Life and Death in the Third Reich

A provocative revisionist view of the Third Reich and the complex relationship of Germans to it. This book, more than any other I know, conveys the complex nature of day-to-day life in Nazi Germany from the perspective of its political leaders, German citizens, and Jewish victims. In many ways, Fritzsche's interpretation of National Socialism and its supporters is far more unnerving than a view of a terrorized, hypnotized populace. The book offers not only an admirable analytic clarity but also passages of such human pathos that they leave the reader quaking.
--Thomas Childers, author of In the Shadows of War

What makes this thoroughly engrossing account of everyday life in Nazi Germany so important is Fritzsche's ability to show how the ideology of racism enveloped not only the public but also the private sphere and eventually informed all thought and action in this empire of death. This is a major achievement.
--Modris Eksteins, University of Toronto

Fritzsche has written an extraordinary book--a short, compelling, and yet comprehensive history of the Third Reich. It unfolds a masterful narrative of a regime that set out to restore a nation and in the process turned Europe into a killing field. This history familiarizes the reader with the key events as they unfolded and with contemporary reflections on them in diaries and letters. We come to the quite shocking recognition that these ruminations capture a conversation, for good and evil, that continues to the present day.
--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago