to show how one thing led to another.” Nor, he assures us, will his trilogy be addressed to specialists, but rather to “people who know nothing about the subject, or who know a little and would like to know more.” The result is rather more equivocal than these words might suggest.Įvans’s first volume takes us from Bismarck’s creation of the “Second” German Reich in 1871 up to the advent of the Third in 1933. After his opening remarks, he rather surprisingly pledges “to avoid using language that carries moral, religious, or ethical baggage with it,” aiming instead to return to old-fashioned narrative history and, while avoiding hindsight, “to tell the story of the Third Reich in chronological order. In the preface to The Coming of the Third Reich, he promises to show instead how “the Nazis managed to establish a one-party dictatorship in Germany within a very short space of time, and with seemingly little real resistance from the German people.” If anything, this prosecutorial language calls to mind the approach taken in recent years by authors like Michael Burleigh ( The Third Reich: A New History) and Daniel Goldhagen ( Hitler’s Willing Executioners).īut it turns out that Evans does not really want to play the part of a hanging judge.
Evans came to prominence in 2000 as a key witness for the defense team in the David Irving trial in London, where he convincingly demonstrated the systematic distortions, adding up to Holocaust denial, in Irving’s work.Ĭlearly, Evans has little patience for arguments tending to relativize Nazi crimes, whether advanced by revisionist historians or by slippery German politicians. The time is therefore opportune for someone once again to set the record straight about Nazi Germany This, indeed, appears to have been the aim of Richard Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge who has just released the first of three projected volumes on the Third Reich. Pushed along by sensational books on subjects like the postwar expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, this unattractive revisionism burst into the open during the lead-up to the Iraq war, when some German intellectuals and political figures began conflating their opposition to Bush-administration policy with the supposed victimization of their own country by Allied bombing during World War II. In the last several years, a new version of 20th-century history has been gathering momentum in Germany one in which Germans at last receive their own share of the contemporary world’s most precious moral commodity: victimhood.
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