Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Air Mail

A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive. --Wall Street Journal

Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through. --The New York Times

Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime's leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?

Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.

Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist's eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies--like Goebbels, the regime's propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust's chief architect--to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten--like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler's People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.

Nearly a century after Hitler's rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility--and even between pathological evil and rational choice--are never easily drawn.

The definitive account of Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany, from the author of The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, and Hitler's People

The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis. --A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement

Impressive in its command of an immense literature, perceptive in analysis, fluent in style, and humane in judgment, this work could only have been produced by a master historian. --Sir Ian Kershaw

Brilliant. --Richard Cohen, The Washington Post

There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans, one of the world's most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans's history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian's art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

An absorbing, revelatory, and definitive account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and Hitler's People

This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed. --The Washington Post

This superb book is not simply a military history; it is a comprehensive portrait of a society at war...A masterpiece of historical research and analysis...Likely to remain the best study of the Third Reich at war for many years to come. --The Christian Science Monitor

Adroitly blending narrative, description, and analysis, Richard J. Evans portrays a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking much of Europe with it. Interweaving a broad narrative of the war's progress from a wide range of people, Evans reveals the dynamics of a society plunged into war at every level. The great battles and events of the conflict are here, but just as telling is Evans's re- creation of the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime. At the center of the book is the Nazi extermi­nation of the Jews. The Third Reich at War lays bare the most momentous and tragic years of the Nazi regime.

The acclaimed and comprehensive account of Germany's transformation under Hitler's total rule and the inexorable march to war, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich at War, and Hitler's People

[Evans's] three-volume history . . . is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive. --The New York Times

Mr. Evans's magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come. --The Economist

By the middle of 1933, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transformed into the police state of the Third Reich, mobilized around the cult of the leader, Adolf Hitler. In The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans chronicles the incredible story of Germany's radical reshaping under Nazi rule. As those who were deemed unworthy to be counted among the German people were dealt with in increasingly brutal terms, Hitler's drive to prepare Germany for the war that he saw as its destiny reached its fateful hour in September 1939. This is the fullest and most authoritative account yet written of how, in six years, Germany was brought to the edge of that terrible abyss.

An Economist Best Book of the Year

Sweeping . . . an ambitious synthesis . . . Evans] writes with admirable narrative power and possesses a wonderful eye for local color . . . Fascinating.--Stephen Schuker, The Wall Street Journal

From the bestselling author of The Third Reich at War, a masterly account of Europe in the age of its global hegemony; the latest volume in the Penguin History of Europe series

Richard J. Evans, bestselling historian of Nazi Germany, returns with a monumental new addition to the acclaimed Penguin History of Europe series, covering the period from the fall of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War I. Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. Among the great themes it discusses are the decline of religious belief and the rise of secular science and medicine, the journey of art, music, and literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the replacement of old-regime punishments by the modern prison, the end of aristocratic domination and the emergence of industrial society, and the dramatic struggle of feminists for women's equality and emancipation. Uniting the era's broad-ranging transformations was the pursuit of power in all segments of life, from the banker striving for economic power to the serf seeking to escape the power of his landlord, from the engineer asserting society's power over the environment to the psychiatrist attempting to exert science's power over human nature itself.
The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the reader a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe.

In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving in his libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, last April 2000, the High Court in London labeled him a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief advisor for the defense, uses this pivotal trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial -- as for Evans in this book -- was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in order to illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation.

The idea that historical events, catastrophes in particular, didn't happen on their own but were driven by the hidden machinations of malign influences has deep roots. The appeal is clear: we can ascribe these events not to human shortsightedness or frailty, or to the contingencies of fate and circumstance, but to unseen forces. Conspiracy theories and paranoia go hand in hand. Something, or someone, is trying to control our lives and to regain that control we need to expose the truth.

Conspiracy theories have lately proliferated, powered by the Internet and social media, as well as by the declining influence of the traditional gatekeepers of facts and information. In his new book, Richard J. Evans, one of the world's leading historians of the Third Reich, explores this new golden age of conspiracy theories and what underlies it. To do that, he focuses on five of the most enduring conspiracies theories of the Nazi period, including those that fueled Hitler's rise in the first place. Hence he reexamines the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the stab-in-the-back myth about the of the role of Jews in Germany's loss in World War One; and the 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which the Nazis used to solidify their grip on power. Evans also delves into the multiple rumors regarding the ill-fated and mysterious 1941 flight to England by Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, and his death in Spandau prison in 1987. Lastly, he turns to the recurrent rumor that Hitler somehow managed to escape from Berlin in 1945 and live out his days in Argentina.

The Hitler Conspiracies is a book about fantasies and fictions, fabrications and falsifications. A distinguished work of history by one of the world's most distinguished historians, it offers equally a hard look at our own troubled times, a post-truth era in which alternative facts have gained new standing.

A tremendous book, the biography of a city which charts the multifarious pathways from bacilli to burgomaster. -Roy Porter, London Review of Books

Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a free city within Germany that was governed by the English ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the cholera years is, in Richard Evans's hands, tragically revealing of the age's social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world's public-health landscape today, including the current coronavirus crisis.

the seventy years since the demise of the Third Reich, there has been a significant transformation in the ways in which the modern world understands Nazism. In this brilliant and eye-opening collection, Richard J. Evans, the acclaimed author of the Third Reich trilogy, offers a critical commentary on that transformation, exploring how major changes in perspective have informed research and writing on the Third Reich in recent years. Drawing on his most notable writings from the last two decades, Evans reveals the shifting perspectives on Nazism's rise to political power, its economic intricacies, and its subterranean extension into postwar Germany. Evans considers how the Third Reich is increasingly viewed in a broader international context, as part of the age of imperialism; discusses the growing emphasis on the larger economic and cultural circumstances of the era; and emphasizes the development of research into Nazi society, particularly in the understanding of Nazi Germany as a political system based on popular approval and consent. Exploring the complex relationship between memory and history, Evans also points out the places where the growing need to confront the misdeeds of Nazism and expose the complicity of those who participated has led to crude and sweeping condemnation, when instead historians should be making careful distinctions. Written with Evans' sharp-eyed insight and characteristically compelling style, these essays offer a summation of the collective cultural memory of Nazism in the present, and suggest the degree to which memory must be subjected to the close scrutiny of history.

In the seventy years since the demise of the Third Reich, there has been a significant transformation in the ways in which the modern world understands Nazism. In this brilliant and eye-opening collection, Richard J. Evans, the acclaimed author of the Third Reich trilogy, offers a critical commentary on that transformation, exploring how major changes in perspective have informed research and writing on the Third Reich in recent years.

Drawing on his most notable writings from the last two decades, Evans reveals the shifting perspectives on Nazism's rise to political power, its economic intricacies, and its subterranean extension into postwar Germany. Evans considers how the Third Reich is increasingly viewed in a broader international context, as part of the age of imperialism; discusses the growing emphasis on the larger economic and cultural circumstances of the era; and emphasizes the development of research into Nazi society, particularly in the understanding of Nazi Germany as a political system based on popular approval and consent. Exploring the complex relationship between memory and history, Evans also points out the places where the growing need to confront the misdeeds of Nazism and expose the complicity of those who participated has led to crude and sweeping condemnation, when instead historians should be making careful distinctions.

Written with Evans' sharp-eyed insight and characteristically compelling style, these essays offer a summation of the collective cultural memory of Nazism in the present, and suggest the degree to which memory must be subjected to the close scrutiny of history.

E. H. Carr's What Is History?, a classic introduction to the field, may now give way to a worthy successor. In his compact, intriguing survey, Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation and powerful computer models to the skilled investigator's sudden insight, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who see all judgments as subjective. Evans brings a remarkable range, a nose for the archives, a taste for controversy, and a fluent pen (The New Republic) to this splendid work. Essential reading for coming generations.-Keith Thomas

Eric Hobsbawm's works have had a nearly incalculable effect across generations of readers and students, influencing more than the practice of history but also the perception of it. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of second-generation British parents, Hobsbawm was orphaned at age fourteen in 1931. Living with an uncle in Berlin, he experienced the full force of world economic depression, and in the charged reaction to it in Germany was forced to choose between Nazism and Communism, which was no choice at all. Hobsbawm's lifelong allegiance to Communism inspired his pioneering work in social history, particularly the trilogy for which he is most famous--The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire--covering what he termed the long nineteenth century in Europe. Selling in the millions of copies, these held sway among generations of readers, some of whom went on to have prominent careers in politics and business.

In this comprehensive biography of Hobsbawm, acclaimed historian Richard Evans (author of The Third Reich Trilogy, among other works) offers both a living portrait and vital insight into one of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Using exclusive and unrestricted access to the unpublished material, Evans places Hobsbawm's writings within their historical and political context. Hobsbawm's Marxism made him a controversial figure but also, uniquely and universally, someone who commanded respect even among those who did not share-or who even outright rejected-his political beliefs. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History gives us one of the 20th century's most colorful and intellectually compelling figures. It is an intellectual life of the century itself.

The idea that historical events, catastrophes in particular, didn't happen on their own but were driven by the hidden machinations of malign influences has deep roots. The appeal is clear: we can ascribe these events not to human shortsightedness or frailty, or to the contingencies of fate and circumstance, but to unseen forces. Conspiracy theories and paranoia go hand in hand. Something, or someone, is trying to control our lives and to regain that control we need to expose the truth.

Conspiracy theories have lately proliferated, powered by the Internet and social media, as well as by the declining influence of the traditional gatekeepers of facts and information. In his new book, Richard J. Evans, one of the world's leading historians of the Third Reich, explores this new golden age of conspiracy theories and what underlies it. To do that, he focuses on five of the most enduring conspiracies theories of the Nazi period, including those that fueled Hitler's rise in the first place. Hence he reexamines the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the stab-in-the-back myth about the of the role of Jews in Germany's loss in World War One; and the 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which the Nazis used to solidify their grip on power. Evans also delves into the multiple rumors regarding the ill-fated and mysterious 1941 flight to England by Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, and his death in Spandau prison in 1987. Lastly, he turns to the recurrent rumor that Hitler somehow managed to escape from Berlin in 1945 and live out his days in Argentina.

The Hitler Conspiracies is a book about fantasies and fictions, fabrications and falsifications. A distinguished work of history by one of the world's most distinguished historians, it offers equally a hard look at our own troubled times, a post-truth era in which alternative facts have gained new standing.

When it was originally published in 1982, this book presented pioneering new research into the everyday life of the German working class in the crucial decades between the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Nazi seizure of power. The authors document working-class attitudes to bourgeois convention, authority and the law in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The book includes studies of industrial sabotage, pilfering at work, working-class drinking habits, illegitimate motherhood and the violence of adolescent 'cliques' in pre-Hitlerian Berlin.

A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book's main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred. What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike.

In Cosmopolitan Islanders one of the world's leading historians asks why it is that so many prominent and influential British historians have devoted themselves to the study of the European continent. Books on the history of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and many other European countries, and of Europe more generally, have frequently reached the best-seller lists both in Britain and (in translation) in those European countries themselves. Yet the same is emphatically not true in reverse. Richard J. Evans traces the evolution of British interest in the history of Continental Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. He goes on to discuss why British historians who work on aspects of European history in the present day have chosen to do so and why this distinguished tradition is now under threat. Cosmopolitan Islanders ends with some reflections on what needs to be done to ensure its continuation in the future.

Originally published in 1977, this book brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals not only with Britain and the United States but also with Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. The chapters trace the origins, development, and eventual collapse of these movements in relation to the changing social formations and political structures of Europe, America and Australasia in the era of bourgeois liberalism.

The first part of the book discusses the origins of feminist movements and advances a model or 'ideal type' description of their development. The second part then takes a number of case studies of individual feminist movements to illustrate the main varieties of organised feminism and the differences from country to country. The third part looks at socialist women's movements and includes a study of the Socialist Women's International. A final part touches on the reason for the eclipse of women's emancipation movements in the half-century following the end of the First World War, before a general conclusion pulls together some of the arguments advanced in earlier chapters and attempts a comparison between these feminist movements of 1840-1920 and the Women's Liberation Movement.

In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians - mainly German, American, British and French - have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany's 'special path' to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.

This book, first published in 1986, surveys the history of rural society in Germany from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributions include studies of Junker estates and small farming communities, serfs and landless labourers, maidservants and worker-peasants. They demonstrate the variety and complexity of the social division that structures the rural economy. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the conflicts that divided rural society, and the ways and means in which these were expressed, whether in serf strikes in eighteenth-century Brandenburg, village gossip in early twentieth-century Hesse, or factional struggles over planning permission in present-day Swabia. The rural world emerges not as traditional, passive and undifferentiated, but as actively participating in its own making; not only responding to the changes going on around it, but exploiting them for its own purposes and influencing them in its own way. This book is ideal for students of history, particularly German history.

In Rethinking German History, first published in 1987, Richard J. Evans argues for a social-historical approach to the German past that pays equal attention to objective social structures and subjective values and experiences. If German history has been seen as an exception to the 'normal' development of Western society, this is not least because historians have until recently largely failed to look beyond the world of high politics, institutions, organizations and ideologies to broader historical problems of German society and German mentalities. By applying and adapting approaches learned from French and British social history as they have been developed over the last quarter of a century, it is possible to achieve a rethinking of German history which does away with many of the textbook myths that have encrusted the historiogrpahy of Germany for so long.

This book will be valuable for students of German history and politics, and brings together essays widely used in teaching. Its broad coverage of social history will also be useful to all those interested in contemporary historiography or the comparative study of European history.