The opening sentence of “The Third Reich: A new History” is both a premise and promise of this highly praised work: “This book is about what happened when sections of the German elite and masses of ordinary people chose to abdicate their individual critical faculties in favour of a politics based on faith, hope, hatred and sentimental collective self regard for their own race and nation.”

The chief enigma for the historian is how one of the most advanced representatives of western civilization could suffer a total collapse. It is more than passing strange that a culture that birthed a Beethoven and Goethe could be subjugated to a Goebbels and Himmler. In the opening chapters, there is an excellent synthesis of scholarship on totalitarianism and what is characterized as political religion. The political ideologies share a kinship with religious rhetoric. The crucial difference is the misappropriating of its language and rituals to serve in its decadent form a programme of social political transformation that negates in its fundamentals any plurality and acceptance of multiculturalism.

The desacralised space is resacralised with caricatures and wild aberrations of redemptive solutions. Aliens, which do not fit into the xenophobic schema of national ideology, are regarded as pathogens that have to be purged as contaminants. Virtues are despised as expressions of the effete. The Biblical evocations laced with decades of uncritical humanistic theology became a tool of propaganda to lull the established church into supine sycophancy.

Established religion was co-opted and some of its leading spokesmen seduced into lyrical praise of the apotheosis of the Exalted Leader. For example, Karl Adams, a church historian said, ”Now he stands before us he whom the voices of our poets and sages have summoned, the liberator of the German Genius he has removed the blindfold from our eyes, and through all political, economic, social and confessional covers has enabled us to see and love again the one essential thing—our unity of blood, our German self…”

The silence of Heidegger has been much written about. The erosion of the centrality of the rule of law accompanies the rise of the totalitarian state. This led to the slide into “a murderous limbo where everything was possible.” In Burleigh’s biting commentary, “One aspect of dictatorship seems in need of more emphasis than it nowadays tends to receive the super cession of the Rule of law by arbitrary police terror. This was not a prosaic B-movie, before the lurid A-movie of the regime’s wartime rampage, but the crucial breach with the most fundamental characteristic of free societies.”

“It was not a side issue which one unaccountably preoccupied an older generation of historians and is now best left to legal historians, but the most important departure from civilized values engineered by the Nazi government.”

The judiciary and legal functionaries were brought in line with the goals of a totalitarian state. One striking example reported by Joachim Fest was that of Herr Bumcke, president of the Supreme Court of Justice of Leipzig. Shortly after the seizure of power, when a guest at a reception in breach of etiquette at the Supreme Court wore a SS uniform, Frau Bumcke acidly commented,” I see that you, too, are wearing the murderer’s uniform.”

But when Bumcke had his audience with Hitler, and the Fuhrer gripped his hand, gazed deeply into his eyes and said intensely, “Bumcke, you must help me.” this gesture made such an impression on Bumcke that he became a convert. The administration of justice became a bureaucratized affair with a continuous increase in the scope of the prosecutor’s powers.

The chapters dealing with the war fronts of Europe and Russia will be of interest to military historians. In the chapter entitled “Eugenics and Euthanasia,” Burleigh’s scholarship unearthed chilling and disturbing evidence of the abdication of the professions, from bureaucrats who rationalized their work as a compilation of statistics to the medical personnel that authorized and signed off the executions of the deformed, the certified psychiatrics and the mass sterilization of women.

Burleigh’s work is a grand synthesis of 20th century historiography combining acumen from varied disciplines of military, political, diplomatic, and social economic history. Undoubtedly, the final result may not please the experts in each of the fields but for a lay reader the synthesis is well worth the effort.

The details which Burleigh marshaled and the driving narrative style make it a compelling read, drawing readers into a cauldron of human extremes. We learn both of the damning ease by which officials of a regime slid into bestiality and collaborationist business which traded and manufactured supplies to the military industrial complex.

We are told how the Michelin family lost their sons when they were involved in the resistance. Indeed, a hallmark of Burleigh’s work is its scrupulous fairness in also retrieving for its readers the Germans who resisted the onslaught of the Nazi’s madness. The story of the Lutheran Pastor and one of the 20th century’s great theologians, Bonhoeffer, is retold deftly. We are made aware that for every Albert Speer, there is a counterpoint that reminds us of the presence of courage, righteousness and resistance amid great evil and wickedness. Shortly before Bonhoeffer’s death, he said, “As a pastor he counted it a duty not only to bind and minister to the wounded and victims of exalted men who drove madly a motor car in a crowded street, but also to try to stop them.”

Burleigh concludes his work with an administration that the story he told is not an edifying one. Regimes produced by armed bohemians produced nothing of enduring moment.

“Their leaders embodied the negation of everything that is worthwhile about being a human being; their followers shamed and demeaned themselves … Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy.”

May we in our 21st century heed these lessons and resist the incipient efforts of ideologues that seek to impose their totalitarian views on any nation state.

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