The Third Reich Trilogy
Between 2003 and 2008, Evans published a three-volume history of the Third Reich. Drawing on years of experience as a leading scholar of German history, Evans wove together the most extensive and comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Hitler’s regime ever produced by a single scholar.
The first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich (published by Penguin in 2003), shows how a country torn apart by the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression moved towards an increasingly authoritarian solution and explains how Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933 and how swiftly he transformed Germany into a one party dictatorship. The first volume featured highly favorable words of praise from Evans's friend, Ian Kershaw on its cover.
The second volume, The Third Reich in Power (published by Penguin in 2005), covers the peacetime years of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1939. The final chapter examines the road to the Second World War, but the real focus is on life inside Nazi Germany. One of the great strengths of this volume is the way Evans allows small stories of key individuals to illustrate many of the key social, economic and cultural events of the period. A leading historian of the Third Reich, Richard Overy, in a review in the Literary Review described this book as "magisterial."
The third volume, The Third Reich at War (published by Penguin in 2008), looks at major developments from 1939 to 1945, including the key battles of the Second World War, a vivid, moving and detailed account of the mass murder enacted during the Holocaust and Hitler's dramatic downfall in Berlin in 1945. In an October 2008 review of the third volume for The Times, best-selling historian Antony Beevor writes: "With this third volume, Richard Evans has accomplished a masterpiece of historical scholarship ... has produced the best and most up-to-date synthesis of the huge work carried out on the subject over the past decades."
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