Hitler's Germany

May 31, 1999
Extending from Hitler's 1923 abortive "Beer Hall Putsch" to WWII and its aftermath, Stackelberg's engrossing narrative history deserves a wide readership. A humanities professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., Stackelberg cogently argues that Nazi rule was generally maintained by popular consensus rather than by coercion (he's thus in agreement with Daniel Goldhagen, whose 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, he pointedly praises). Wide sectors of the German public, he notes, were all too ready to collaborate with the Nazi regime, either out of conviction or expediency. Balancing "intentionalist" versus "functionalist" explanations of the Holocaust, Stackelberg maintains that the Nazis' commitment, from the very start, to total exclusion of Jews from German society, combined with Nazi adherence to the deadly eugenic principle of exterminating whoever they deemed "life unworthy of life," led to the genocide of two-thirds of European Jewry under the facilitating conditions created by the war. Combining dispassionate analysis with dramatic writing, he provides historical context for Third Reich barbarism by boldly delineating a "pre-history" of Nazism that includes Bismarck's absolutist rule, the work of late-19th-century nationalist propagandists and the Free Corps goon squads who crushed the 1919 Spartacist revolt and murdered Rosa Luxemburg (Free Corps veterans were later recruited to be leaders of Hitler's own storm troops, the SA). Stackelberg ably covers the Nuremberg trials, German denazification and the contemporary resurgence of militant neo-Nazi fringe groups. While he offers no surprises or new findings, Stackelberg gives readers a superb historical synthesis.