What do you think?
Rate this book
The Third Reich #4
The New Order
Book 4 of the Time-Life series The Third Reich.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
46 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 26, 2024
At first glance this volume in the Time-Life Third Reich series seems like a good fit with The Twisted Dream and Storming to Power but while those two books have a stronger chronological narrative (and Storming to Power aptly picks up right where The Twisted Dream leaves off) this volume doesn't quite have the same cohesive master narrative. Instead it is more anecdotal and jumps around in chronology constantly as it moves from one area of German society to another, which makes the sudden intrusion of the drop dead moment of September 1, 1939 at the very end seem abrupt.
Much of the book is a distillation of William Sheridan Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945 which is the first place to go if you want to dive deeper. Allen was one of the consultants on this volume, hence the obvious contribution there. His work centered on the town of Northeim and so that's where we start here as well.
There's a lot of grey-washing still going on in this book as it depicts the mass of Germans as being maneuvered and manipulated by a dedicated cadre of ideologues. This would be a very different book if looked at through the lens of more recent books like Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Like The Twisted Dream the narrative here sometimes bends (or twists) in such a way as to give the "people" a more passive role in their complicity especially as we see so many times that the prejudices and self interests that led a lot of these people to support the Nazis ran very deep.
To put it in a vulgar vernacular: It's one thing to eat a crap sandwich because you're hungry. But if crap sandwiches were a thing you always had a taste for...then you can't blame the sandwich.
To put it another way, a lot of the "good people" here were always assholes.
The most useful thing about this book is that it's a quick lesson in busting one of the biggest myths of fascism. THEY WEREN'T IN ANY WAY EFFICIENT. That's right. The short version if you want to skip this book and if you want to destroy a number of memes is that the Nazi regime was inefficient, and often incompetent too. Part of the inefficiency was by Hitler's design. As an organizational apparatchik his method of keeping control was to create the most asinine version of a "Team of Rivals" you could imagine. He created multiple organizations with overlapping and sometimes 100% overlapping goals in order to make sure that nobody would be able to establish a secure fiefdom without appealing to him as the supreme arbiter. This book outlines how that affected day to day things in labor and agriculture effectively. So if you need to refer someone who thinks fascists are good at organizing society you can refer them to this.
Perhaps the most contemporary relevance you can find in this book is the number of times you read about Germans being disappointed with the results of the Nazi regime. (Even before the more obvious disappointment that comes from having your town turned into rubble.).
A good chunk of this book shows just how many Nazi projects were basically scams.
As I mentioned before this book skips around from subject to subject and bounces around the chronology a lot (It's 1931, now it's 1936, now it's 1933 again). Also there's a profile of Herman Goering thrown in at the tail end. So, this is a good source for some anecdotal evidence about how crappy the Nazi government was but it could do with a little bit less coddling of the 20th century German mind.
Much of the book is a distillation of William Sheridan Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945 which is the first place to go if you want to dive deeper. Allen was one of the consultants on this volume, hence the obvious contribution there. His work centered on the town of Northeim and so that's where we start here as well.
There's a lot of grey-washing still going on in this book as it depicts the mass of Germans as being maneuvered and manipulated by a dedicated cadre of ideologues. This would be a very different book if looked at through the lens of more recent books like Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Like The Twisted Dream the narrative here sometimes bends (or twists) in such a way as to give the "people" a more passive role in their complicity especially as we see so many times that the prejudices and self interests that led a lot of these people to support the Nazis ran very deep.
To put it in a vulgar vernacular: It's one thing to eat a crap sandwich because you're hungry. But if crap sandwiches were a thing you always had a taste for...then you can't blame the sandwich.
To put it another way, a lot of the "good people" here were always assholes.
The most useful thing about this book is that it's a quick lesson in busting one of the biggest myths of fascism. THEY WEREN'T IN ANY WAY EFFICIENT. That's right. The short version if you want to skip this book and if you want to destroy a number of memes is that the Nazi regime was inefficient, and often incompetent too. Part of the inefficiency was by Hitler's design. As an organizational apparatchik his method of keeping control was to create the most asinine version of a "Team of Rivals" you could imagine. He created multiple organizations with overlapping and sometimes 100% overlapping goals in order to make sure that nobody would be able to establish a secure fiefdom without appealing to him as the supreme arbiter. This book outlines how that affected day to day things in labor and agriculture effectively. So if you need to refer someone who thinks fascists are good at organizing society you can refer them to this.
Perhaps the most contemporary relevance you can find in this book is the number of times you read about Germans being disappointed with the results of the Nazi regime. (Even before the more obvious disappointment that comes from having your town turned into rubble.).
A good chunk of this book shows just how many Nazi projects were basically scams.
As I mentioned before this book skips around from subject to subject and bounces around the chronology a lot (It's 1931, now it's 1936, now it's 1933 again). Also there's a profile of Herman Goering thrown in at the tail end. So, this is a good source for some anecdotal evidence about how crappy the Nazi government was but it could do with a little bit less coddling of the 20th century German mind.
August 16, 2020
Another volume in Time-Life's The Third Reich series, this one focusing on the profound changes in the life of the average German the new regime wrought. Rather slow reading.
March 29, 2014
This book was almost donated to Purple Heart, but I saved it. Finally, I thought its oversized dimensions in a set of three was awkward in my library. And, how good could WWII history distilled from magazine journalism be? I decided to pull it out and, peruse it, and dispense with it. At least with this volume, I was pleasantly surprised. Like The Bridge at Andau, this work charts the dramatic changes through named individuals, personalizing the heavy boot beat to war.
War is not a topic in this volume, although it looms ominously on the horizon. This work gives an overview of something I am very interested in; how Nazism took root and hold of the German nation. It took over a decade, but this book tracks the tendrils into paramilitary your organizations, encompassing once unallied farmers, the Junker landed aristocracy, labor movements and industry.
War is not a topic in this volume, although it looms ominously on the horizon. This work gives an overview of something I am very interested in; how Nazism took root and hold of the German nation. It took over a decade, but this book tracks the tendrils into paramilitary your organizations, encompassing once unallied farmers, the Junker landed aristocracy, labor movements and industry.
February 21, 2015
This volume in the Time-Life "Third Reich" series looks at how the Nazis took over key areas of German society. Hitler wanted nothing less than the complete nazification of Germany and all its institutions. He called it Gleichschalthung, roughly meaning 'coordination.' The book shows the importance of Nazi propaganda to the regime's massive effort to control the minds, emotions, & behavior of Germans. "The New Order" also discusses how, chillingly, no single target of nazification took higher priority than Germany's young people.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews