invasion of the Soviet Union with the subsequent terror and destruction, and the futile German resistance movement. The Holocaust is central to this history of Nazi Germany, as the author depicts the wide-ranging effort to slaughter all the Jews in occupied Europe. Burleigh's book, based on monographic sources, is a major contribution to the study of Nazi Germany and is recommended for all collections of modern European history.
Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: great book. this is a worthy successor to Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Rating: 
Summary: A tough nut to crack, but lots of meat inside
Review: How is a modern industrial, Christian nation seduced and led down the path of evil? Germany with past dreams of glory and empire was humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI . The country was looted for war reparations and occupied. Then comes the world depression and money is not worth the paper it is printed on, people are starving and work is hard to find. Enter a smooth talker with promises to restore Germany to her previous glory. Play on the peoples fears and past hatreds and suspicions. Stabilize the economy and provide jobs by building an arms juggernaut then buy the military by providing them with men and new weapons. Establish a new police force (Gestapo) and new military (SS) that are not part of the mainstream government. Kill or imprison those that don't agree with National Socialists policies or leaders. The people are now working, there is now food, the country is becoming stronger than ever before and the people believe they are saved and a new destiny is in store for Germany. But alas, the Germans have painted themselves into a corner and are too afraid to do anything but go along and ignore the whisperings of dark and evil deeds. This book looks at the rise of Nazism from the end of WWI, through Weimer Republic, the great depression, the gaining of power by Hitler and his cronies, and their disastrous plunging of the world into WWII that cost millions of people their lives and almost totally destroyed Germany and devastated much of Europe and the Soviet Union. (Personally, I think that Stalin topped Hitler as despot of the century.) This book is a bit heavy on the academic side and I found I could only digest it in small pieces and I would not recommend it to a casual reader. But for all that, it is a pretty good one volume history of Nazi Germany and should satisfy those with a curiosity on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: A shame that the target audience is so narrow.
Review: I have to agree with DB Washington in that I have had to keep a copy of the Collins English Dictionary close by. Whilst Michael Burleigh has an excellent knowledge of obscure adjectives, he is not a great communicator, which is a shame because the general content is superb, hence the 4 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Tough Going
Review: I just finished Klaus Fischer's "Nazi Germany: A New History," which I recommend. It's a straightforward and engaging account. After finishing it, I slogged about a hundred pages of this book and gave up. To me, it's well-nigh unreadable. I came to it seeking history, but it's more like extended essays on the train of events. Put simply, the author's ego gets in the way in just about every paragraph. Burleigh's not writing for the general public, but his academic peers. If you're a scholar, that's fine and it quite possibly deserves more stars. If one has read many books on the Third Reich, it may be sweeping and opinionated. But one must be very familiar with the basic story and have extensively studied the literature equating Naziism with political religion to comprehend this one. To this general reader, it's turgid, badly organized and digressions abound on each page--if it pretends at being a narrative history, that is. Judging by this book, "cause and effect" and the concept of "narrative" have been drummed out of the canon of the historian's methods.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting subject, if you can decode the writing style
Review: I read about one third of this book before giving up. The subject is very interesting, but the writing style is complex, confused and hard to follow. The author uses rare words for their own sake not for clarity. The sentence construction is obtuse and unclear. He seems to be trying to impress as an intellectual, but he fails to present a clear picture of what happened and when. Michael Burleigh badly needs to meet Rudolf Flesch.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely well-written
Review: I won't say much about this monumental work of scholarship. I must, though, throughly disagree with some of the comments below that it is somehow inaccessible to to the general reader. My copy is covered with marks, notations, and underlinings of what I thought on first reading was absolutely wonderful prose. Most notably, and surprising given the topic, Burleigh pulls off the amazing task of using humor to illustrate some of his most serious points. First rate scholarship and superb writing.
Rating:
Summary: Big
Review: If you don't HAVE to read this book, or at least have a NEED to know more than anyone else in your news group or forum....RUN! run and don't look back.
Having said that, while I did not enjoy reading this book, it is certainly worth the struggle.
Rating:
Summary: Big
Review: If you don't HAVE to read this book, or at least have a NEED to know more than anyone else in your news group or forum....RUN! run and don't look back.
Having said that, while I did not enjoy reading this book, it is certainly worth the struggle.
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