Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 622 pp., $34.95.

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 538 pp., $45.

At the invitation of French president Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder joined the leaders of the Allied powers of World War II at this year's 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. His presence, a subtle suggestion that Germans may also claim to have been liberated from Hitler's tyranny by the Allies, was a richly symbolic moment in Schröder's long campaign for his country to be treated as "a normal nation." This had been an important theme of his first successful election campaign in 1998, and the "normal nation" phrase was deployed to justify his bold decision to deploy German troops abroad (for the first time since 1945) in Kosovo-Metohija and Afghanistan.

The increasing official prominence given in Berlin to the annual commemoration of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler should be seen in the same political context. Graduating cadets from the Bundeswehr military academy now take their oaths of allegiance to the Federal Republic and its constitution on the date of the abortive assassination attempt and at the site of the former Wehrmacht HQ. The political implication is clear: There was a brave and determined German resistance to Hitler, and therefore Germans also enjoyed a real liberation in 1945. The new Germany, which takes an honorable part in the military operations of the international community as mandated by the UN Security Council, should thus finally be allowed to emerge from the long shadow of the Third Reich.

Officially, some countries agree; hence the invitation to the D-Day event in Normandy this year. The event was marked by little of that international furor that attended the presence of President Ronald Reagan at the Bitburg military cemetery some twenty years ago, when it was learned that SS men were among the dead. Germany and the world have moved on and the World War II generation is dead or in retirement. But the history never quite goes away. In April of this year, the German agency in charge of war graves found, after a request by Schröder's sister Gunhild, the unmarked grave of their father Corporal Fritz Schröder, killed in 1944 by partisans in Romania at the age of 32. Schröder, who never saw his father, has said that he will at some point visit the grave, and hoped for privacy from the media when he did so.

He is unlikely to get it, because Germans are as fascinated by their own past as anyone else. But the recent wave of books and films about the Third Reich suggests an important new element has entered the national memory. The new theme is Germans as victims. Jorg Friedrich's Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 ("The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War") deals at length with the horrors inflicted on civilians by the Allies' strategic bombing campaign, while giving short shrift to the Luftwaffe's own pioneering efforts in Guernica, Rotterdam, London and Coventry. Gunther Grass's new novel, Crabwalk, deals with the sinking of the cruise ship Gustloft taking refugees from Königsberg with 4,000 children aboard. The Fall of Berlin, by the British historian Anthony Beevor, with its powerful account of the mass rapes of German women by the victorious Red Army, has become a best seller. The film Amen (directed by Costa-Gavras) recounts the vain but heroic attempts by German officer Kurt Gerstain to alert the Catholic and Lutheran church hierarchy to the reality of the extermination camps.

This is not an improper rewriting of history so much as changing the angle of vision from Germans as extraordinary perpetrators of a unique evil to Germans as fellow-sufferers of a unique regime. There is something in this. Even in the election of March 1933, two months after Hitler came to power, and after the Communist Party had been driven underground and the Social Democrats and trade unions crushed, Hitler won only 17 million votes in an electorate of 45 million. With the support of their Nationalist allies, the Nazi-led coalition won 51.9 percent of the votes cast (and were somewhat surprised to have done so well. "Unbelievable figures", Goebbels confided to his diary.) But even from the underground, the Communists took over 12 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats won 18.3 percent and the mainly-Catholic Center Party took 11.2 percent. The Nazis won over 50 percent of the vote only in the lands east and north of Berlin. Throughout the Rhineland and in most of Bavaria and central Germany, they scored less than 40 percent of the vote.

It is entirely understandable that the Federal Republic should seek to present the Hitler period and the Third Reich as an aberration from which they suffered as much as other Europeans. First, this has become a habit. Throughout the Cold War, East Germany viciously claimed that West Germany was the heir to the capitalist and military-industrial complex on whose behalf Hitler had seized power and sought to crush communism both in Germany and in its Soviet homeland. This charge had to be constantly refuted, particularly after 1968, when a disturbing proportion of young Germans seemed inclined to believe it. Second, no self-respecting state can abide the debilitating thought that it represents a people eternally flawed with an extreme political version of original sin. Third, modern Germans (and their allies and partners in NATO and the European Union) have reason to be proud of the stable and prosperous democracy they have built.

So the received wisdom of modern German historiography has been dominated by Ernst Fraenkel's theory of the Third Reich as a Dual State, in which a normal, law-abiding and fundamentally decent German state endured, while a parasitic Nazi system with its Gestapo and SS and concentration camps grew alongside to hold monstrous sway. In this concept, the German army remained honorable and brave, while the crimes were committed by the Waffen SS. German intelligence, the Abwehr, remained efficient and reasonable (and ready to deal discreetly with the Allies) while the wickedness was perpetrated by Schellenburg's SS intelligence division, the Sicherheitsdienst. The German judicial system continued to function with an eye to legal norms, while the gross distortions of justice lay at the door of the Nazi People's Courts. Ultimately, this concept of the Dual State leads to a suggestion of Nazi guilt and German innocence, and throughout the Cold War it was convenient for the NATO allies to accede to this view.

That was not how it seemed to a number of German historians, of whom the first and foremost was Friedrich Meinecke, who produced The German Catastrophe in 1946. Meinecke's book pre-empted the theory of the Dual State and the Nazis as a bizarre aberration from a healthy German civilization by asking a version of Thucydides' question: If a great state falls as a result of a single battle, then what was unsound in the state to make it so oddly vulnerable? If a great civilization falls into the hands of a gang of murderously deranged thugs, then what was it in that civilization that allowed it to be so misled? Meinecke concluded that the German nation state had been poisoned from its Bismarckian birth in 1871 by militarism and an obsession with power. In his new book, The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, the Cambridge professor of modern history, inclines strongly to Meinecke's view. He notes of the constitution Bismarck devised for the new German Reich in 1871, "alone of all modern German constitutions, it lacked any declaration of principle about human rights and civic freedoms."

Evans has produced the first of a three-volume narrative history that promises to be a masterpiece. This first volume, which deals with the origins and establishment of the Nazi state, will be followed by a second on the building of the Third Reich until 1939, and the third will deal with the war and collapse. Evans decided to write it when he was serving as an expert witness for the defense in the celebrated libel trial of David Irving, the British historian who sued Deborah Lipstadt (and lost) for suggesting that he was something of an apologist for the Nazi regime. Evans noted that many aspects of the Nazi regime remained poorly documented, and there was "no really wide-ranging, detailed overall account of the broader historical context of Nazi policies towards the Jews in the general history of the Third Reich." Later, while serving on the British government's Spoliation Advisory Panel, weighing claims for the return of property stolen in the Nazi era, he again found that "there was no general history of Nazi Germany to which I could direct other members of the panel." He has thus produced one and has been forced to plunge into the tangled issue of the German past, the roots of Nazism and whether or not Hitlerism was quite the aberration that the Bonn and Berlin Republics insist it was.

This is a far more serious and thorough work than William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, yet it remains readable. Evans explores in some detail the nature of the Bismarckian state and the degree to which it precluded the emergence of a democratic civil society. Bismarck played the politics of divide and rule with brilliance; his legacy was to leave Germany with a schismatic electorate, separated into six main political parties. His Anti-Catholic measures had provoked the emergence of the Center Party to defend Catholic interests, whose votes were thus not available to buttress other parties. There were two conservative parties, one of which accepted Bismarck's merging of Prussia into Germany and one that did not. There were two liberal parties, one of which accepted Bismarck's rule that the parliament could not control the military budget, and the other that did not. And there were the Social Democrats, who were sufficiently patriotic to vote for the war credits in 1914. But the Social Democrats would never forgive the bourgeois parties for not fighting Bismarck's draconian Anti-Socialist Law (introduced after an attempted assassination of the kaiser in 1878). Thus fragmented, Germany's political institutions were ill adapted to the challenges of rebuilding the state after the defeat of 1918, the subsequent abortive revolution, and the economic collapse due to inflation.

Evans has an eye for the telling detail and the arresting anecdote. He notes that one distinctive feature of the Bismarckian state was the guarantee that every conscripted soldier who stayed on in the army to become a career non-commissioned officer would later get a secure job in the civil service, as a policeman, postal worker, railwayman or clerk. This meant that most of the representatives of the German state, particularly those with whom the public came most into contact, "behaved in the military fashion to which they had become accustomed." He explores the surge in antisemitism in the late 19th century, the bizarre warping of Darwinism into theories of racial destiny, the Wagner cult, and suggests that they grew in importance because of the social dislocations brought on by headlong economic growth. "Germany, unlike any other country, had become a nation-state not before the industrial revolution, but at its height", and so, "German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition."

While working with the libel defense team against David Irving, Evans had a young research assistant, Nikolaus Wachsmann, who has now produced a fine book of his own, Hitler's Prisons. Subtitled, Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, it sharply questions the Dual State thesis by demonstrating that there was far more overlap between the traditional German judicial system and Nazi injustice than generations of German lawyers have sought to maintain. "There was a striking continuity with the Third Reich, with about 80 percent of former officials re-employed", Wachsmann recounts.

Even former members of the most lethal Nazi court, the Peoples Court, continued their legal careers in postwar Germany. In total, some 72 former judges and prosecutors from the Peoples Court were re-employed by the West German state, some of them serving into the 1970s. In view of this continuity, it is hardly surprising that not a single Nazi judge or prosecutor was convicted by his colleagues in West Germany. (The exception was the case of a few members of the civilian drumhead courts martial, who got away with very lenient sentences.) The legal system proved utterly incapable of facing its own Nazi past.

Noting that the full verdict of the Nuremberg trials was not published in German until 1996, Wachsman makes it clear that the German courts and penal institutions had much to hide, for they "played a central part in the criminalization of political dissent and the politicalization of common crime."

And yet Wachsman concludes, "the Third Reich did not become an all-out police state." There was a reason for this. Had the Nazi regime relied solely on the police and concentration camps, it would have destroyed the semblance of the rule of law vital for its popular support.

The population of the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps) did not exceed the population of the conventional prison system until 1943, a time when Hitler became seriously alarmed that food rationing and the effects of the strategic bombing campaign were threatening to build a wave of internal dissent that he was determined to crush.

It is in detailed studies such as Wachsmann's that the cumulative evidence builds to suggest that the Dual State theory will not wash and that the Nazis were less an aberrant and evil parasite on a sound German culture than a symbiote of the authoritarian state system founded by Bismarck. Whether one looks at the colonial history of pre-1914 Germany and the deliberate genocide of the Hereros of southwest Africa; or at the persecution of Roman Catholics in the 1870s, which saw 225 priests in prison, the suppression of all non-nursing religious orders and the wholesale dismissal of bishops and archbishops; or at the routine press controls, or the complaisant way in which German universities in the 1930s cooperated with the purge of Jewish academics, the continuities from Second to Third Reich are striking. It is understandable that the current German government and much of the German intelligentsia seek to downplay this, but Evans's work is too powerful to be easily gainsaid.

History's Riddle

It may be said that the riddle of German history is far too important to be left to the historians. And yet others have reached similar conclusions. The novelist Thomas Mann also blamed the authoritarian Bismarckian Reich for so denying any real political space that the German middle class simply ignored politics and thus could mobilize few defenses against the Nazi assault. W.H. Auden, who called Hitler "a psychopathic god", went back much further, writing:

"Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad."

The novelist Dennis Wheatley, recruited by Churchill in 1940 as a special propagandist, contributed the idea that Germany remained essentially barbaric because it had never known the civilizing hand of the Roman Empire. Others followed Auden to focus on the occasional antisemitism and xenophobia of Martin Luther, or explored the nationalism of Herder, the idealization of the state in Hegel and so on.

Charles de Gaulle, in his 1924 book The Enemy's House Divided, drew on his reading of the German press as a prisoner of war from 1916-18 to conclude that the nation had suffered a shattering psychological blow. After the collapse of Russia in 1917, the German army and people had been convinced that the great spring offensives of 1918 would bring victory. When the offensive stalled and the Allied counterattacks cracked the German lines, morale crumpled:

"A sort of moral stupor all at once gripped a proud and authoritarian sovereign, a formerly tenacious government, a docile political world, a confident and resolute military command, an obedient and courageous soldiery. At a blow, as by the fatal strike of a magic wand, that stupor annihilated the warlike qualities of the German people and suddenly enlarged their faults."

But, De Gaulle added with some foreboding, the ghost of Nietzsche lingered amid the ruins of the Wilhelmine Reich:

"They voluntarily resolved to be part of that formidable Nietzchean elite who are convinced that in pursuing their own glory, they are serving the general interest; who exercise compulsion on the mass of slaves, holding them in contempt; and who do not hesitate in the face of human suffering, except to hail it as necessary and desirable."

The late British historian A.J.P. Taylor suggested that the fault lay in the failure of the liberal revolution of 1848--"the turning point at which history failed to turn." But Taylor noted that the great symbol of that moment of liberal nationalism, the Frankfurt Parliament, chose as its slogan, "Einheit, Freiheit, Macht": Unity, Freedom, Power. Even the liberals thought instinctively in terms of Machtpolitik.

Perhaps the most telling single contribution came from a German historian who was not looking at Nazism at all, but concentrated instead on the question of German responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. Fritz Fischer's seminal work of 1961, Griff nach der Weltmacht ("The Grasp for World Power"), was based on the rarely used archives of the sub-kingdoms of the German Reich who kept "embassies" in Berlin. It made a powerful case that German generals and officials wanted and deliberately provoked war as a pre-emptive strike against a fast-industrializing Russia.

Fischer's work had important implications. An important feature of the "innocent Germans, guilty Nazis" theory was that Germany has simply been unlucky. World War I was nobody's fault, or everybody's. A diplomatic crisis in the Balkans had got out of hand. The mobilization plans of the various armies then took over. Germany had to defeat France in six weeks, before sending the vast armies back by train to the Eastern Front to confront the advancing Russians. Once defeated, Germany was then unfairly blamed for starting the war and suffered punitive vengeance at the hands of the victors, which caused the great inflation that destroyed the savings of the German middle class and left the country demoralized and prostrate before the Great Depression. Adolf Hitler seemed to have the answers, not least in defeating the communists, but then led the country astray with his racial insanities and lust for conquest.

Fischer's book unpicked the first link in that chain of logic by arguing, with an impressive array of documentary evidence, that Germany had brought its ill luck upon itself by deliberately seeking war in 1914. This suggested in turn that the notorious "war guilt" clause of the Versailles Treaty had not been an outrageous imposition upon a blameless Germany, but a verdict based on historical truth. And this further implied that the Nazis had not been some inexplicable aberration from the sweet and wholesome flow of German civilization but that perhaps there was something uniquely aggressive and anti-social about the various forms of the German Reich, in 1914 as in 1933-45. If so, then Germany's neighbors might be forgiven for a lingering suspicion that Europe's richest and most populous power remains too dangerous for comfort.

Because of Germany's history, such issues are intensely sensitive. Margaret Thatcher was not the only European who continued to see modern Germany through the perspective of World War II and the Holocaust long after those events. Her prejudices were reinforced by an unusual seminar she conducted at her country residence, Chequers, in March 1990, when she was fighting her doomed delaying action against German unification. Six academic experts on Germany and Europe were summoned to join her, as well as Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Charles Powell, her chief adviser on foreign affairs. Powell's memorandum on the session, subsequently leaked to the British press, addressed what were seen as the negative aspects of the German character. These he listed as "angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex and sentimentality."

The list is a caricature. Nearly sixty years after the end of World War II, it should be possible to consider modern Germany apart from Hitler's shadow. But Germans themselves make it difficult to do so, because an official anti-Nazism practically defines the identity of modern Germany. In the election year of 2002, which saw the banning of a small but unpleasant neo-Nazi group, the issue of Germany's Nazi past arose repeatedly. The first was when the conservative challenger, Edmund Stoiber, demanded the retraction of the Benes Decrees of 1945, under which some 3 million Czechs of German descent were deported from their homes in the border region of the Sudetenland. Stoiber, married to a Sudeten German, outraged the Czech government and alarmed other eastern Europeans, particularly the Poles, who wondered whether the issue would put at risk the whole 1945 settlement of Europe's borders. The second arose over Israel's forthright reaction to the Palestinian suicide bombings. The deputy leader of the Free Democratic Party was driven to stand down for suggesting that, in the Palestinians' place, he too would be provoked into fighting back.

The same election year saw a cultural drama over a novel that topped the German best-seller lists throughout the summer. Death of a Critic, by the acclaimed writer Martin Walser, was based on the murder of a well-known Jewish literary critic by an outraged writer. The book was condemned by the country's leading newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung--in whose pages Germany's leading (and Jewish) critic had made his reputation--as a kind of intellectual Nazism. Walser is perhaps best known outside Germany for a forthright speech, in the context of Schršder's "normal nation" policy, in which he said that it was time to stop battering Germany with "the bludgeon of Auschwitz."

"When this past is laid before me every day in the media, I notice something awakes inside me that resists such continual harping on our shame", Walser said at the presentation of the German Booksellers' Peace Prize. His remarks were made in the context of two controversies of the day: the reparation payments of German industry and banks to forced laborers from the Nazi era and the building of the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin.

There should be little surprise that history has become such an intellectual battleground in contemporary Germany and much comfort to be drawn from the liveliness of the debate. Much of this debate focuses on the work of Ernst Nolte, whose Three Faces of Fascism remains a classic. But in 1980, Nolte ventured into highly controversial territory with a speech that is credited with unleashing the Historikerstreit, the clash of the historians.

In his 1980 lecture, "Historical Legend and Revisionism?", Nolte said:

"The Third Reich should be removed from the historical isolation in which it remains. . . . The demonization of the Third Reich is unacceptable . . . . [Instead, it] must become an object of scholarship, of a scholarship that is not aloof from politics, but that is also not merely a handmaiden of politics."

So far, so reasonable. Then Nolte went further, suggesting that Hitler's assault on the Jews might have had some shred of justification:

"It is hard to deny that Hitler had good reason to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate him long before the first information about the events in Auschwitz became public. . . . Chaim Weizmann's statement in the first days of September 1939, that in this war the Jews of all the world would fight on England's side . . . could lay the foundation for the thesis that Hitler would have been justified in treating the German Jews as prisoners of war (or, more precisely, as civilian internees), thus interning them."

In June 2000, Nolte was awarded "Konrad Adenauer Prize" for literature, one of Germany's most prestigious prizes by the Munich-based Germany Foundation (Deutschlandstiftung). In his acceptance speech, Nolte suggested that the contemporary historian "should leave behind the view that the opposite of National Socialist goals is always good and right" and asked the dangerous question "whether Hitler's antisemitism may not have had a kernel of truth [or a] . . . rational, comprehensible core."

Because the Third Reich was the "strongest of all counter forces" to Soviet communism, a movement with wide Jewish support, Nolte raised the question whether Hitler may have had rational reasons for persecuting the Jews, and suggested that there was now "a Jewish paradigm" of history, which is assuming the status of a "near-religion" of which Nazism is the "new Satan." It is at this point that the reasonable questions of the serious historian start to blend into something markedly more sinister and the prospect emerges that yesterday's history becomes a contentious factor in today's politics.

This is dangerous and unpleasant ground, and Richard Evans is to be congratulated on restoring a clearly demarcated historical sensibility to what was becoming treacherous terrain. And it is striking that some of the most important new contributions to the history of the Third Reich should have come not from German but from Anglo-Saxon historians: The British contribute Evans, and Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler (Hubris, 1889-1936 and Nemesis, 1936-1945), and Michael Burleigh (The Third Reich) is a worthy American contender who reminds us constantly that there was something deeply evil at the heart of the Nazi project.

This is not to say that Gerhard Schröder, the posthumous, and thus innocent, son of a Wehrmacht corporal, should not have been invited to the commemoration at the Normandy beaches this year. Nor is it to say that Ernst Nolte's questions are not worth pondering. There were, after all, influential people and currents of thought in Britain, France and the United States in the 1930s who found Hitler's ideology to be quite congenial. Nor is it to say that the Third Reich was unique in its modern evil. Stalin's gulag regime was an equally hideous twin whose victimization of the class enemy was just as wicked as Hitler's assault on his racial and social enemies. But it remains remarkable that the most thorough and intellectually penetrating studies of the gulag and of the Third Reich have come less from the Germans and Russians who were heirs to Nolte's "great ideological civil war" but from British and American writers such as Robert Conquest, who are products and heirs of the liberal democracies that confronted and overwhelmed Nazism and communism alike. That remains the signal challenge to German (and Russian) historians for the future, and it should be an enduring concern for the Schröders and the Putins to ponder as they congratulate themselves that their presence at the D-Day events implies that they have finally escaped from the dreadful burden of history. They have not. We never do.