BOOK OF THE DAY: Richard Aldousreviews The Third Reich at War: how the Nazis led Germany from conquest to disaster. By Richard J Evans Allen Lane 926 pp, £30
IN 1940, on his way back from Paris, Hitler stopped off at Bayreuth to see Twilight of the Gods. He had loved Wagner's music since childhood, but this would be the last time he attended the festival. There were, of course, fears about his personal safety. He even worried about the appropriateness of the subject.
Yet the simple truth was that Hitler no longer liked his favourite composer and, after losing Stalingrad in 1943, would not listen to his operas at all. Instead, as the German Reich headed to military defeat and the Jews to the gas chambers, Hitler holed up in his bunker with recordings of the waltzes and operettas of Franz Lehár. It made a curious soundtrack - Land of Smiles - for a regime that, says Richard J Evans, "raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within us all".
The Third Reich at War is the third and final volume in a massive study of the Nazis by Evans, recently appointed Regius Professor of history at Cambridge. Taken together the three volumes span more than 2,500 pages. The cumulative result is a powerful and commanding work that must surely now stand as the most authoritative history of the Third Reich written in English. The final volume, perhaps because it deals with so many issues of life and death, is the best of the three - dramatic, moving and forcefully written.
Evans has developed a theme throughout the volumes, taking issue with those recent historians who have seen the German population as Hitler's "willing executioners". Instead he makes the case that the system of state-sponsored terror the Nazis put in place was highly effective in coercing the German people.
Music again provides a neat example. The composer Richard Strauss, whom many subsequently criticised for not using his moral authority to speak out against the regime, was constantly bullied and harassed by the Nazis. His Jewish daughter-in-law was regularly arrested and interrogated. His Jewish grandchildren were threatened with deportation to the camps. "Be quiet, and take note that you have no idea of who you are and who I am!" the propaganda minister, Goebbels, screamed at him in 1941.
The brutality of those who supported the regime also emerges strongly, including during the Holocaust. Evans handles this in a restrained fashion, although if anything the simplicity of the writing on, for example, Auschwitz makes the horror more, not less, affecting. Pathological viciousness was not confined to the camps or to the Jews. Chapters on Poland, for example, chronicle a brutal process of conquest that was characterised by horrifying levels of violence, destruction and deprivation. Hitler had said in 1939 that he intended to clear the Poles out of Poland and replace them with German settlers.
Most of those Germans who moved in showed few, if any, regrets. "I really like the town of Posen," wrote a new doctor, "if only there were no Poles at all, it would be really lovely here." Later, chillingly, he wondered whether all Poles might simply be sent to the local crematorium.
A "land of smiles" for some, then, if not for others. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, says Evans, but continues to command the attention of thinking people worldwide long after it has passed into history.
• Prof Richard Aldous is head of history archives at UCD