“Will long remain the definitive English-language account ... both gripping and precise ... An always reliable, often magisterial synthesis of a vast body of scholarship, and a frequently deft blend of narrative and interpretation, Evans’s book is an impressive achievement.”

“Brilliant.”

“Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich gives the clearest and most gripping account I’ve read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis.”

“Richard J. Evans’s Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgeable and reliable ... vivid ... Evans shows how the ingredients for Nazi triumph were assembled and what was needed to make them jell: add war and depression, cook in a turbulent political atmosphere for several years and serve hot.”

“Why, Mr. Evans asks, did Germany deliver itself over to the Third Reich? Mr. Evans’s answer is a brilliant and sweeping work of history.... He has mastered the vast scholarship on the politics, economics, ideology, and culture of Weimar Germany ... more important, he has synthesized all this knowledge into a lucid, absorbing dramatic and accessible book.”

“A masterly and most illuminating interpretation of its subject, which makes one look forward eagerly to the volumes to come.”

“The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served.... The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.”

“Gripping ... Evans broadens the historic perspective to demythologize how morbidly fertile the years before World War II were as an incubator for Hitler.”

“A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible.... A peerless work ... Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.”

“Evans provides an erudite, fascinating, and sometimes painfully moving account of one society’s slow collapse into nightmare and evil.”

“One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evans poses and so masterfully grapples with.”