The Third Reich: A New History
by Michael Burleigh
Summary
Burleigh's single volume history of Nazi Germany opens with a question the political histories had stopped asking: what did Nazism feel like from inside, and what kind of thing was it? His answer organises the whole book: it was a political religion, a totalising faith with its own liturgy, martyrs, devils and promise of salvation, which captured a society exhausted by war, inflation and depression, and which demanded not obedience but belief.
From that frame the book covers the whole catastrophe: the collapse of Weimar and the broader European flight from liberal democracy, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the machinery of consent and terror, everyday life under the regime, the euthanasia killings of the disabled, which Burleigh had studied for years and renders with particular authority, the war of annihilation in the East and the Holocaust, and the moral wreckage of the end. Throughout he keeps two registers running: the analytical history, and the experience of individuals, perpetrators, victims, and the enormous accommodating middle, swept along or quietly repelled.
It is written with a moralist's heat unusual in academic history, sardonic, angry and quotable, and it wears its learning heavily in the best sense: the judgements arrive earned. The euthanasia chapters in particular, the T4 killing centres and the families who protested, carry the weight of his earlier archival work and stand among the strongest treatments of that programme anywhere.
Around a thousand pages.
Best for readers who want one serious volume on the Third Reich that argues a thesis rather than compiling one, and are prepared to argue back.
Historical Context & Significance
The Third Reich: A New History won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001, the judges calling it urgent and magisterial and a work of authentic historical genius, language rarely spent on thousand page histories. It became a bestseller, unusual for a work this dense, and put the political religion argument, an old idea Burleigh renovated, back at the centre of the debate about what Nazism was; specialists have contested it ever since, which is what theses are for.
Michael Burleigh came to the synthesis from the hard end of the subject, earlier books on the euthanasia programme and on Germany's ethnographic war in the East, and followed it with Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, extending the religion and politics frame across two centuries.
The book sits now among the standard single volume accounts alongside Evans's trilogy and Kershaw's Hitler, the opinionated member of the set, and the prize win marked the award's early appetite for big history told with voice.