Into the Darkness

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing
Review: Finally a great book on 3rd Reich from an unbiased observer. Some of the chapters provided excellent insight into everyday life in Germany. Reminds us that Americans would never wish to live in that manner, but given the circumstances the Germans did their best to rebuild a society shattered by war, revolution, and economic disaster. It raises the question of what might have happened if the National Socialist experiment in Germany could've continued.

Rating:
Summary: A Perceptive Book -- Must Read
Review: Twentieth-century America's most perceptive, influential, and prophetic writer on race -- Lothrop Stoddard -- spent four months in late 1939-early 1940 covering National Socialist Germany, as its leaders and its people girded for total war. Stoddard criss-crossed the Third Reich to observe nearly every aspect of its political, social, economic, and military life, and he talked with men and women from all walks of life, from Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels to taxi drivers and chambermaids. The result -- Into the Darkness -- is not only a classic of World War II reportage, but a unique evaluation of Germany's National Socialist experiment. For Stoddard was no ordinary journalist. A Harvard Ph.D in history, the author of The Rising Tide of Color and other works that played a key role in the enactment of America's 1924 immigration act, fluent in German and deeply versed in European politics and culture, Stoddard brought to Into the Darkness a sophistication and a sympathy impossible for William Shirer and a myriad of other journalistic hacks. To be sure, the New England Yankee Stoddard was no supporter of the Hitler dictatorship, but he was deeply interested in National Socialist policies, above all in the social and the racial sphere. Reading Into the Darkness brings you to hearings before a German eugenics court, to an ancestral farm in Westphalia, to the headquarters of the National Labor Service, to German markets, factories, medical clinics, and welfare offices, as keenly observed and analyzed by Stoddard. You'll read, too, of Stoddard's conversations with German policy makers in all fields: Hans F. K. Guenther and Fritz Lenz on race and eugenics; Walther Darré on agriculture; Robert Ley on labor; Gertrud Scholz-Klink on women in the Third Reich; General Alexander Löhr on the Luftwaffe's Polish campaign, as well as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and many other leaders. And you'll travel with Stoddard to Slovakia, where he interviews Monsignor Tiso, the national leader later put to death by the Communists, and to Hungary, where the Magyars, still at peace, gaze apprehensively at Soviet Russia. Into the Darkness (so named from the mandatory air-defense blackout that Stoddard found so vexing) shines a torch of sanity and truth against the vituperation of all things National Socialist that has been practically obligatory for the past sixty years. Knowledgeable, urbane, skeptical, and above all fair, Stoddard's book is a unique, an indispensable historical document, a time capsule for truth, and a stimulating page-turner for everyone interested in the Third Reich and the German people.

Rating:
Summary: An Yankee in Hitler's Germany
Review: What possible historical subject could get this exciting?

When Stoddard the anthropologist visited wartime Germany Pearl Harbor had not yet happened, and so he was able to approach his subject--a social history of Nazi Germany at war.

And being neutral Stoddard's work lacks the often-hysterical tone of professional "pro-" or "anti-Nazi" pieces of much of the period's genre.

Having access as a scientist to a variety of German institutions Stoddard gives us a grounded look into how Germans of all station in life viewed such issues as social policy, foreign policy, Jews, and the German leadership. His chilling look into a "Eugenics Court" where "undesirables" were judged is worth the price of the book alone.

Not to be missed.