Jonathan Wright writes:

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 . . . In his second volume, The Third Reich in Power, covering the years 1933-39, Evans once again dissects the social fabric of the regime with great skill. Again, there is a balance to be struck. How far did the regime succeed by coercion and propaganda in building the new society to which it aspired? Evans explores this through sections on the police state, the media and culture, religion and education, the economy, anti-semitism and the road to war.

(LRB 19 July 2007)

Penguin | paperback 941 pp. |ISBN: 9780141009766