Ian Kershaw

This is what good history should be about - an evidence-based narrative exploration offering the best working explanation of a particular problem of possible concern to us today.

Ian Kershaw asks a simple question of why Germany continued to fight on, far beyond reason, against the overwhelming force of Russian manpower and of Anglo-American air and technical superiority.

The book takes us from the failed Operation Valkyrie (the only serious revolt by conservative nationalists against national show more socialism) in July 1944 to the final capitulation in May 1945.

These were ten months in which it was pretty clear after the failure of the Ardennes Offensive and then the massive punch of the Soviets to within 80km of Berlin that the 'regime' had no chance of survival.

Yet Germany fought on - not just the Nazi Party but the entire military, the bureaucracy, the increasingly discredited judiciary and a good proportion of the common people. Kershaw simply asks why?

This period saw not just the military dead but the death marches of concentration camp victims, significant refugee losses, mass aerial bombings (including Dresden) and German-on-German terror.

And yet the system did not break even as the country was split - not until Hitler was known to be dead and a more rational if still ferociously Nazi Donitz eventually sued for unconditional peace.

Can it be down to the force of Hitler's will or the blind obedience of the German people? Kershaw explores these and many other reasons and like all the best history comes up with some very complex answers.

However, the best history seeks patterns in the chaos and in the interweaving of many causes and effects. Kershaw is no exception. There was some binding force that locked Germany into its apocalypse.

Kershaw finds this force in the functional reality of the 'fuhrerprinzip' where military, bureaucracy, party and national identity were bound into one locus represented by a monomaniac.

Unlike Italy, where Mussolini could be ousted by the Fascist Grand Council and the military and state be redirected under a national identity separate from the man, Germany was bound into one figure.

Beneath this man, all the players could dispose of forces towards one end set by Hitler but under conditions where each gathered power in competition with the other.

After Valkyrie, Bormann turned the Party into a mechanism of terror directed at controlling the German people through fear. Goebbels took responsibility for the engagement of the masses in the war effort.

Speer used his power to broker a corporatist economic state directed at armaments production, binding military, industrialists, workers and, more unwillingly than most, slave labour.

Himmler imposed discipline on the army in a collaborative relationship with the Wehrmacht. Powerful pro-Nazi Generals took advantage of Valkyrie to place their honour and duty in the hands of the Fuhrer.

Above all, the whole 'fuhrerprinzip' was underpinned by a dreadful combination of German nationalist duty and honour and national socialist fanaticism against both communism and the 'Jewish threat'.

If most soldiers may not have cared that much about the Jews, they were prepared to sacrifice them and other race-hate targets in the primary war against the Bolsheviks.

It was this hatred of the East which bound military and Hitler together and the hatred was fully returned. Soviet vengeance became a genuine fear factor in the continuation of the war.

Any deal with the West that did not allow Germany to release its troops to fight the Soviets was seen as a cultural and possibly real death sentence for half of the country.

Anti-communist fanaticism and fear were so strong that senior figures often could not comprehend that the Western Empires would prefer to fight alongside Stalin to the end rather than save Germany.

If I have not mentioned the opinions of the ordinary German (though Kershaw is very enlightening here) it is only because they had very little to say that mattered. They were not permitted much agency.

By the last months of the war, Germans, including ordinary German soldiers in some zones, were placed under a brutal terror regime of arbitrary executions that meant revolt was a death sentence.

And this is what strikes us about the story - the extreme lack of agency offered by the 'regime' where, although paid the weekly or monthly cheque to the end, a German was the slave of his Government.

Kershaw is also good on the fundamental attitudinal split between military and civilians in the East (fearful of Soviet atrocities) and in the West (almost desperate in some places for the Allies to arrive).

He also reminds us of the human cost, with atrocities in which no player in the game was not guilty. Nazi atrocities in the East were simply compounded at home under what amounted to a gangster regime.

Soviet atrocities were real enough (it took some time for control to be re-asserted by the authorities over their own occupying troops) and led to a tragic refugee exodus in icy conditions.

The French destroyed a whole village under circumstances still not clear today and the mass aerial bombing of German civilians by the British, notably the fire storm at Dresden, still leaves a bad taste.

This was a maelstrom of horror in which the men at the top (and their wives) reveled in their own fanaticism, desperation, 'heroism', brutality and power. But can we learn from this?

The puzzlement of Kershaw was that it was so rare, possibly unique, in history for a state to go so far and so willingly down the road to potential annihilation and at such cost to itself.

It is unlikely that it will ever be repeated as a case since now we know that even communist regimes can fall without a fight - their internal complexity perhaps helps to explain why.

Perhaps Stalin's Russia came closest and perhaps it was an intelligent analysis of his own situation - a lesson that Saddam Hussein attempted to copy, not reckoning on the sheer firepower of the US.

The story tells us something about our species and power that, on reflection, is rather grim - it is that the state's strength is in opposition to individual agency on terms very favourable to the former.

Even in our lovely cuddly liberal democracies, the state has immense reserve powers - as Americans saw under Woodrow Wilson and Britons saw under Lloyd George and Churchill. These are truly formidable.

We think our agency is a human right in that magical thinking about contracts and rights of which liberals are so fond. It is true that political culture in the West usually restrains the worst of the State.

But be under no illusions that the restraint exists only because those who control the State do not have a monomaniac will to use the State for some mad cap ideal. It is convenient for them to separate powers.

If a State is so disrupted that a monomaniac can systematically unravel pluralism and centre the bureaucracy, the military and the police on him then you and I do not stand a chance.

We are then simply not in a position to organise anything but the most futile of resistance (basically, we die or are imprisoned). We should remember this when think of the powers now accruing to the NSA.

This leaves us with an interesting dilemma in our dealings with the modern state. Do we trust it to be restrained and hope it is never disrupted so that some extremist loon can seize power?

Or do we begin to consider how we can make sure that the State is always actually rather than theoretically beholden us. In short, what checks can we the people make against a loss of checks and balances.

Certainly, in 1933, the elite handed power to a genius in political manipulation and turned itself into his willing creature. Within a little over a decade, the population ended up in a hell on earth.

Even today, the British and American military have ideologies of duty and honour towards single sovereigns that are scarcely different from that of the Wehrmacht in functional terms.

It is, of course, extremely unlikely that we, in the West, would be ruled by a monomaniac able to terrorise us into total compliance but, even today, the state's weapon of choice remains fear and half truths.

Outside the West, the idea of monomania is less ridiculous when there are religious and nationalist parties which offer path ways not dissimilar to that of the Nazis in the drive to control the State.

Perhaps this is why Sisi's coup in Egypt may not be pleasant but should be heartening in a way. The military turned away from obscurantist magical thinking in favour of rational administration.

The book should thus be read not as something distant from us but as a lesson in our lack of agency even in more benign conditions and in the ridiculous power that we give to institutions and belief systems

It should also be read as an essay in the consequences of particular modes of thinking - duty and honour in the military, duty and 'public service' in the bureaucracy and belief in the party and the nation.

We think of heroism, duty, honour, ideals and often faith (though less so with maturity and education) as positives but they are not if there is no serious questioning of why the heroic act and to whom the duty.

In Silesia, the Soviet advance isolated a town. The local Gauleiter became a Nazi hero for his defence to the end against the 'Asiatic horde' but the citizens would have done better to have surrendered.

This is not an argument for pacifism or 'cowardice' but for reason. Continuing a fight against overwhelming odds for gangsters is simply stupid, worse, it is criminal where lives are concerned.

It is time to look duty, obedience, honour, authority, custom, claims of heroism, idealism and leadership in the eye and call them out by asking them why and for whom people hold to these magical beliefs.

The Nazi regime was a merger of an aristocratic presumption on its last legs and the resentments at the uglier end of the masses in a malign war on modernity and progress.

Such people were not and never could be heroes. They were simply, so it was proved, not bright enough to understand their own condition and they dragged a lot of innocent people down with them.

Let them now be cursed again. In the end, these were only dim thugs who denied humanity its greatest evolutionary prize - personal agency and freedom. show less

Any time you visit Hitler’s Germany, if you’re a functioning adult with a conscience, it’s horrifying and unsettling. Doubly so here as we witness the collapse and destruction of Germany at the end of the war, the self serving lies of its apologists and “who me?” tens of millions who seemed just fine with National Socialism when it was “winning.” Anti semitism and anti lgbt sentiment and the corresponding laws were an easy sell to these tens of millions - but they were shocked, show more shocked I tell you, by concentration camps. Ravening Slavic hordes were the “real” enemy, said a nation which invaded the Soviet Union, raped and murdered her people, and then reaped the whirlwind she herself instigated. In a world where we see plenty of resurgent neo Nazi white supremacist sentiment among those under 40, books like these are important. Hard to read, yes - but important. Nazis and their apologists and enablers were contemptible then - they remain so now. show less

Two disclaimers:
A. Long book, long review.
B. Admiration of the capabilities/skill of people involved does not equal support for their evil policies.

Richard Evans' byline of this tome being the Hitler biography of the 21st century is not off at all.

This book sat on my shelf for some years; I was and am hesitant about spending that much time "inside" someone's head like Hitler. It's the same reason I've never read 'Mein Kampf'. That being said, for some reason towards the end of last year I show more felt like delving into this. I knew it was going to be horrible and I knew it was going to be a slog.

The obvious horrors aside, I learned a ton actually, things that I was shocked to learn and this lead to a deeper mental questioning of just how these things came to be and just how much wasted potential there was that was squandered on genocide.

The first big shock to me was just how effective Hitler and Goebbels propaganda was to the point that even the history books in my high school curriculum were accepting of it. EG the Anschluss, the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland and France, are still portrayed broad stroke as examples of Hitler's drive and will power, when in reality he vacillated tremendously on these things, second guessing, postponing, doubting himself etc.

I was amazed at how little Hitler actually dabbled in government affairs. It's well known he was involved in the absolute minutia of the armed forces by 1941. He was almost completely hands off when it came to real policy work, just relying on his increasingly Byzantine-esque court to handle things for him. This in turn led to an insane style of government that Mr. Kershaw dubbed "Working towards the Fuhrer." Where his gauleiters, paladins, etc all just took what he said in his speeches as free license to attempt to do things that would impress Hitler and raise their standing with him. Which leads me to my next point:

How in the absolute hell did the perfect storm of so many evil people be around all at once? Hitler's rhetoric is absolutely 100% at fault but Kershaw shows how the men put in charge of conquered areas decided to turn things up to 11 genocide and abuse wise before Hitler was really ready to get to that stage (He knew it would come, but he hadn't quite accepted his own speeches it seemed). Again all in the name of "Working towards the Fuhrer". Just mind blowing.

On the flip side of the above coin, just the amount of talent all in Germany at once completely squandered in the pursuit of terrible anti-Semitism and racist genocide. Hitler's right hand men including himself had such incredible gifts. Hitler was an amazing speaker, Speer a brilliant architect and production genius, Goebbels a master propagandist, Reinhard Heydrich was a masterful problem solver and delegator. And the list goes on.

It's incredibly hard to read this biography and not go "What if?". What if Hitler had not been obsessed with what he viewed as the betrayal and stain of 1918, if he had not been caught up in looking for an easy scape goat in the form of the Jewish and Slavic peoples. How different things could have been, if Hitler, Speer, Goebbels, Heydrich, had instead focused their incredible natural talents on rebuilding Germany and bettering their citizens existences. The building projects envisioned by both Hitler and Speer alone would have kept skilled laborers employed for decades. These same structures would have then needed staff, care takers, etc. I truly feel that if he had not been fundamentally evil and encouraged the evil to be given free reign in those around him, perhaps the 'Thousand Year Reich' he envisioned could actually still exist. If only the pillars of its creation and foundation were built on love, compassion, and the pursuit of good will. Just such an absolute waste of real talent on hate and vitriol.

This is to say nothing of the millions people wiped out under Hitler's auspices. How many brilliant minds went to their early graves by the hands of the few in control. How different the world would have been today, perhaps the Cold War would have never happened or taken a much different route if Germany had just focused on defensive measures and the betterment of mankind.

Hitler also lived in a complete fantasy world, even to the very end he couldn't stop sudden swings of optimism citing his, by then, well worn examples of famous Germans who had (In his view) through simply the power of their will beaten back and won against incredible odds. He was surrounded obviously by sycophants who knew they were beholden to Hitler alone in terms of their power and influence and did everything to keep that.

This book opened my eyes to much more than I had known about Hitler and Germany in WWII. Honestly after reading it I don't think I need to read any more biographies on Hitler. It should be remembered, it should be guarded against from ever happening again. There is no other way to put it than the period of 1933-1945 being an utter catastrophe for the human race. show less

The book caught my attention for the sheer audacity of the subject matter: Europe covering the period that encompassed two world wars, the early Cold War and a rather eventful inter-war period. I am familiar with single-volume histories of each war, but to do justice to both - and everything in-between seemed an impossible task. It would not simply because of the writing and the need to condense key facts, but the immense volume of material that exists covering the period.

The outcome is show more impressive. [a:Ian Kershaw|30702|Ian Kershaw|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1612305000p2/30702.jpg] paints the narrative chapter by chapter advancing a few years at a time, sketching our the political developments, the views of the elite, of the ordinary people, economic and cultural developments. Inevitably the major powers get the most attention: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Russia (or the Soviet Union), Italy and (while it lasted) Austria Hungary. But he also did a circuit of the other countries, picking out common themes and contrasts. The coverage was truly impressive.

Of course, something has to give. This was very broad-brush. There are no detailed accounts like you might find in his biographies of Hitler (e.g. [b:Hitler|22534749|Hitler|Ian Kershaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410145141l/22534749._SY75_.jpg|3785163] ). Any detail of the military campaigns was largely eliminated as battles affecting hundreds of thousands of troops were covered in a half-sentence (such as the battles for Norway and France) or vanish entirely (such as the defence of Greece or the Allied operations after Normandy). This must be the only history of the period that does not mention Eisenhower, Montgomery or Rommel! Kershaw has chosen to put more emphasis on the privations of the civilian population: bombing, totalitarian control, famine, displacement and of course, deliberate mass murder - the genocide.

Controversies and mysteries are quickly dispensed with. There is no debate about the causes of the First World War - an answer is provided and he moves. This also proves a contrast to [b:Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941|143614|Fateful Choices Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941|Ian Kershaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266481778l/143614._SY75_.jpg|2420378] where he deals with a series of key decisions in detail.

Gaps such as these are unavoidable given the scope of the task. The result, however, is a coherent narrative that does feel like a genuine European perspective that gives fair coverage across the board. show less