Life and Death in the Third Reich

Peter Fritzsche

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008

At the beginning of Ernst Junger’s Auf der Marmorklippen (“Off the Marble Cliffs”), there is a touching passage: “You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles.”

Junger wrote in 1939, when no German could mistake (or simply ignore) the changes taking place in the country. Hitler came to power in 1933; the Nuremberg race laws were passed in 1935; the Anschluss took place in 1938. A dark new age was dawning, and Peter Fritzsche, the author of the definitive Germans into Nazis, probes his subject further in this brief, brutally intense new book, Life and Death in the Third Reich.

Fritzsche investigates the myriad ways Hitler’s Nazi Party attempted to impose the myth of its own necessity on the German people – and the correspondingly large number of ways the German people accommodated, accepted, and maybe even came to believe that myth. At the center of the book’s US dust jacket is a kind-faced matronly woman who could be anybody’s friendly mother – only her right arm is raised, as are the right arms of all around her, in an enthusiastic Sieg Heil salute. It’s murky, disturbing territory, and Fritzsche, in chilling detail after detail, doesn’t flinch from it:

It was important, Elizabeth Sextrohs wrote [to her former friend Paula Tobias, a Jewish physician who’d asked her why she, Paula, no longer “counted” as a German] in September 1933, trying to be “as clear as possible,” to push back the “preponderant influence of Jewry in all aspects of German life.” True, it was “hard and tragic” for individuals to suffer. Elizabeth Gebensleben also weighed good and bad, but defended Jewish measures because they promised to restore German sovereignty. Antisemitism was tried on, and it often fitted.

Everywhere in Life and Death in the Third Reich, Fritzsche is energetic and assured, but he’s at his most affecting in this book when he’s writing about the Reich’s primary victims, the Jews:

The annihilation of Jewish communities was accompanied by the destruction of photographs, letters, and diaries – the private papers of deportees fueled a constant fire in Austerlitz, a satellite camp of Drancy (near Paris) where Jewish prisoners sorted through stolen goods – and thus the destruction of evidence of adjustment, attempts to escape or to resist the invaders, of the documentation of crimes, and of the comfort offered to friends and family.

Fritzsche has devoted his professional life to studying the horrible phenomenon of Nazism – how it came about, how it was able to flourish, how it exacted all the prices it did in death, in flesh, and in belief. It’s an unsavory subject, but he’s a master of it, and Life and Death in the Third Reich is his best work to date.