Life And Death In The Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche

From The Week of March 28, 2010

How do dictatorships take hold in democratic nations? How does a people become so desperate for a solution that they convince themselves to hand over their own inalienable rights in exchange for the promise of a return to glory? Is humanity capable of the kind of self-deception necessary for an entire people to be blind to the games of a man like Hitler? To this last, Mr. Fritzsche seems to answer both yes and no, even while his chilling work speaks to the first two as he chronicles the rise to power of a political system anathema to personal liberty.

There are always those willing to trade liberty for security. Benjamin Franklin deduced that much 240 years ago. So yes, some blinded themselves to the devil in the details of the Nazi regime, choosing to believe that the gains under such a charismatic leader would outweigh the sins he would revisit upon them. But while this is true of some, it's simply wrong to paint all Germans with this brush. Many spoke out, wrote letters, organized marches, established resistances. Proud people do not universally succumb to the snake-oil salesman, not even if he does wrap himself in the flag. But of course, dictatorial regimes do not last long unless they are good at not only crushing dissent, but making the rest believe that the dissent was minor, a silly distraction, a plot by external forces seeking to rob the people of their deserved glory.

How do dictatorships take hold? Fear. Fear of instability, fear of not being able to feed your family, fear of being worthless and useless. How do people convince themselves to hand over their liberties? By telling themselves that this can't possibly be worse than what came before which, when you're starving and miserable, isn't that hard to do. Mr. Fritzsche's ruminations on human nature, in both allowing the Nazis' rise and in protesting its excesses, are fascinating and worthwhile for anyone curious about how they might react in a similar situation to that which confronted the downtrodden Germans of the early 1930s. This is poignant work, particularly in the accounts of those who saw the dark future ahead and were powerless to stop it. (3/5 Stars)