Evans manages to weave a wealth of statistical information into a smooth narrative enlivened by eyewitness commentary from diaries, Gestapo reports and observations by Social Democratic opponents of the regime reporting to their colleagues abroad. This method works particularly well in his chapters on Nazi persecution of the Jews, which vividly convey the slow smothering of Jewish life, punctuated by episodes of fantastic violence, and the inexplicable double-think of ordinary Germans who stood by silently. Evans, here and throughout, maintains a dispassionate tone. He lets the facts, and the voices of the times, speak for him.
The attempt to refashion the German soul encountered resistance, mostly passive. As Evans points out, most Germans had formed their characters before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis made only limited headway in their confrontations with the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Constant bombardment from the propaganda ministry caused many Germans to tune their radio sets to foreign stations or retreat into a private, nonpolitical world. The average German quickly grew tired of constant political pestering and the ceaseless charity collections by Hitler Youth and brownshirts, which amounted to a quite substantial unofficial tax.
In the countryside, where tradition ran deep, local loyalties often trumped Nazi policy. In the Hessian village of Korle, storm troopers tried to seize bicycles from a club with ties to the Communist Party, but the local innkeeper, a longtime Nazi, said that the club owed him money, and that the bicycles therefore belonged to him. He stored the bicycles in his loft and returned them to their owners after the war. The Nazi machine, as Evans describes it, moved forward with a good deal of creaking and squeaking. The economy was no exception. On many fronts, the Nazis managed nothing more than to bring the economy back to the status quo that existed before the Depression. As late as January 1935, one estimate put the number of unemployed at more than 4 million, and food shortages were still a problem in 1939. Workers put in longer hours simply to stay even.
Even miserable stability looked good compared with the alternative: the hyperinflation, mass unemployment and uncertainty of the Weimar period. Most Germans did not realize, however, the dirty little secret to the German economic recovery, which, by the late 1930s, had reached its natural limits. The only way forward, in 1939, was war and foreign conquest.
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