What do you think?
Rate this book
In Hitler's Shadow
In Hitler's Shadow by noted historian Richard J. Evans, is a study of recent attempts by some West German historians to free the German conscience from guilt about its Nazi past. These new revisionists argue that Germans have no more to be ashamed of than other Auschwitz, they say, does not stand alone in history; it was merely one of a number of similar crimes, from Stalin's purges to the mass murders committed by Pol Pot. The German army was not trying to impose a genocidal dictatorship; it was fighting to prevent a Communist takeover of Europe. These theses are advanced not by fanatics or extremists, but by senior West German politicians and internationally respected historians. In Hitler's Shadow examines the debate, placing it within the context of West German politics, and tries to reach a balanced and reasoned conclusion. The new revisionism does not, Evans argues, succeed in making its case, and many of the neoconservative theses bear a disturbing resemblance to arguments first put forward by the Nazis themselves. The survival and strengthening of democracy in West Germany, Evans argues, require an honest and open confrontation with the Nazi past.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
1 person is currently reading
183 people want to read
About the author
Richard J. Evans
70 books857 followersRichard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2024
I love a good historiographical debate and this book gives a clear overview of the arguments used in the Historikerstreit and critical analysis of their worth. It's well argued and fair minded but absolutely devastating in it's rebuttal of some of the arguments, as a good historian should be. I feel like a bit too much page time was 'waisted' at giving an overview of the chronology of nazi expansion and the Holocaust. This are basic facts that I feel every reader of this kind already will know so why spend that much time at it ? But it was sure a satisfying read!
March 14, 2024
SHOULD MODERN GERMANS BE FREE FROM ‘RESPONSIBILITY’ FOR HITLER’S LEGACY?
Historian Richard Evans wrote in the Preface to this 1989 book, “Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is it time to forgive the Germans? Now that most of those who carried out the crimes of Nazism are dead, should the younger West Germans who constitute the majority of the Federal Republic’s population today learn to be proud of their country rather than being ashamed of it?... Has the moment arrived when we should … accept that the evil of Nazism, terrible though it was, did not significantly differ from other evils which have plagued our troubled time, from the Gulag Archipelago to the killing fields of Cambodia? Over the past few years, these questions have aroused an impassioned debate both within West Germany and outside, as a substantial number of West German historians have argued in various ways that the answer to all of them should be ‘yes.’ This book is an attempt to lay out the fundamental issues in this sometimes angry and convoluted discussion, and to reach as balanced an assessment of them as possible. It is not a polemical book… The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues in the light of what we know about the historical events upon which they touch.” (Pg. xii-xiii)
He says of the West German professor of history Ernst Nolte, “he began by arguing that the commonly accepted stress on the uniqueness of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ constituted a major, and unnecessary, obstacle to the emergence of West German national self-confidence. For Auschwitz, he argues, was not unique. A previous, comparable act of genocide… had taken place in 1915, when the Turks had brutally murdered some one and a half million Armenians… Nolte says that the Soviet system of death camps, mass deportations and shootings… had already happened years before in the Soviet Union… Thus Nolte seeks to rehabilitate, or at least to excuse, the Germans, the Nazis… and fascism in general by portraying Hitler’s policies as a defensive reaction to the Soviet and Communist threat… Nazism was basically a 'justified reaction’ to Communism; it simply overshot the mark.” (Pg. 27-29)
He continues, “Thus Nolte, in a number of publications ranging from brief newspaper articles to substantial historical tomes, seeks to provide the West Germans with an escape from Hitler’s shadow, or at least, since he realizes this is too tall an order at the moment, to unburden themselves of the oppressive weight of the alleged uniqueness and gratuity of Hitler’s crimes. Only by freeing ourselves, he argues, from collectivist generalizations about ‘the Germans,’ ‘the Jews’… and so on, can we reach a more differentiated, less mythologizing understanding of these events. Only in this way will we cease to regard every tactless remark of a local politician in the Federal Republic as evidence that the Germans have not changed since the Third Reich. It is time to stop talking about the guilt of ‘the’ Germans…” (Pg. 32)
He goes on, “In making his points, Nolte is recognizing that Germany did indeed employ great brutality on the eastern front… In accepting the German generals’ account of their conformity to normal standards of military conduct, American and British writers in the postwar years were to a large extent reflecting the experiences of Allied troops on the western front and in North Africa. They pointed to the fact that only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by the Germans died in captivity, and contrasted this with the brutal treatment meted out by the Japanese to Allied prisoners of war, of whom … 27 percent… died in captivity.” (Pg. 57)
He explains, “By recovering the history of these groups [Gypsies, mentally retarded, homosexuals, etc.], left-wing historians in the Federal Republic have succeeded in bringing home the crimes of Nazism to Germans in a way which they find easy to grasp, since some of these groups---unlike the Jews---are present in today’s Germany in large numbers and are part of Germans’ everyday experience. The concentration on the ‘forgotten victims’ of Nazism, however, has made left-wing historians in Germany increasingly reluctant the accept the uniqueness of Auschwitz. The Jews, in this view, were only one category of victims among many, even if they were the most numerous. Jews, Gypsies… the mentally ill… and the other groups were all comparable because they were all victims of racism. Concentration on the uniqueness of the Nazi extermination of the Jews has diverted attention too long from the Nazis’ many other victims. Racism … was neither directed by the Nazis exclusively against the Jews, nor did it die with the end of the Third Reich.” (Pg. 78-79)
Evans states, “German history does not simply belong to the Germans. The rest of the world has an intense and legitimate interest in German attitudes to the recent past and Germans’ feelings about their national identity and purpose. After an initial slowness to react, historians and commentators in many countries have turned their attention to the present debate… Even those few conservative commentators who were willing to go along with Nolte to some extent … were unwilling to follow him down the road of justifying a putative ‘internment’ of German Jews as prisoners of war in 1939… Perhaps the reaction from other countries has concentrated too much on one issue and one historian and, therefore, neglected or passed over too many of the other issues involved. Perhaps also it has expressed itself too much in the language of moral outrage and not enough in the calmer tones of scholarly debate. But the fact that it has been overwhelmingly negative confirms the failure of the revisionists to achieve their aims in a wider international context.” (Pg. 122)
He concludes, “But responsibility is not the same as guilt. Nations conventionally accept a degree of historical responsibility for their past actions, as Britain does, for example, for the legacy of her empire. So too does West Germany, especially in relation to Jews and other victims of Nazi tyranny and genocide. This does not mean that every individual German needs to feel guilty about the crimes of the Third Reich, least of all if he or she was born after 1945, as most Germans now living were. Germans are entitled to object if they are all held equally and personally guilty, if they are treated as pariahs in the rest of the world, or if every minor outbreak of Neo-Nazism, however offensive, is treated as a sign that nothing has changed. Nolte is right in saying that it is time to treat Germany and the Germans with calmness, rationality, and objectivity. But he is wrong in saying that this requires releasing them from Hitler’s shadow. The survival and strengthening of West German democracy, and the continued stability and calculability of West Germany in European and world politics, require, now more than ever, a continuing, open, and honest confrontation with the Nazi past.” (Pg. 139-140)
This book will appeal to those concerned with current events in modern Germany, and related issues.
Historian Richard Evans wrote in the Preface to this 1989 book, “Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is it time to forgive the Germans? Now that most of those who carried out the crimes of Nazism are dead, should the younger West Germans who constitute the majority of the Federal Republic’s population today learn to be proud of their country rather than being ashamed of it?... Has the moment arrived when we should … accept that the evil of Nazism, terrible though it was, did not significantly differ from other evils which have plagued our troubled time, from the Gulag Archipelago to the killing fields of Cambodia? Over the past few years, these questions have aroused an impassioned debate both within West Germany and outside, as a substantial number of West German historians have argued in various ways that the answer to all of them should be ‘yes.’ This book is an attempt to lay out the fundamental issues in this sometimes angry and convoluted discussion, and to reach as balanced an assessment of them as possible. It is not a polemical book… The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues in the light of what we know about the historical events upon which they touch.” (Pg. xii-xiii)
He says of the West German professor of history Ernst Nolte, “he began by arguing that the commonly accepted stress on the uniqueness of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ constituted a major, and unnecessary, obstacle to the emergence of West German national self-confidence. For Auschwitz, he argues, was not unique. A previous, comparable act of genocide… had taken place in 1915, when the Turks had brutally murdered some one and a half million Armenians… Nolte says that the Soviet system of death camps, mass deportations and shootings… had already happened years before in the Soviet Union… Thus Nolte seeks to rehabilitate, or at least to excuse, the Germans, the Nazis… and fascism in general by portraying Hitler’s policies as a defensive reaction to the Soviet and Communist threat… Nazism was basically a 'justified reaction’ to Communism; it simply overshot the mark.” (Pg. 27-29)
He continues, “Thus Nolte, in a number of publications ranging from brief newspaper articles to substantial historical tomes, seeks to provide the West Germans with an escape from Hitler’s shadow, or at least, since he realizes this is too tall an order at the moment, to unburden themselves of the oppressive weight of the alleged uniqueness and gratuity of Hitler’s crimes. Only by freeing ourselves, he argues, from collectivist generalizations about ‘the Germans,’ ‘the Jews’… and so on, can we reach a more differentiated, less mythologizing understanding of these events. Only in this way will we cease to regard every tactless remark of a local politician in the Federal Republic as evidence that the Germans have not changed since the Third Reich. It is time to stop talking about the guilt of ‘the’ Germans…” (Pg. 32)
He goes on, “In making his points, Nolte is recognizing that Germany did indeed employ great brutality on the eastern front… In accepting the German generals’ account of their conformity to normal standards of military conduct, American and British writers in the postwar years were to a large extent reflecting the experiences of Allied troops on the western front and in North Africa. They pointed to the fact that only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by the Germans died in captivity, and contrasted this with the brutal treatment meted out by the Japanese to Allied prisoners of war, of whom … 27 percent… died in captivity.” (Pg. 57)
He explains, “By recovering the history of these groups [Gypsies, mentally retarded, homosexuals, etc.], left-wing historians in the Federal Republic have succeeded in bringing home the crimes of Nazism to Germans in a way which they find easy to grasp, since some of these groups---unlike the Jews---are present in today’s Germany in large numbers and are part of Germans’ everyday experience. The concentration on the ‘forgotten victims’ of Nazism, however, has made left-wing historians in Germany increasingly reluctant the accept the uniqueness of Auschwitz. The Jews, in this view, were only one category of victims among many, even if they were the most numerous. Jews, Gypsies… the mentally ill… and the other groups were all comparable because they were all victims of racism. Concentration on the uniqueness of the Nazi extermination of the Jews has diverted attention too long from the Nazis’ many other victims. Racism … was neither directed by the Nazis exclusively against the Jews, nor did it die with the end of the Third Reich.” (Pg. 78-79)
Evans states, “German history does not simply belong to the Germans. The rest of the world has an intense and legitimate interest in German attitudes to the recent past and Germans’ feelings about their national identity and purpose. After an initial slowness to react, historians and commentators in many countries have turned their attention to the present debate… Even those few conservative commentators who were willing to go along with Nolte to some extent … were unwilling to follow him down the road of justifying a putative ‘internment’ of German Jews as prisoners of war in 1939… Perhaps the reaction from other countries has concentrated too much on one issue and one historian and, therefore, neglected or passed over too many of the other issues involved. Perhaps also it has expressed itself too much in the language of moral outrage and not enough in the calmer tones of scholarly debate. But the fact that it has been overwhelmingly negative confirms the failure of the revisionists to achieve their aims in a wider international context.” (Pg. 122)
He concludes, “But responsibility is not the same as guilt. Nations conventionally accept a degree of historical responsibility for their past actions, as Britain does, for example, for the legacy of her empire. So too does West Germany, especially in relation to Jews and other victims of Nazi tyranny and genocide. This does not mean that every individual German needs to feel guilty about the crimes of the Third Reich, least of all if he or she was born after 1945, as most Germans now living were. Germans are entitled to object if they are all held equally and personally guilty, if they are treated as pariahs in the rest of the world, or if every minor outbreak of Neo-Nazism, however offensive, is treated as a sign that nothing has changed. Nolte is right in saying that it is time to treat Germany and the Germans with calmness, rationality, and objectivity. But he is wrong in saying that this requires releasing them from Hitler’s shadow. The survival and strengthening of West German democracy, and the continued stability and calculability of West Germany in European and world politics, require, now more than ever, a continuing, open, and honest confrontation with the Nazi past.” (Pg. 139-140)
This book will appeal to those concerned with current events in modern Germany, and related issues.
December 2, 2024
evans is as always my personal definitive expert on nazi history and historiography. his balanced approach to the various schools of thought helps the reader navigate this complex period.
this book fits into those efforts: helping to decode the arguments in west german historiography and set the record straight. the discussion is a bit disorganized, with it being unclear why certain chapters were delineated as such. the writing was clear enough nontheless.
recommended for anyone digging into the nuance of nazi germany history.
this book fits into those efforts: helping to decode the arguments in west german historiography and set the record straight. the discussion is a bit disorganized, with it being unclear why certain chapters were delineated as such. the writing was clear enough nontheless.
recommended for anyone digging into the nuance of nazi germany history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews