It took me a while to get through this 965-page book, but it was worth it. This book is a very detailed history of the Nazi Regime, starting with Hitler's violent path to becoming Germany's dictator and continuing through the transformation of a country struggling to recover from The Great War to the dehumanized killing machine it became. It gives a thoroughly horrifying account of the atrocities of the war itself. Also, it provides theories and political analysis of the personal and international agendas that propelled the world into this epic shit storm. It's incomprehensible to imagine one man's hate-filled vision could persuade an entire country to exterminate another race, but it is even more sickening that it happened. Hitler and the Nazis were evil and caused millions and millions of innocents to die. They will be a stain on our history forever, one, I hope, is never repeated. ( )

A comprehensively informative and disturbing telling of the gradual collapse of all moral & ethical values in 1920s-30s-40s Germany: an incredibly depressing view of one of the great civilizations of Europe failing in every aspect of its social, spiritual, economic, philosophical, political life to defend the immensely impressive cultural inheritance from previous generations that until 1918 was the story of the Rise of the German state.
Not all Germans were Nazis and not all Germans were evil, however, my goodness this book does not spare the inter-war years German population from a magnifying glass exposure of just how they collectively came to allow an extraordinarily extremist, near death-cult regime to settle and assert itself in and over them: Hitler's Nazism not only took over their lives, but had them actively participate in spectacularly huge numbers from the lowest level of street society through to the families of ancient nobility & landowning & industrial conglomerates all the way to those intimately linked with the great panoply of affairs of State.
The author has written an enlightening version of the tragedy of Germany between the World Wars that compares favourably with any other Historian's tome detailing one of the darkest most depraved periods in humankind's alleged civilized existence. ( )

This was a well-written book about a terrible story. Burleigh does a good job in presenting a balanced appraisal of the Third Reich in the context of its times, and does not spare either the Western Allies or the USSR when he finds examples of their hypocrisy or shared culpability in what happened in the nightmarish 1940s. The book was a tough read at times, since the author has a predilection for long sentences, and now and then he seemed to wander from the subject at hand. Well worth a read, for those who still think that Hitler's Germany was a state like any other -- it most certainly was not. ( )

Burleigh writes an epic, sweeping history of the rise of Nazism in Germany, the Second World War, and its immediate aftermath. Though there are many books about Hitler and the War, Burleigh manages to write a new book covering Nazism as political religion and Nazi totalitarianism including eugenics, mass murder etc. He offers a chillingly comprehensive account of the programme of mass sterilisation against Gypsies, Jews, and the mentally ill. Burleigh is very good at describing this progressively deteriorating position of the "undesirables" and it makes for uncomfortable reading. Though the author's underlying premise means he must often make comparisons to Stalinist Russia, these are few and brief. Nevertheless, the chapters on the pieces that together made up the jigsaw of the Holocaust are valuable and haunting. Overall, the book is indeed emotionally draining as the reader is forced to confront time and again "man's inhumanity to man" but nevertheless, the reader should persevere for it is a rewarding historical study. ( )

NO OF PAGES: 965 SUB CAT I: Holocaust SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: Humans have a fascination with evil. We long to identify it, quantify it, and understand it. To this end, newspapers frequently splash photographs of murderers with the caption "The face of evil." Heading most lists of the 20th century's most evil people would be Adolf Hitler, but, as Michael Burleigh's tour de force makes clear, evil is not always as cut-and-dried as we would like. The Nazis could not have come to power and committed Germany to a policy of war and genocide without the tacit consent of the German people. This makes Germany as a whole responsible for the crimes committed in its name, but it is clearly wrong to label every German as evil. Through his painstaking research and direct prose, Burleigh slowly builds up a picture of a people desperate for identity and economic prosperity, who, bit by bit, closed off their conscience as the price of their dreams. There was no one cathartic moment when Germany, under the Third Reich, lapsed from goodness into badness; rather, there was an incremental realignment of a collective morality. Burleigh's explanation of this phenomenon is so simple, yet so obviously right, that you can only wonder that it didn't become the generally accepted currency years ago.
Instead of viewing Nazi Germany in purely social, political, and economic terms--though he doesn't ignore these spheres--Burleigh wraps them all into a picture of a country gripped in a religious, messianic fervor, and that which had previously felt inexplicable suddenly seems clear. If you want the nitty-gritty details of the Second World War and the genocide, they are here, retold as well as, if not better than, many of the other histories of this period. But it's Burleigh's take on the people of Germany that makes this book so special. Above all, with similar genocidal wars currently being fought in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq, it makes you think, "Would I be able to resist becoming complicit in such regimes?" This is a must for every 20th-century historian.NOTES: Donated by Patricia Irwin. SUBTITLE: A New History