Taking a Fresh Look At Nazism.(The Coming of the Third Reich)(Book Review)

When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, an army of Brownshirts paraded through Berlin to thunderous cheers. In the first volume of a new trilogy on Nazi Germany, "The Coming of the Third Reich" (641 pages. Allen Lane), Richard J. Evans describes how a young boy, Hans-Joachim Heldenbrand, noticed that the same men kept appearing in front of him again and again. "There you see the con trick," his father told him. "They're constantly marching around in a circle as though there were a hundred thousand of them." Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge, has taken on the daunting task of looking beneath the tricks of this charged period.

Postwar historians like A.J.P. Taylor placed the rise of Nazism in the context of the spread of totalitarian governments across Europe, arguing that the course of European history made it inevitable. Evans's detailed, unflinching narrative, which covers the period up to the summer of 1933, argues that the conditions in each country that gave rise to such tyranny varied markedly--and that in Germany, at least, Hitler could have been ...