The Descent Into Barbarism

Few of those who followed the David Irving libel trial held in London three years ago could avoid being struck by the calm but towering presence of the British historian Richard Evans. One of the chief witnesses for the defense, Evans succeeded, more than anyone else, in exposing David Irving as a foul, mendacious apologist for and admirer of Adolf Hitler. And a prolific one to boot. Over the course of several decades, Irving produced one volume of history after another, honing what Evans has called his "denier's credo"--that gas chambers either did not exist or were insignificant instruments in Hitler's policies; that the number of murdered Jews has been vastly exaggerated; and that in fact the Holocaust as such is nothing but a myth created by the war-time Allies and by "Jewish Zionists."

In preparing his testimony, Evans--no stranger to the literature on Nazi Germany--found to his astonishment that in the enormous bibliography on this subject (37,000 items by 2000, one scholar calculated) there are virtually no histories for the general audience, and that the few volumes that have succeeded, however impressively, in combining an academic with a popular approach suffer from one flaw or another. Thus Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler focuses on those areas in which Hitler was personally involved, and rather neglects aspects with which Hitler was not directly concerned. Some excellent works are cast in an academic jargon that make them hard to digest for the more average reader, while others, Evans writes, "indulge in the luxury of moral judgment.... The story of how Germany, a stable and modern country, in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair is a story that has sobering lessons for us all; lessons, again, [which are] for the reader to take...not for the writer to give."

Both appalled and energized by this discovery, Evans embarked upon a work that would combine some of the best features of previous tomes (such as the emphasis on narrative in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer), while identifying features distinctive in bringing about the emergence of Nazi Germany. It is remarkable that after years of assiduous research, despite the appearance of thousands of scholarly works, after all the multitude of memoirs and diaries, we are still haunted by the same questions: How could Germany, of all countries, so civilized, so rich in intellectual, scientific and artistic achievement, Goethe's fabled country of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), produce, "in less than a single lifetime," as Evans notes, such an unspeakably monstrous system as Nazism? How did it happen that a country where Jews constituted around 1 percent of the total population could seek their complete extermination? How could a leader of a powerful state, who enjoyed the docile support of the vast majority of his subjects, become so relentlessly bent on self-destruction? Can the lessons of previous generations be unalterably lost upon their successors?

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