As Evans explains, “the final solution” was the result of a process rather than a single decision. It began gradually with the deportation of Jews to camps for “extermination through labour” and then incorporated the use of gas chambers. His description of the camps, which never fails to shock, reminds us why Polish-British mathematician and writer Jacob Bronowski, on visiting Auschwitz, quoted Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
What is most interesting, however, is the attitude of the ordinary German people. It is this question with which Evans is acutely concerned. Clearly they knew what was going on, despite subsequent denials. Reactions at the time were mixed: Guilty consciences haunted many Germans before the end of the war, but others were filled more with self-pity than with guilt. Anti-Semitism was widespread and manifested itself not only in the organized annihilation of around six million Jews but also in the spontaneous, localized actions of ordinary citizens.
In one especially brutal and horrific scene, a group of Jews was savagely beaten to death, while cheering civilians – men, women and children – watched and laughed. “Some of the women,” one onlooker observed, “were lifting up their children so that they could see better.”
“What drove the extermination impulses of the Nazis,” Evans writes, was “an ideologically pervasive mixture of fear and hatred, which blamed the Jews for all Germany's ills, and sought their destruction as a matter of life and death, in the interests of Germany's survival.” Well into the 1950s, many Germans thought the country was better off without Jews.
“Not only historical knowledge about the Third Reich,” Evans writes, “but also public consciousness of what it did, has increased with distance in time from the Nazi regime.” These volumes contribute to that increase in understanding, and they are a remarkable achievement.
His conclusion also highlights the continuing relevance of Hitler's Germany: “The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. ... It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction.” While we will never fully comprehend why educated people can be persuaded to believe the most terrible things, Evans at least demonstrates what can happen.
James Grant, a freelance writer living in Britain, has a particular interest in the history of the Third Reich.
