What Am I Reading?

I am currently some 300 pages into Richard Evans' wonderfully written tome on Nazi Germany during the war years -- 1939-1945.

The book (The Third Reich at War) is a beautifully written, meticulously documented (through letters, official documents and diaries of soldiers, victims and leaders)and touches on many different aspects of Germany's war polity.

And when I say, tome, I mean tome. The book is some seven hundred pages long and was well worth the wait time from the local library.

I have read auto-biographies by Elie Wiesel (Night) and Primo Levi's, Survival in Auschwitz and still, Evans' book brings home terribly the obscene depravity of the mass killings carried out by the Nazi's of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and other so called "sub-human" races. One of the most interesting things Evans has done is to bring to my attention the fact that the Nazi's were very careful not to directly order the mass extermination of, as they said, "jewry." Legalist bureacrats that they were, they were aware, even while denying it to be true, that there was something so very wrong in killing civilians en masse based on their ethnicity. And that history would judge their behaviours harshly. In the end, the 'final solution' was an accumulation of speeches vilifying the Jews and others, documents pushing leaders and soldiers to squeeze more work from the forced labourers, a need to keep the area behind the front line clear of partisans, a hierarchy of needs due to food shortages, years of indoctrination and propaganda starting in the pre-war years, which finally gave permission for people to be able to hammer, shoot, kick, hang, starve, over-work and gas the supposed enemies of the Nazi state.