The Coming of the Third Reich

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, religious discrimination, and death.

Richard J. Evans describes The Coming of the Third Reich as the first book in a planned trilogy of books detailing the Nazis’ rise to power—how they developed their government, what it was like to live under it, and the Nazis’ military policies and eventual defeat during World War II. The trilogy is meant for “people who know nothing about the subject” (xv). While many books have been written about Nazi Germany, there “have been […] surprisingly few attempts to write the history of the Third Reich on a large scale” (xvi).

Next, Evans discusses previous books that tried to provide comprehensive histories of Nazi Germany. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) was written by a US diplomat who witnessed events firsthand, but scholars criticized it for not being outdated in terms of historical research and overly focused on diplomacy and politics. The German Dictatorship (1969) by Karl Dietrich Bracher “was strongest on the origins and growth of Nazism and its relation to German history” (xvii), but it was written for expert audiences. As the title suggests, Ian Kershaw’s two-volume work, Hitler (1998), focuses on Hitler himself and the policies he was obsessed with rather than generally examining the Third Reich.