War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (February 2007)

Richard J. Evans. _The Third Reich in Power_. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. xvii + 941 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 0-14-303790-0.

Reviewed for H-German by Paul Moore, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London

Rituals and Retribution

One afternoon in late June 1934, three friends from Dresden went for a drive in the surrounding countryside. Their destination, which at least two of their number were "all agog to see," was not a local beauty spot or picturesque village, but an altogether more contemporary place of interest, namely Hohnstein concentration camp. The friends consumed coffee and cream opposite the gate of "The Hell of Saxony," before driving home past a group of its inmates building a road under the watchful eyes of armed guards. The sight prompted one of the friends, a judge, to remark on the "healthy outdoor life" the forced laborers enjoyed; a second, concurring, was also moved to comment on the absolutely ideal surroundings" with which prisoners were privileged, adding that, contrary to the impression she had been given that concentration camps were "really horrible," "certainly these prisoners have nothing to complain of." The very next day, the same woman was deeply shocked to learn that a friend of hers had been killed during the "Night of the Long Knives": "I cannot understand it. What comes next in this unhappy country?"

That such a seemingly surreal sequence of events could be possible in mid-1930s Germany is brought home effectively in this monumental book. The second part of a planned trilogy of works, this volume picks up where the preceding volume, _The Coming of the Third Reich_ (2004), left off and will be followed by _The Third Reich At War_, intended to complete the story by not only covering the conflict itself but also "exploring the legacy of Nazism in Europe and the world in the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present" (p. xv). This is an ambitious project on a grand scale, and accordingly this weighty second volume has the avowed aim of telling "the story of the Third Reich from the moment when it completed its seizure of power in the summer of 1933 to the point when it plunged Europe into the Second World War" in September 1939 (p. xv). This focus is necessary: despite the profusion of books on the Third Reich, born in part of a continuing British cultural obsession with the Nazis (to the chagrin of many German observers), English-language books that look specifically and deeply into the prewar years remain very few. This shortage may occur because ending the narrative in 1939 prevents an analysis of either the Second World War or the Holocaust, the two historical facts, quite correctly, most associated with the Third Reich in the public mind. Many books cover the Third Reich in its twelve year entirety, but these inevitably cannot devote as much discussion to the first six years as a text looking specifically at 1933-39. Michael Burleigh's general history, for example, covers the prewar Third Reich in just over 250 pages ...

REVIEW: Horst Boog, Gerhard Krebs and Detlef Vogel, Germany and the Second World War, Volume VII: The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia 1943-1944/5

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (May, 2007)

Horst Boog, Gerhard Krebs and Detlef Vogel. _Germany and the Second World War, Volume VII: The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia 1943-1944/5_. Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore, Francisca Garvie, Ewald Osers, Barry Smerin, and Barbara Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xxxvi + 892 pp. Maps, tables, diagrams, glossary, bibliography, index. $425.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-822889-9.

Reviewed for H-German by Richard Byers, Department of History, North Georgia College and State University

An Epic Series Continues

This volume continues Oxford's excellent translation of the ongoing work of Germany's _Militaergeschichtliches Forschungsamt_, and its massive series, _Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg_, now well into its fourth decade. Many readers may by now be familiar with the format of the volumes, with several noted scholars contributing sections to make up the whole. In this regard, this volume employs a stellar cast, engaged in a monumental project now nearing completion. Of the major belligerents of the Second World War, only Germany continues to produce an extensive and ongoing historical investigation of its actions and this volume continues an impressive and honest, though high-level, appraisal of the horrific nature of the conflict. The seventh volume traces Germany's loss of the air war against the Western Allies, Allied troop landings in France and their advance to the German border, and the second half of the war in Asia, culminating in the surrender of Japan ...

REVIEW: Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941

H-Diplo Review Essay

Ian Kershaw. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941. London and New York: Penguin, 2007. pp. xxiv, 624. ISBN 978-0-713-99712-5.

Review by Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina, Emeritus

Published by H-Diplo on 4 November 2007

The author of a recent excellent two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler has selected ten decisions made in the early stages of World War II for careful examination. One might argue about the choices selected, but even if one could argue for a different selection, a reviewer ought to  deal with the book the author wrote, not one he might have written. In each of the cases Kershaw carefully examines and recounts the background  to the decision, explains the options ­ if any ­ as seen by the decider, points to the presence or absence of dissenting voices at the time, and delineates how and why the decision actually taken came to be.

The first decision examined is that of the British government in May-June 1940 to continue to fight against Germany after the fall of France. While this reviewer¹s reading of the evidence does not make the division between the views of Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax as clear cut as Kershaw does, no one is likely to disagree with the judgement that this decision was of enormous significance for the subsequent course of the war. Perhaps the account would have been more accurate if Kershaw had noted that in 1938 Churchill had privately informed the government of Czechoslovakia that if he were in power, he would follow the same policy as Neville Chamberlain, a policy he publicly attacked in his subsequent writings. And if Kershaw had noted that the fighter planes that won the Battle of Britain were not purchased at the 5 & 10 the day after Churchill became prime minister but had been ordered by Chamberlain over the opposition of the Labour Party, his account of the latter siding with Churchill in the decision  to continue fighting would be easier to understand ...

REVIEW: David M. Glantz, Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (September 2007)

David M. Glantz. _Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944_. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006. 448 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, appendix with Soviet documents. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1465-6.

Reviewed for H-War by Robert Niebuhr, Department of History, Boston College

Delaying the Inevitable

In an exhaustive account of the Soviet military operations along the southern Ukrainian frontier with Romania, David Glantz tries to use these episodes to elucidate several key issues important for understanding World War II and the subsequent Cold War.  First, Glantz seeks to resurrect these operations from the supposed dustbin of history and place them among the key moments in the war.  Second, Glantz dives into the intense details of the springtime battles to show that the Soviet operations resulted from far broader, more menacing motives. While a successful Red Army along this front obviously would have compromised Germany's Balkan allies and cut off the flow of oil from the Ploiesti oil fields, the more important issues lies within what Glantz sees as the reasoning behind Soviet operations as early as the spring of 1944.

Glantz argues that Soviet and Russian historians incorrectly assert that Josef Stalin's influence over Red Army operations focused on defeating Germany with a direct drive towards Berlin.  Instead, Glantz asserts that Stalin advocated for a so-called broad front strategy that, on the tactical level, would probe the entire front for individual weaknesses the Soviets could then exploit.  Berlin was a central target, so this argument goes.  But, if the German line broke in the southern Ukraine, for example, the way to the Balkans would open up and effectively degrade the German war effort, simultaneously giving the Soviet Union possession of territory of high strategic value.  But, the significance of this argument expands into territory that is more controversial ...

REVIEW: Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Stefan Goebel. _The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940_. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xviii + 357 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $ 90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-85415-6.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Antoine Capet, University of Rouen, France

Some Are More Medievalist than Others

It is clear from his stated objectives as indicated in the introduction that the author set himself a very ambitious task, from at least two points of view. First, because the general theme of the book is not one with which most readers are _prima facie_ familiar: "The 'medievalising' of the memory of the Great War is the subject-matter of this study. It argues that the Middle Ages figured centrally in the remembrance of the First World War in both Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1940" (p. 1). Second, because, as Stefan Goebel himself admits, the book "ventures into a significantly underdeveloped field of historical enquiry: empirical comparative history" (p. 6). Mastering the subject and the enormous historiography of First World War memory in Britain or Germany was already a considerable difficulty, which he chose to compound by covering both countries, fully aware of the pitfalls, since he writes that "the comparative historian of the First World War seems to tread a tightrope between emphasizing European convergences, national
peculiarities, or sectional diversities within nations" (p. 10).

Goebel's approach is clearly influenced by Pierre Nora's _Lieux de memoire_ (1984-1992). Those who are familiar with the work or its translations will remember that the "sites of memory" in question go much further than mere places and buildings, to include all elements of culture. Here, of course, lies the first major difficulty as the signifiers "culture" in English and "Kultur" in German do not have the same signified notions, with "Kultur" including references to Germanity which "culture" does not have in English for Britishness. Since, not unexpectedly, he founds his reasoning on the chivalrous ideals of the Middle Ages, Goebel draws a constant implicit comparison between the exploitation of the Knights of the Round Table in Britain and the Teutonic Knights in Germany. But as the very expression "the Arthurian legend" immediately suggests, the Knights of the Round Table are not "history"--at best they are "cultural history"--admittedly a British _lieu de memoire_ in Pierre Nora's wide acceptation of the notion, but evidently not with the same grounding in the national historical awareness as the "real" Teutonic Knights ...

REVIEW: Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April, 2007)

Thomas Kühne. _Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert_. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006. 327 pp. . EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-35154-3.

Reviewed for H-German by Dirk Bönker, Department of History, Duke University.

German Soldiers, Comradeship, and the Pursuit of War

The complicity of the _Wehrmacht_ and its personnel in the National Socialist pursuit of war, racial empire, and genocide has become the subject of an ever-proliferating body of scholarship. Historians disagree about the exact shape and extent of this participation, that is, the ways and extent to which most _Wehrmacht_ soldiers became actively involved in the Nazi _Vernichtungskrieg_ and lent shape to it as killers and willing bystanders. Historians also struggle to offer convincing explanations for the mass involvement of "ordinary" German soldiers in racial war and their willingness to fight until the bitter end of catastrophic defeat. Existing explanations range from the pervasiveness of a collective, deep-seated racist nationalism to wartime Nazi ideological mobilization, from the dictates of organizational cultures to social pressure to conform within primary groups.

In this outstanding book on notions of comradeship and German soldiers of World War II, Thomas Kühne stakes out new interpretive ground beyond such explanations. Exploring _Kameradschaft_ (the literal English translation is "camaraderie," which has a significantly more light-hearted connotation than the German term) as both a mythical construct and social practice, Kühne argues that it helped to mold the ideas, deeds, and experiences of the more than seventeen million German men who fought as _Wehrmacht_ soldiers and that it engendered social life and community in the midst of mass killing and genocidal warfare. These soldiers carried out genocidal and total war, argues Kühne, because their participation ensured an "enormous intensification of social life (and not physical survival)" (p. 21). In other words, the ideal of _Kameradschaft_ and its appropriation by millions of Germans explains both the murderous deeds and the cohesion of the _Wehrmacht_, and the Nazi _Volksgemeinschaft_ (people's community) at large, during the war. If we believe Kühne, _Kameradschaft_ could acquire this centrality precisely because it was neither simply the product of Nazi policy, war, and military socialization, nor was it endowed with fixed meanings. Rather, _Kameradschaft_ had gained its potency as a mythical construct well before the formation of the Nazi regime. This highly malleable construct originated from within German society in the 1920s and drew its strength from its openness towards different appropriations by multiple social actors; it expressed a collective yearning for national unity and social belonging prevalent among diverse political camps in a deeply divided society coming to terms with the traumas of total war and defeat ...

REVIEW: Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacy of Defeat on Postwar Germany

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April, 2007)

Frank Biess. _Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacy of Defeat on Postwar Germany_. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiii + 367 pp. Images, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-12502-2.

Reviewed for H-German by Thomas Kühne, Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University

Perpetrators into Victims, Warriors into Citizens

As a result of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's trip to Moscow in September 1955, in the following months the last German POWs returned from the Soviet Union--all in all 9,262, including 3,000 civilian internees. West Germans sighed with relief. The postwar period, and thus the most terrible war in European history, seemed to come to an end. In fact, it did not. Innumerable former soldiers and POWs were left alone or had to burden their families when it came time to deal with the traumas resulting from actively exercised or passively suffered mass violence. The return of the last POWs in late 1955 did, however, constitute a caesura. "It completed the (re)constitution of the (West) German national body," as Frank Biess says in his masterly and well-written study (p. 227). Formal sovereignty was granted only weeks before Adenauer's trip to Moscow, when the Paris Treaties were signed and West Germany joined NATO. However, as one contemporary commentator put it, "'only the return of the last POWs gives us the consciousness to be a nation with equal rights among other nations' since 'no state that is forced to accept foreign captivity of a part of its members is really sovereign'" ...

REVIEW: Richard J. Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920-1931

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h.net.msu.edu (October 2006)

Richard J. Shuster. _German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920-1931_. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 256 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-35808-6.

Reviewed for H-War by Bianka J. Adams, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia

Diplomatic Trench Warfare

Richard Shuster's _German Disarmament after World War I_ is a solid and very timely book. This might sound far-fetched, considering that he covers the period from 1919 to 1931, but the reader will soon discover that weapons inspections in the early years of the last century were not all that different from similar efforts in modern times and were just as important. Even in our technologically advanced age, the effectiveness of disarmament undertakings--whether voluntary or mandated--still depend on the skill and persistence of the inspectors and the political will to punish violations. Then and now, weapons experts incurred the wrath of states and their organs whose national sovereignty they violated. Harassed by the armed forces at inspection sites, the specialists also contended with host governments' obfuscation and endless bureaucratic foot-dragging. On occasion, irate citizens even tried to assassinate inspectors as the representatives of a hated control regime. In one of the most notorious incidents in March 1920, Prince Joachim of Prussia led a group of Germans in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin (the IAMCC Headquarters) in an assault on two French officers who refused to stand during a spontaneous outburst of _Deutschland über Alles_.

The approach Shuster chose was to treat this complex issue through a combination of chronological phases or parts subdivided into functional chapters. Hence part 1 ("1919") introduces the readers to the victors at the Paris Peace Conference. The military clauses of the resulting Treaty of Versailles receive a thorough treatment--as does the machinery set up to implement them. The author also takes care to develop the divergent national agendas of the two dominant powers, Great Britain and France, who used the disarmament process as a diplomatic version of trench warfare. By the end of the first postwar year, however, the British and French had agreed on the military clauses of the Treaty that were designed to eliminate Germany's capacity to conduct offensive operations. They included limiting the number of troops, amount of war material, and fortifications of the German army. To implement this monumental task of turning Europe's most advanced land power with nearly 500,000 men under arms into a state with a standing army of only 100,000 and next to no armament production or fortifications, the allies set up an Inter-Allied Military Control Commission. This new body consisted of three sub-commissions: Armaments, headed by the British; Effectives personnel), directed by the French, and Fortifications, administered by the Americans. As Shuster points out, the distribution of sub-commission responsibilities reflected each nation's  respective interests in forestalling a resurgent German threat ...

REVIEW: Richard L. DiNardo, Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (July, 2006)

Richard L. DiNardo, Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 282 pp. Index, bibliography. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1412-5.

Reviewed by:Michael Anklin, Department of History, Indiana University.

Why the Axis Lost

Richard L. DiNardo's book will be of great interest to military and other historians, as well as the general public. Interest in World War II and especially Nazi Germany's war conduct remains at an all-time high. Some consensus on why the Allies won and the Axis lost has been reached in the wake of an innumerable quantity of studies. It is clear, for example, that the United States simply outproduced the Axis and that the sacrifice of the Red Army contributed significantly to the Allied victory.[1] However, numerous details and questions remain open to debate. DiNardo addresses such an issue: Nazi Germany's method of conducting coalition warfare. DiNardo skillfully dissects the structure of the Axis coalition forces during World War II and presents a detailed analysis of Germany's flawed relationship with its European military allies.

DiNardo agrees with Jürgen Förster that the Axis was "hardly a coalition at all," but comes to what he calls "a slightly more nuanced conclusion" (p. 192). The main reason for the failure of Axis strategy, according to DiNardo, was "that each service conducted coalition warfare a little differently from its sister service" (p. 192). The Luftwaffe, the German army and the navy all operated along different lines. In DiNardo's view, the navy was the most successful and the army failed most miserably in their conduct of coalition warfare (p. 192). Among the problems preventing the successful execution of Axis coalition warfare were unnecessarily complex command structures, the often arrogant attitude (with some exceptions) of Germans toward their allies and the failure of Germany to share military technology appropriately with partners. The outcome was often the fighting of "parallel wars," which severely weakened the overall war effort ...

REVIEW: Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (September, 2005)

Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society. Trans. Andrew Boreham and Daniel Brückenhaus. Oxford: Berg, 2004. 322 pp. Index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-8597-3881-8; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 1-8597-3886-9.

Reviewed by: Kevin Cramer, Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier?

After the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1815, the "German Question" was whether or not there could (or should) be a nation-state called Germany. After this question was decided with unification in 1871, the "German Question" soon evolved into the "German Problem," which was widely viewed by contemporaries and posterity as the root cause of two world wars. For many historians and other observers of German political and cultural life, the essential characteristic of Germany's historical development, which explained this nation's de-stabilizing pursuit of continental hegemony, was the prominent role "militarism" played in German society. Another name for this trait was "Prussianism," a convenient label that summoned up images of Hohenzollern authoritarianism and saber-rattling, goose-stepping soldiers, and monocled Junker generals in spiked helmets. After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, "Prussia" was deliberately erased from the map of a partitioned Germany, as if a virus of war somehow lay dormant in the soil itself.

Ute Frevert's book is an original and insightful re-examination of the role the military has played in shaping the German civil, political, and cultural landscape. She sees this aspect of German life evolving out of the French revolutionary concept of "the nation in arms," that is, conscription, which established a new kind of link between the state and civil society. Frevert believes that conscription, as a European and "modern" phenomenon, created the possibility of what she calls the "peacetime military socialization" of the citizen (p. 3). Conscription also broke down the assumption that the "civil" was the antithesis of the "military" and in so doing gave the state a powerful means of building the nation around new definitions of citizenship, patriotic values, and social order. In other words,conscription allowed the state to infiltrate civil society effectively by creating what Hermann Broch, in his novel The Sleepwalkers, called "the cult of the uniform ... the man who wears the uniform is content to feel he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life" ...