Breathtaking Co-ordination

Jonathan Wright

• BuyThe Third Reich in Power by Richard Evans
  Penguin, 941 pp, £12.99, May 2006, ISBN 0 14 100976 4
• BuyThe Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze
  Penguin, 800 pp, £12.99, August 2007, ISBN 978 0 14 100348 1

Richard Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now have makes a general history all the more useful, and not only, as Evans suggests, for those who know little about the subject. Evans, a social historian, aims to cover ‘not only politics, diplomacy and military affairs but also society, the economy, racial policy, police and justice, literature, culture and the arts . . . to bring these together and to show how they were related.’