A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
Penetrating biographies of Hitler and 21 other Germans who played important roles in Nazi-era atrocities.
Evans, author of the Third Reich Trilogy and other acclaimed books of German history, offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. The subjects include the “Paladins,” top Nazis such as Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels; “Enforcers,” such as Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann; and “Instruments,” including filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and military officer Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. “What had happened to their moral compass?” asks the author in this robust historical investigation. “Were they gangsters acting with criminal intent?” Were they “ordinary Germans” or “deviants” of some kind? Seeking answers, Evans thoroughly examines each of his subjects’ early years, their reasons for joining the Nazi party, what they did in the war years, and their postwar fates. Common denominators include a desire to find someone to blame for the loss of World War I and for the Great Depression, as well as the belief that a strong leader could return Germany to its rightful place in the world. Tellingly, few ever showed remorse for their deeds. Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his charismatic speaking style combined with ruthless opportunism to bring him to power, even though the Nazis never attained a majority of the electorate in a fair election. Hitler’s delusion that Germany could fight three much larger powers—the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.—was widely shared among Germans, though its effects were exacerbated by their leader’s constant overruling of his generals and the derangement of his later years. The author avoids drawing parallels to any current political figures or movements.
A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593296424
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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