Rating: 
Summary: The Reich Revisited
Review: This book breaks from the thousands of other books on the Third Reich, which focus on the cult of personality surrounding Hitler and the other Nazi leaders and analyzes the full impact of National Socialism on the people, those in Germany, the Jews, the conquered collaborationists, the trail of death produced by the Nazi juggernaut. It illustrates the formulative years leading up to WWII... the rise of lawlessness during the Weimer republic and Hitler's seizure of power, the dehumanization of people and the acceptance of euthanasia to get rid of undesirables, the Nazi invasions and occupation as seen by the occupied. It is well written and well organized. It presents a new window into the Third Reich that few historians have captured with such depth. Burleigh breaks with those historians like Carroll Quigley that refuse to denote the German dictatorship as totalitarian and recognizes that Nazism, tried to create a polis that truly blurred the lines between public and private, subordinating all aspects of life to the Nazi ideology.I also recommend Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot by Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin and the Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. These books give an excellent insight into the roots of national socialism and fascism, which was a close cousin of the French Revolution, Jacobinism, and the followers of Mazzini in Italy.
Rating: 
Summary: Unreadable to non-academics
Review: This book is not intended for non-academics. What Burleigh has done is a social and legal history of Nazism, casting it in a new light. For what it is, it is great. If, however, you are looking for a narrative history, read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling
Review: This is a fascinating although strange book. Most authors tend to try to have a certain distance from their subjects and to write in dispassionate terms. Burleigh holds nothing back for instance calling Himler a "sanctimonious creep" During the narrative he comments that most empires no matter how flawed have some positive aspect. They may have art or a form of laws or administration. The Nazi empire however has nothing and its only monuments are some concrete fortifications on the coats of France which are difficult to destroy and some old fragile wooden camps surrounded by barbed wire which are in danger of disintegrating but are kept preserved to show the bestiality of the regime which spawned them. The book again discusses the Nazi's rise to power. The critical element of this was a desire by the right in Germany to destroy democracy for ever. The Nazi's were going to be their tool. They thought that Hitler would be an easy mark. An agreement was made so that the old style non Nazi conservatives would have the majority of cabinet posts. The Enabling act would end the need for a legislature and as a result they would never have to deal with the Social Democrats again. Once Democracy was destroyed the Nazi's never ever again called cabinet meetings so that the conservatives were never able to exercise power. As they had been part of the destruction of democracy there was no way of going back or undoing the bargain that they had made. Hitler was able to buy off the army by killing the leading SA members in the night of the long knives. The expansion of the army through the 30's and the acquisition of new equipment wedded the army to the regime. In 1938 some scandals with senior army officers allowed Hitler to put in a weak commander in chief and prevented the army from challenging his power. In the 40's the army had become a partner in the Nazi's murderous policies in the Soviet Union and were wedded to the regime. The Nazi's corrupted most of the German elites in a similar way. With the public service, academics, the legal and medical profession they forced out Jewish people. Other members of the profession were eager to take over the jobs taken by the expulsion of the Jews. These professions were thus corrupted and became committed to the system. The Nazi's created a series of private non state organisations parallel to the organs of state. Thus the police organ the Gestapo was a Nazi organisation as was the SS. Perhaps the most important was welfare and social security. The provision of welfare was made a private Nazi prerogative and as a result "undesirables" could be denied the assistance of the state. Burleigh continually shows examples of how bullying tactics by the SA and other Nazi thugs were used to keep judges, priests and bureaucrats in line. Such thuggery was of course condoned by police agencies. Buerleigh also points to the eduction system and shows how physical education was given priority over academic subjects and it is his belief that Germany "dumbned down" during the Nazi period. Apart from the question of the pure horror of the regimes policies they were hopeless and ineffective. During the war most of the Germans war effort came from Germany and France. The occupied Soviet Union produced little and in fact in terms of revenue had to be subsidised from the Reich. The racial policies led to the murder of and displacement of so many millions of people that areas such as the Ukraine which prior to the war had huge outputs of coal and iron produced virtually nothing. In the first year of operation Barabrossa the Germans captured some 3million Soviet prisoners who were starved to death. This did not include the millions of Jews and Poles who were killed in the same period. Apart from the shear horror of such policies they were moronic in the context of Germany's attempts to utilise such economies for there war effort. This book also puts to rest any theories of the Holocaust deniers. (If such theories were not already so without substance that they do not require answering) It is clear that the murder of the Jewish population was widespread officially sanctioned and not the result of some dreadful accident of people being put in put in crowded camps. Burleigh traces the mad ideology of racial hatred and the growth of shooting, the use of mobile extermination vans and the many other methods used to carry out the Holocaust. All in all not a wonderful book as the subject matter is grim but a fascinating record of the obscenity of Nazism.
Rating:
Summary: The Thrid Reich: A New History
Review: This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It was written in a very scholarly fashion, so the reading was challenging. However, it was worth every minute I spent looking up words...Mr. Burleigh unmasked the deceit of the Nazis and the illogic of those who occupied their ranks. Subtley, he revealed the ignorance, the cowardice, and the apathy of those that let Nazi atrocities happen. It is a horrifying glimpse into the psyche of a nation consumed with its own glorification, materialism, and pervasive elitism that manifests it self in racism. Finally, it extols the virtue of seeing human life as innately valuable. That virtue is the only thing that separates us from the...well... the Nazi's. At one point, he crystallizes, in a few words, the absurdity of the Nazi basic premise which is that a human's value is in direct proportion to what he produces and it's worth to the community; "Like other totalitarian societies, this one played upon human guilt, putting the psychological onus on the individual to prove his or her value to the collective, as if people have to justify why they are alive or why they should have children." This excellent quote shows exactly why the Nazi mind is affront to all of humanity. The reader is flabbergasted at the presumption of those that felt they had the right, or even ability to be the arbiter of which lives were to be considered worhtwhile. This book is much more than The Rise and Fall...which reads more like a military after-action review. This work forces you to grapple with the humanity of the entire event.
Rating:
Summary: The Thrid Reich: A New History
Review: This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It was written in a very scholarly fashion, so the reading was challenging. However, it was worth every minute I spent looking up words...Mr. Burleigh unmasked the deceit of the Nazis and the illogic of those who occupied their ranks. Subtley, he revealed the ignorance, the cowardice, and the apathy of those that let Nazi atrocities happen. It is a horrifying glimpse into the psyche of a nation consumed with its own glorification, materialism, and pervasive elitism that manifests it self in racism. Finally, it extols the virtue of seeing human life as innately valuable. That virtue is the only thing that separates us from the...well... the Nazi's. At one point, he crystallizes, in a few words, the absurdity of the Nazi basic premise which is that a human's value is in direct proportion to what he produces and it's worth to the community; "Like other totalitarian societies, this one played upon human guilt, putting the psychological onus on the individual to prove his or her value to the collective, as if people have to justify why they are alive or why they should have children." This excellent quote shows exactly why the Nazi mind is affront to all of humanity. The reader is flabbergasted at the presumption of those that felt they had the right, or even ability to be the arbiter of which lives were to be considered worhtwhile. This book is much more than The Rise and Fall...which reads more like a military after-action review. This work forces you to grapple with the humanity of the entire event.
Rating: 
Summary: a big waste of time
Review: This ponderous heap of dull-witted and ill-constructed invective scarcely deserves have "History" included in its title. Rather more appropriate would be something alluding to British upper-class bigotry towards the rest of the world, enemies as well as erstwhile allies while simultaneously projecting that indulgent self-legitimizing and self-rightous snobbery that has long since become such an object of derision in most of the rest of the world (particularly when balanced against their own rather pitiful contributions in the titanic struggle of the last World War). Nearly half the text is, in fact, a barrage of diatribe against the former Soviet Union, much of it issued without, apparently, much consideration for its historical accuracy or even self-consistency, as when for example the rapid pre-war soviet industrialization is characterized as reckless, wastefull and unnecessary (!?), in later chapters only to be acknowledged as being vital to the eventual victory on the Eastern Front, and hence, I might add, to the entire war effort. Burleigh dwells at length on Lend-Lease to the Soviets, a debt which they, incidentally repaid doubly, financially as well as with their blood, unlike Burleigh's Britain which did neither. He treats traitors, such as Vlasov and Bandera, who would have fit that definition in any society as some kind of tragic martyrs. Throughout his references to largely like-minded third and forthand accounts and analyses is a derth of any mention of, testimony of, or accounts at variance with his seriously one-sided opinions. See for instance "My Just War; An Account of a Jewish Red Army Soldier" by Gabriel Temkin, as an eye-witness account from a considerably different point of view. One may also wonder what the repetitious references to Chechnya have to do with a history of the Third Reich. A connection is, finally, established to further illustrate the extent of (present-day, even) soviet-stalinist perfidy towards another of its persecuted and downtrodden minorities which so heriocally shed their blood in defense of the undeserving wicked motherland. I refer to the currently pleasing, fourth-hand, accounts heroic Chechen resistance at the battle for Brest-Litovsk at the start of Hitler's invasion, which are at best controversial, and certainly at variance with contemporary accounts of demographics of the Red Army during WW2. But it does seem to strongly imply that Burleigh is not quite finished fighting his own Crimean War which ended over 150 years ago between France and Britain and Russia to assist another victim of russian imperialism, that time the Ottoman Empire. This historical aversion and hostility to Russia is rather common in Britain unto this day. For a "new" history on the Third Reich there is little here that is truly new. The brutalization and inherent tendency of pre-war Germany towards Nazism has already been amply documented, especially in Bartov's "Hitler's Army" and in a much more succinct and incisive manner. There is, on the other hand little venture into the sources of Nazi irrationality as evidenced by their early involvement with spiritualism, astrology, and Masonic esoterica, not that these predilictions were unique to Nazis at that time. But they are more infrequently investigated and they are illustrative of a type of mental predisposition to be viewed with caution, even today. Burleigh is, perhaps conveniently, also silent as to the substantial sympathies and assistance extented the Nazis from within the Allies, themselves, to wit the contraventions of the embargo by such pillars of americanism as Ford, ITT, and Standard Oil, Holland's Prince Bernhard (read Shell Oil), and from the British, the likes of Lord Haw-Haw. Burleigh weighs in on too many participants in the period that really had little to do with the Third Reich, other than being involved, almost unavoidably, in the World War. In short, this is an almost incomprehensible montage of raving opinionating, interspersed with some facts, on a grave topic which is, thankfully, more informatively and compellingly treated elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: COULDN'T STOP READIN IT!
Review: This was one of those few books that I couldn't put down that bibliophiles love so much! The author told an old story by now to most of us who love history in a fascinating, intellectual style. He focused on Hitler's obsession with the Jew. Burleigh feel's Hitler's real war and hence the Third Reich's war, was against Jews and the content of the chapters gets structured accordingly. Relatively little military history gets told here. Some of his sentences were run ons, but how they ran on! The author uses a wonderful vocabulary comparable to Gibbon's to tell the story. This is a monumental work that will be read for the next millenium!
Rating:
Summary: destined to become a classic
Review: When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches. Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives. In one of the more striking quotes in the book, one that Hoffer would have noted, Burleigh cites Hitler favorably discussing Roman Catholicism : Be assured, we too put faith in the first place and not cognition. One has to be able to believe in a cause. Only faith creates a state. What motivates people to go and do battle and die for religious ideas ? Not cognition, but blind faith. Over the course of the book, Burleigh demonstrates the gradual process by which the German people's faith in Hitler and Nazism grew, supplanting their belief in Christianity and vitiating their sense of morality. Where Goldhagen showed the German people to have been generally amenable to Hitler's exterminationist program, Burleigh shows them to have participated in, or at least to have acquiesced in, a truly totalitarian program which replaced every aspect of traditional German culture and society with Nazi beliefs. This idea, of Nazism as a religion, gives the book a helpful focus and a unifying theme around which to organize the enormous amount of information which Mr. Burleigh has assimilated and lays out here. In addition, where the prior treatment Hitler and Nazism as a historical exception may have acted as a balm to our liberal sensibilities, Burleigh's treatment of them helps us both to understand their similarity to the Soviet Union and Communism, and to understand how such movements could rise again. It's an excellent book, one that benefits greatly from the author's willingness to advance a novel view and to prosecute his case forcefully. If you've developed a palate for the sort of bland mush that passes for popular history these days, you might find it too bracing, but if you've enjoyed such powerful iconoclastic works as those already mentioned, or Richard Pipes's Russian Revolution, or Niall Ferguson's Pity of War , this one's sure to appeal to you also. It seems destined to become a classic if only enough people with open minds are willing to read it. GRADE : A
Rating:
Summary: Epitome of the great WWII book irony
Review: When well treated, we read about this period that did not end fast enough wishing the books about them did not have to end. This book epitomizes that irony. It simply defines the difference between having real understanding of the Germany on which Hitler left his brutal stamp and not having it. Burleigh's explanation of the socioeconomic forces of dehumanization makes the mass murder of the Jews seem a natural outcome of a once-great society's mostly voluntary descent into barbarism. His description of the euthenasia program tells you all you need to know about what else would become possible, and how easily it was to turn and entire culture on its head. Another fine aspect of this work is that while it does not flinch at looking hard at the ugliest chapter in European history, he does not stare mawkishly at the bizarre figures of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and the like. Indeed the reader is expected more or less to know the members of the cast. I agree with the other reviewers that this book is now a standard entry in World War II histories and among studies of modern European history as well.
Rating:
Summary: Epitome of the great WWII book irony
Review: When well treated, we read about this period that did not end fast enough wishing the books about them did not have to end. This book epitomizes that irony. It simply defines the difference between having real understanding of the Germany on which Hitler left his brutal stamp and not having it. Burleigh's explanation of the socioeconomic forces of dehumanization makes the mass murder of the Jews seem a natural outcome of a once-great society's mostly voluntary descent into barbarism. His description of the euthenasia program tells you all you need to know about what else would become possible, and how easily it was to turn and entire culture on its head. Another fine aspect of this work is that while it does not flinch at looking hard at the ugliest chapter in European history, he does not stare mawkishly at the bizarre figures of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and the like. Indeed the reader is expected more or less to know the members of the cast. I agree with the other reviewers that this book is now a standard entry in World War II histories and among studies of modern European history as well.
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