History: 'When the Führer gets to London, you will be shot." That was the blunt warning to the English conductor Malcolm Sargent while he was touring neutral countries as Britain's "ambassador with a baton" during the second World War.
Wherever he went, the Germans sent their best musicians, including Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic, to clash with his concerts.
A fellow conductor made the death threat to Sargent. This maestro had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1935, and was the protégé of Hermann Göring. He was already on his way to becoming the most famous conductor of all time. His name was Herbert von Karajan.
Sargent reacted to the intimidation with typical nonchalance - "How gratifying to be on the wanted list of the SS" - but the story captures the terrible unfathomable dilemma we face in thinking about the Nazis. How does a conductor as sublime as Herbert von Karajan issue such a brutal threat? And how does a nation that produced Beethoven and Goethe end up embracing Adolf Hitler? Part of the fascination is that in Nazi Germany evil and the sublime so easily co-existed (and there are stunning live recordings of Wagner operas from Bayreuth in the 1930s to prove it).
But what a fascination it is. We are obsessed with Nazism. Hardly a week passes without a new drama or documentary appearing on television (the latest starring Robert Carlyle as Hitler). The most recent bibliography on the Third Reich lists a staggering 37,000 titles. In the last decade, an average of 1,500 new books have appeared on the subject every year. The British schools watchdog, Ofsted, recently expressed dismay at the unhealthy interest in Hitler among children, fearing it is leading to a sinister personality cult. Richard Evans has been at the sharp end of public attention, not least as key witness at the trial that branded historian David Irving as a "Holocaust denier".
Evans seems to have read most of those 37,000 books, but he writes in a direct, urgent style, that keeps the narrative rattling along for his target audience of "people who know nothing about the subject".
What is immediately striking is the way he leaves Hitler waiting in the wings for the first third of the book. Germany before the Nazis was already seething with racism and political extremism. The 1929 Wall Street Crash pushed a brutalised society over the edge. By 1932, the unemployed and their dependents made up 20 per cent of the population. "In this situation, people began to grasp at political straws," Evans writes, "anything, however extreme, seemed better than the hopeless mess they appeared to be in now."
Enter Hitler, stage right. He offered a vision that was both revolutionary and restorative. His nerve held while rival parties vacillated. Handed power in January 1933, he acted immediately and ruthlessly to destroy ailing democracy. Within six months, the Nazis had established a totalitarian state that ravaged "alien" influences such as Judaism (or more precisely, Jewishness), communism, socialism, liberalism, pacifism, conservatism, trades unionism, artistic modernism, sexual freedom, and much else besides. "I have never had a particularly favourable opinion of the Germans (morally and politically speaking)," wrote the exiled Albert Einstein in May 1933, "but I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise to me."
One of the many fascinations of Evans's account is the way he skewers apparently more respectable Germans who gave Nazism credibility at home and abroad. Furtwängler, who so often gets away with being judged "naïve", is here shown railing against "Jewish-Bolshevist" democracy, believing that no non-German had ever written a genuine symphony, and demanding that Jews not be given responsibility in the cultural sphere. Similarly, when the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter was locked out of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, who should happily step forward to replace him but Richard Strauss, the nation's most famous living composer. And the Nazis installed Martin Heidegger, Germany's best-known philosopher and an admirer of Hitler, as Rector at the prestigious Freiburg University.
The rejection of democracy was by overwhelming popular demand. In 1933, the Nazis were the largest party in parliament. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the election that year supported parties that openly opposed democracy. Many others voted for the authoritarian Centre Party and Bavarian People's Party, both of which were committed to democracy only by the skin of their teeth. In short, most ordinary Germans, from North and South, Catholic and Protestant, detested the Weimar Republic. Only 14 years earlier three-quarters of German voters had backed the Weimar democratic coalition parties.
This new book, the first of a Nazi trilogy, tells the dramatic story of that reverse. The Coming of the Third Reich is a brilliant if terrifying book. It immediately establishes itself alongside the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw's life of Hitler as an indispensable read for anyone with an interest in the rise of Nazism. Richard Evans takes a scalpel to the corpse of democratic Germany to reveal the black heart of a society that was depraved, violent, and eager to embrace totalitarianism.
But perhaps the real triumph of The Coming of the Third Reich is the way it forces the reader to confront the precious fragility of democracy itself. Joseph Goebbels certainly understood the point. "It will always remain one of democracy's best jokes," he gloated, "that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed."
Richard Aldous teaches history at University College, Dublin. His biography of Malcolm Sargent is published by Pimlico
- Richard Aldous
The Coming of the Third Reich By Richard J. Evans Penguin/Allen Lane, 622pp. £25