How did an extremist party lurking at the fringes of political life take over the entire government in such a shot time without ever raising the wrath of the bigger parties or of the people? The biography of Hitler won't really mean much without the context of s. If this question still applies to anyone else, read the overall history first. I also wrote my undergrad thesis on this time period, so I am very interested in the subject. ... Shirer's book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first -century reader." 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. This is a “broad, general, large-scale history of Nazi Germany.”  It is a chronological history, not a cultural examination, much less a view of Germany through the lens of the forgotten common man or some such unoriginal and unhelpful frame. This edition was published in 2004 by The Penguin Press in New York. £25.00 RICHARD J. EVANS, Das Dritte Reich, vol. Evans notes that “The conflicts that rent Weimar were more than merely political or economic. Very few, if any, I suspect. This critical essay on The Coming of the Third Reich was written and submitted by your fellow student. And that the country's leadership was determined to go to war to redress the penalties and humiliations forced on Germany at the end of WWI made the slide to the far right a critical event in European history. He also makes a very good case that because of Weimar's failures and the vacuum of power they caused, some type of right wing authoritarian dictatorship was almost assured. Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Evans does a good job of communicating the basic facts about the various mainline political parties (Social Democrats, Center Party, Nationalists, People’s Party) including their views, their support (both from voters and from sectors of society, such as the army, civil service and judiciary, and their geographic strengths), as well as the rising power of the Communists, who, of course, took orders from Moscow and had every interest in destroying the republic, but were tainted by the rebellion in 1919. For the past few months, we have been subjected to a tedious, hysterical stream of comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. So said the Romans. When I first read Neuromancer, a science fiction classic of the modern age, twenty-some years ago, serious people believed that our certain technological future was one of accelerating, boundless... Who thinks much about Finland? Third Reich (First Volume) Newsday, 29 February 2004 THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH, by Richard J. Evans. Summary: 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. Evans then takes us a few months forward, in “Creating the Third Reich”; here is where the Gleichschaltung begins, the Reichstag Fire happens, and so forth. Of course, there have been innumerable books about this topic. In fact it is already happening, the question is how far we will fall. Do any Swiss children learn about him? Evans makes the argument that as an authoritarian dictatorship (which Germany was from 1932 on, even before Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933), Germany wasn't exactly an outlier in Europe. We get the early version of Hitler’s management style, designed such that “the most ruthless, the most dynamic and the most efficient would rise to positions of power within the movement.”  We also get the early usage of bemoaning violence publicly, but condemning it vaguely enough that the rank-and-file take the condemnation as an endorsement (something we see in recent cut-rate American political violence, but as I say, we have thin gruel compared to 1920s Germany). Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The Nazis, who possessed no respect for democracy whatever, never won an election by fair means, and once they’d achieved power, they quickly suppressed (often by killing) any opposition. MICHAEL BURLEIGH. I “read” this book by listening to the Audible audiobook.