Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis

Rating:
Summary: 1000 masterful pages but little about Hitler
Review: This is an excellent history of the Third Reich, with the focus being on the actions, and sometimes the words of the Führer. Sometimes we even get to examine his thoughts. But this book really isn't about Hitler in the way that other books have been about him. It does not study in any detail his psyche or the attitudes of others to him in any kind of detail. The book does hint at these things, but rather than providing any kind of detailed or complex look at Hitler, the man, it is instead a telling of the history of his domain from 1936-1945.

At that, it is a masterful telling. Kershaw is an excellent historian, and there is much of substance in this volume, focussing on Hitler's decisions and their effect on the German people, their economy, and their war machine. Hitler's relations with others are only briefly sketched out - important figures in his life like Eva Braun and Albert Speer are hardly mentioned, or only referred to in passing.

This is not a biography, but a history, and readers are advised to take it for what it is. It is riveting, informative, chilling and suspenseful, and above all, gives a masterful feel for what it was like to be living in the Third Reich at the time. There is no revisionist tone and no feeling of hindsight - as the pages go by, Kershaw gives a real sense of what Germans as a whole were feeling, from euphoria in May 1940 to abject defeat in February 1943, to ambivalence to life itself in April 1945. But it is really not a detailed look at Hitler personally.

Rating:
Summary: Definitive
Review: This is the culmination of a magisterial and masterful biography. I am overwhelmed by what a good job Kershaw has done. Reading this volume was somewhat more satisfying than reading the first one, because more bad things happen to Hitler in this volume, which cannot help but please anyone. The book spends a lot of time showing that Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution, and while I was convinced long before Kershaw finished the book, the documentation is valuable--right up to Hitler's final Testament. The book is well worth reading, and is not as formidable as it looks since there is an index and 194 pages of footnotes and 37 pages of bibliography. I started it March 26 and finished it April 1. It is a great and important book, and is much more definitive than Fest's biography, which I until now thought was the best Hitler bio

Rating:
Summary: The Devil In The Wolf's Lair
Review: Volume one, "Hubris," rode the wave of a crescendo of Hitler's evil imagination, the misplaced anger of a nation, and the unconscionable cowardice of men of influence in Germany and elsewhere. For all the grim realities chronicled by the author, the reader experienced a grotesque curiosity in following Hitler's improbable ascent to power and the unfolding of personal, national, and international events that made his ascent possible.

Volume two continues the excellence of research and writing, but it is not a tonic for the soul. On the contrary, "Nemesis" is a scholarly apocalypse of the degradation of human life. While it is very possible that many readers will be more familiar with the events of this volume, most will probably be revolted to see just how inhumane the Third Reich really was. Although this work is generally free of polemic, it is safe to venture that author Ian Kershaw would like those who romanticize the Third Reich or present day neo-Nazi youthful idiocy to get a craw full of the real thing.

Kershaw's treatment of Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust reveals a dictator who is crazy like a fox. The author's careful examination of Hitler's orchestration of this abomination reveals a calculating mind and the rather extraordinary measures he took to lead his nation, and particularly his intimate advisors in all compartments of government, down the slippery slope to inevitable genocide. For all of Goebbels' carefully orchestrated anti-Semitic propaganda, Kershaw observed that there is no executive order, no speech, and no document, in which Der Fuhrer explicitly orders mass deaths of Jews. The Holocaust in effect began in the mid-1930's, through discriminatory laws and more significantly the intimidation and violence quietly encouraged and judicially tolerated among Nazi youth thugs. Those eager to do their leader's will believed they had a free hand from Hitler to do with the Jews as they wished, and of course in this they were correct.

According to Kershaw Hitler realized that open genocide would not only bring world condemnation but would probably not be accepted even by a nation that hailed him. Thus, he was careful not to establish concentration and extermination camps where they would be obvious to Germans, specifically, in Germany. Rather, the grim business of detention and mass execution was centered in Poland after its conquest. Nor did Hitler originally envision the cold-blooded gassing and crematories of the death camps. Hitler's utopia, if it can be called that, was more complex and quite surprising, even for a man like Hitler.

Throughout both volumes Kershaw goes to considerable pains to elaborate one of Der Fuhrer's most significant ruminations, his perception that Germany did not have enough "living space." This is a critical piece of the puzzle, for it explains what would appear to be madness of his foreign and military policy, particularly in the later years of the Reich. To be sure, Hitler wished to reclaim what had been lost in World War I, and in these efforts he enjoyed universal support from the citizenry and the military. Restoration, after all, made perfect sense.

But having accomplished this, Hitler's vision of the future was evidently something that few citizens truly understood, nor did they feel it worth the horrible sacrifice of human life and civilization invested in making it come true. Hitler envisioned a new Germany extending well into western Russia and the Balkans. He would then have the space to expand his country as well as oil and natural resources into virtual perpetuity. His plan went on to a relocation of western Russian citizenry further to the east, and beyond that to relocating European Jews to Siberia, where he expected them to die. [He had briefly considered Madagascar for similar abominable purposes.] This vision of the future explains the dilemma that every schoolboy has pondered for sixty years: why attack Russia and fight a two-front war?

Russia would eventually drive the Germans back at horrible cost to both nations. Hitler's megalomania prevented him from accepting advice from his generals, who recommended strategic withdrawals from time to time to reduce casualties and to regroup forces. For the last three years of the war Hitler lived in his famous "Wolf's Lair," a private war camp in East Prussia, for the express purpose of directing the eastern war front himself. As his geographic utopian plans crumbled, the execution of Jews by direct methods in the camps accelerated. Hitler seemed to know what international reaction to his genocidal conduct might be, and he used this insight to enmesh his generals and advisors in the full knowledge and concurrence of the camp activities as a deterrent to defection to the West, as Rudolf Hess had done in 1941.

The German public rarely saw Hitler once the Russian war began, primarily because he would have very little good news to report once Moscow regrouped. Entire years would go by without so much as a radio broadcast. Thus, what Germans saw of their government were primarily war casualties, material deprivation, and police state intimidation. Gradually they emotionally rejected him, though public demonstrations against him were rare. Hitler, for his part, grew to despise the German citizenry as weak and undeserving of his talents. In 1944 he narrowly escaped death when a bomb, planted by a staff officer, exploded within several feet of him. More paranoid than ever after this attack, Hitler trusted basically no one and the rotation of officers and advisors began to take on the trappings of comic opera. Even his last day, marked by marriage to Eva Braun, was surreal. Kershaw was able to take advantage of recent access to Russian war archives to clarify many, if not all, the questions surrounding the death of Hitler and the disposition of his corpse, fittingly and ironically cremated.