Volume 10, Number 3 · February 15, 1968
How Hitler Made It
By James Joll
The Nuremberg Party Rallies 1923-39
by Hamilton J. Burden
Praeger, 206 pp., $5.95
The German Army and the Nazi Party, 1933-39
by Robert J. O'Neill
Heineman, 286 pp., $8.50
Stauffenberg
by Joachim Kramarz
Macmillan, 255 pp., $5.95
Pius XII and the Third Reich
by Saul Friedländer
Knopf, 238 pp., $4.95
Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States 1933-1941
by Saul Friedländer
Knopf, 238 pp., $6.95
The Swastika and the Eagle
by James V. Compton
Houghton Mifflin, 297 pp., $5.95
Hitler's Pre-War Policy and Military Plans 1933-1939
by E.M. Robertson
Citadel Press, 207 pp., $5.95
The Rise of Fascism
by F.L. Carsten
California, 256 pp., $6.50
The appetite of English-speaking readers for books about Nazi Germany seems insatiable. As our uneasiness about our own society grows, perhaps the study of National Socialism provides some comfort: at least we are not so bad as that. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, it reminds us of how easily one thing leads to another, and how an ordinary man going about his ordinary tasks, thinking of his family and his personal problems, can find himself in a position in which every act of acquiescence in the policies of his government makes him an accomplice of its crimes. At the end of World War II, for the Americans and British, National Socialism was a phenomenon alien to their own experience, a dragon which they had just slain; and democracy triumphant seemed to have justified all that its apologists had claimed for it. The interest in Nazi Germany immediately after the war centered on the question: How could these things have happended in Germany? Now in an America torn by the effects of the Vietnam war and a worsening racial situation, or in a Britain faced with economic disaster which the machinery of parliamentary government seems to many people as powerless to avert as that of the Weimar Republic between 1930 and 1932, the question which we look to a study of National Socialism to answer is: How could these things happen anywhere?
Review, 3713 words
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