More to learn about the Nazis

As professor of modern history at Cambridge university and one of Britain’s leading experts on the Nazi period, Richard Evans has made yet another contribution to the Nazi canon with his newly published book The Coming of the Third Reich, the first in a trilogy on Nazi Germany.

But with libraries teeming with thousands of books on the subject already, what more can be said on the subject? ‘It’s precisely because the literature is so enormous that I felt there was a need for a major overview and synthesis of the material,” Evans argues. ‘Research has gone in three phases: in the 1950s and 1960s West German historians tried to understand how fascism arose from the Weimar democracy; then in the 1970s and 1980s historians worked on the structures of the Reich between 1933-39; and since the 1990s the main focus has been the war and the Holocaust.”

The Coming of the Third Reich steers a comfortable middle ground between the determinists who reckon that Nazism was a historical inevitability for Germany ever since Luther drew his first breath and the only real surprise is that it didn’t happen earlier, and those who see it as an aberration with no deep roots in German culture.

‘The trouble with history is that you study it in reverse, so everything can appear to have an immediate cause and effect,” Evans points out. ‘So while the driving force of Nazism can be seen as far back as Bismarck with the marginalisation of the Catholics and socialists, together with the emergence of a nationalism based on social Darwinism and eugenics, you can never say it was an inevitability. If German unification had taken place in a less authoritarian way, if the first World War had not taken place, if the Weimar Constitution had been worded differently, if the Depression had not put one-third of the workforce out of a job, and had Hindenburg not written off the Nazis as politically naïve and compliant, then German history of the 1930s and 1940s might have looked very different.”

Evans is critical of what he sees as a new trend for overwriting history as a series of moral judgements. ‘Of course a historian cannot avoid expressing certain values,” he says. ‘It’s clear from my own work that I believe in a multicultural democracy. But to go from that position to say someone is morally good or bad is either unnecessary or simplistic. The principal task of history is to explain and interpret, not to issue moral judgements.”

Evans’s interest in the Nazis grew out of seeing first-hand the bombed-out rubble of London’s East End. But he is well aware that today’s students will have their own agenda. ‘You can’t predict what will motivate people in years to come,” he says. ‘It will depend on what situation we find ourselves in and what areas of research open up. One of the reasons why there was a sudden explosion of interest in the Nazis in the 1990s was due to the opening up of the former Soviet bloc countries. Overnight, huge archives became available.”

So is there anything left for us still to discover? ‘Oh yes,” he enthuses. ‘We still know very little about the concentration camps – especially the satellite camps – as well as the German economy and their criminal justice system. I’ve plenty of ideas if anyone is stuck for a PhD topic.”

Looks like there’s still life left in them thar Nazis.

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