However, this book provided to neophytes an excellent illustration of the nature of power of Hitler and the Third Reich management structures. It is not a military type of narrative events, but the inclusion of these on the Western Front and even more on the eastern front to why the collapse of scheme has been so long. Ian Kershaw always insists on the charismatic character of Hitler, close to the exercise of power by an absolute monarch to explain the persistence of his authority almost to the day of his suicide.
Ian Kershaw is the author of remarkable electoral sociology studies, the first being on the perception of Hitler as a myth in the German population, and the second being a sophisticated analysis of public opinion in Bavaria under Nazism.
These two studies highlight the variable elements of consent of the population of the Third Reich to Nazi ideology, enabling the introduction of the book that I commented to reject the mechanistic model of the totalitarian state as the only modality explanations of the Hitler regime.
However, a hundred pages after the rejection of the totalitarian model, Ian Kershaw indicates that one precisely in the regime's fall all the elements of a totalitarian state, which shows that even such a serious and recognized university Ian Kershaw there are probably contradictory explanatory elements which hinders more fluid narrative of the story.
Note that if Ian Kershaw seems unwilling to consider a uniform consent of the population towards Nazism, he is obliged to admit that in the case of the final solution, there was indifference and even a certain acceptance the doom of a small minority who as he says himself was hated if not hated by the Germans.
The fear of the Red Army on the Eastern Front is a good explanation for the fighting spirit of the Heer and the Wehrmacht, but it should in this respect to refer to the Omer Batov book that demonstrates that German soldiers deployed on the eastern front were packed in a state described as a "brutalization" by Omer Bartov following the monstrous special guidelines designed to fulfill Barbarossa. The crimes committed by the German army in the Soviet Union is of an unprecedented magnitude, of course against the Jews, but also against the civilian population and soldiers of the Red Army.
Therefore, it is obvious that the Red Army would take merciless revenge by entering the territory of the Reich. It is of course impossible for me to condone looting and rape followed by summary executions, but I also have great difficulty to feel any empathy for German victims ...
Ian Kershaw makes much of the cruelty of the soldiers of the Red Army, but at the same time he mentions very well the massive aerial bombardment led mostly by the British on German cities: Dresden, Nuremberg, Cologne etc ... Or these bombings against civilians were outright war crimes, but they were war crimes committed by the victors which changes everything .. So the pseudo correction of Anglo-Saxon regularly mentioned by Mr. Kershaw, deserves still a critical appreciation ... for less.
For an incomprehensible reason, the French troops, especially from North Africa were presented by Mr Kershaw as a bunch of rapists and looters: It is unfortunate that Mr. Kershaw does not use the archives of the Military Provost American strong-rich rape, murder and rapine of any kind done by IM nice.
A great merit of Ian Kershaw is to show the blindness of the OKW and the OKH and the servility of general officers and upper face absurd orders officers. Moreover, he recalls a particularly significant roles criminals Albert Speer, linfâme technocrat without conscience and fanatical of the great role Dönitz. Both of these scoundrels who are responsible for the prosecution of the fighting, to varying degrees and in different ways, and therefore the increase in the number of military and civilian casualties, yet at the Nuremberg trials, instead of being promised the gallows, they'll just scoop prison sentences.
