The Third Reich was unique not only in the murderous extremes of its quest for Lebensraum, argues Nicholas Stargardt in his excellent book The German War, but also in staging its “total defeat.” It mobilized and exhausted “all the moral and physical reserves of German society. Even the Japanese did not fight to the gates of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo as the Germans fought for the Chancellery in Berlin” (1). For that reason, the author suggests, a critical question remains unanswered despite everything we know about the war's origins and atrocities: what exactly did Germans think they were fighting for, and what did they think about Nazism's unprecedented violence? By exploiting an impressive range of first-hand sources—collections of letters, diaries, memoirs, court records, and the regime's surveillance reports—Stargardt opens a window into the hopes, expectations, and fears of ordinary Germans in order to examine their views of the war that the Nazi regime unleashed. The result is a fascinating and disturbing analysis of how German justifications for war and genocide suppressed moral reservations that might have challenged Nazism's core objectives. Seeking to transcend the sharply defined categories of “perpetrator” and “victim,” as well as other constructs that have shaped debates about the relationship between the Third Reich and its citizens, Stargardt convincingly demonstrates that Germans saw themselves as both.

Ambiguity characterized German popular attitudes toward the Third Reich's bellicosity. Although few welcomed the war's outbreak, Adolf Hitler's justifications for launching it capitalized on popular memories of World War I and deep-seated resentments against the Versailles Diktat. For most Germans, this second world war in a generation echoed the contours of the first. Once again Germany faced the enemies who had previously encircled and defeated it. For many German enlistees and their families whose relatives had seen action in World War I (indeed, some soldiers served in the very same places their fathers had once occupied), a sense of “intergenerational responsibility” motivated them to “stick it out” [durchhalten]. They aimed to break the “cycle of repetition” (17) by defeating Germany's foes once and for all. The longer the war lasted and the bloodier it became—especially in the case of the apocalyptic conflict with “Bolshevism” in the east—the greater the determination to fight on. Stargardt cites the case of Robert R., who fought with Army Group Center in the Soviet Union and who had premonitions of his own death: he detested the Barbarossa campaign's extraordinary viciousness, which escalated as German supply lines weakened, partisan attacks mounted, and military stalemate set in, but he insisted that only a decisive victory would spare a third generation from fighting in Russia. A young Catholic from Münster, Hans Albring, questioned neither the war against “Jewish Bolshevism” nor the regime's characterization of it as such, even though he was upset by conflicts between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime at home. To be sure, acknowledging World War I's legacies is not new. Stargardt reminds us of the popular unrest that led to the Revolution of 1918, a nightmare the Third Reich desperately sought to avoid repeating. This was not an easy task given that the regime froze wages, imposed rationing, and curtailed imports even before September 1939. Yet popular memories of World War I also explain how interpretations of that conflict and its aftermath could justify World War II without much prodding from the regime. Even the middle-aged cabinet maker and convinced Nazi Fritz Probst was no militarist. Like many others, he loathed the disruption of his marriage and family life that military service entailed. Yet he believed that this war was not only defensive but also necessary to reverse the consequences of the last. The few conscientious objectors brave enough to refuse military service and face execution, most of them Jehovah's Witnesses, met with no public sympathy.

Historians have long noted that popular support for the Nazi regime was at its height when military victories came easily and swiftly. Some have argued that the stalling of the Barbarossa invasion near Moscow in late 1941, and especially the disasters at Stalingrad and Tunis in early 1943, weakened popular confidence and gave rise to defeatism. Stargardt rejects that claim. Without denying the depressing impact of these setbacks, he argues that news about the deportation and annihilation of the Jews, and the growing conviction of many Germans that Allied bombing was punishment for this, mobilized civilians and soldiers alike to stave off a final catastrophic defeat. By the fall of 1941, deportations of Jewish neighbors and the murder of Jews in the Soviet Union became a “shared secret” (chap. 8) among German civilians, who assuaged their consciences by asserting a moral equivalence between the American government's alleged persecution of German Americans and the Reich's treatment of Jews. Some stilled their voices altogether to avoid breaking the bonds of friendships or family. In the summer of 1942, for example, Karl Dürkefälden, an engineer from a working-class background, recoiled in horror at a letter from his brother-in-law on the Soviet front that included a comment justifying the murder of Jews in Hitlerian language as “a matter of existence or non-existence” (247)—yet he bit his tongue for fear of sowing family division.

Building on the work of Peter Longerich (“Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenvervolgung 1933–1945 [2006]), Stargardt argues that the conflicted feelings of Germans became especially evident by the spring and summer of 1943 as Allied bombing became more frequent and devastating. Consumed or at least prodded by guilt, Germans concluded that the air raids were punishment for the murder of Jews; but although they recognized themselves as implicated in the mass killings, they once more retreated to moral equivalence—namely, that the widespread lethal assault against the Jews was no worse than Allied bombing. This rationalization persuaded Germans to fight on. Unlike Andreas Hillgruber, however, who three decades ago claimed the moral equivalence of the Holocaust and the Allied destruction of Germany (Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums [1986]), Stargardt sees Germans as having desperately attempted to escape the consequences of the war that they themselves had endorsed.

As Joseph Goebbels's “total war” speech in February 1943 indicated, the regime's bellicose propaganda continued apace. Light popular entertainment on the radio and in the cinema nevertheless tempered public anxiety. The following did as well: the revelations of the Soviet massacres of Polish officers in Katyn, which reaffirmed German justifications for the war; the regime's repeated promises of retaliatory wonder weapons; and the Wehrmacht's successful invasion of northern Italy after the overthrow of Benito Mussolini. The Nazi regime's response to Allied bombing was more effective than that of the Fascist state, which failed to defend citizens adequately. Yet Stargardt stresses that the successful mobilization of German civilians—who cleaned up after air raids, assisted in finding shelter and food supplies, volunteered for the Red Cross, and joined units to shoot down Allied aircraft—was critical to preventing a breakdown of public support similar to what had occurred during World War I. The common goal of breaking the “cycle of repetition” and keeping civilians and soldiers united survived until Allied armies finally crossed the borders of the Old Reich. Only then, suggests Stargardt, did the solidarity of popular mobilization collapse.

Stargardt's desire “to explore the subjective dimensions of social history” (1) through sources that let Germans speak for themselves allows us to appreciate just how much they costarred in the drama that engulfed them. Drawing upon their affective relationships and past experiences, the German people made their own decisions—even when those decisions dovetailed with those of the Nazi regime. Stargardt exposes the contradictions in German thinking: on the one hand, they had deep concerns about the regime's criminality; on the other, they saw the war as “defensive” and justified. The latter sentiment prevented moral qualms from leading to moral action. The Nazi regime's ability to appropriate beliefs that it shared with its citizens lay less in Hitler's charisma or the regime's ambition to acquire Lebensraum, according to Stargardt, than in its ability to assuage popular discomfort and avoid public confrontations that had the potential to challenge Nazism root and branch. The Nazi leadership's success stemmed from its practical observations: it recognized that it could not eradicate Christian and bourgeois moralities overnight, and it realized that communicating less overtly about its murderous practices would allow popular nationalism to contain moral anxieties.

Much has been written about the conflict between the Third Reich and the churches (especially the Catholic Church) over the Nazi regime's euthanasia program, which targeted “lives unworthy of life” for extermination under the cover of wartime. Stargardt's account of that episode excels in illuminating the range of issues that informed the clash between a Christian commitment to the preservation of life and the lethal eugenics of the Third Reich. The Protestant and Catholic churches administered many hospitals and asylums, a role that put them in direct conflict with the regime's policy of euthanasia, and over 94 percent of Germans belonged to the churches. Despite the secrecy that enshrouded the medical killings, rumors spread widely and prompted senior clergymen to protest privately to Nazi leaders. On the Catholic side, the episcopate went public, notably when the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, issued a pastoral letter in August 1941 condemning euthanasia. To be sure, Stargardt acknowledges, the sanctity of human life stood at the forefront of Galen's letter—but it accompanied his and other prelates’ concerns over radical Nazi attacks on church assets. In fact, shortly before Galen issued his letter on euthanasia, he had issued two pastoral letters condemning the sequestration of church property in the annexed territories of Luxembourg and Alsace, the confiscation of religious houses and lands in the “Old Reich,” and the removal of crucifixes from schools. Because many anticlerical Catholics supported the party's dissolution of monasteries and convents, widespread Catholic opposition to euthanasia provided a unifying issue that would strengthen the authority of the clergy against local Nazi radicals. Moreover, as a conservative nationalist, Galen devoted special attention to the fate of gravely wounded German soldiers whom he feared medical killing would eliminate. He confined his criticism to local Nazi bosses and closed his appeal with prayers for the Führer.

Galen's pastoral letters were successful in stopping sequestrations, but they brought only a temporary halt to the killing program: after imposing new layers of secrecy, the regime resumed its euthanasia program without further public protests from clergymen. Despite rumors that medical killing had been revived, the church did not want to risk further assaults on its property and religious orders. The policy that the Nazi regime followed during the euthanasia controversy—i.e., curtailing gratuitous radical assaults on conventional morality to avoid public disturbances—proved even more valuable when military setbacks in the field and relentless bombing raids increased public anxieties over Allied retribution for the annihilation of the Jews.

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Overall, The German War suggests that recent debates about how best to characterize the Nazi regime have exhausted their ability to explain. To what extent did National Socialism achieve its goal of a homogeneous and socially harmonious Volksgemeinschaft? Was it, in fact, a dictatorship that ruled more by consent than by repression? As Stargardt makes abundantly clear, no one can deny the efficacy of one route toward the Volksgemeinschaft, namely, the regime's elimination of racial and political “enemies.” Yet the “people's community” itself, composed of racially, eugenically, and politically “acceptable” Germans, remained divided, especially as forced evacuations, competition over housing, and inequitable rationing mounted. When push came to shove, patriotism and support for the war remained rooted in the obligations of family and Heimat, as did mobilization to save the Reich from defeat. Little else mattered—not Hitler's charisma, not organic nationalism, not the stunning early military victories, not even the regime's imperialism, except to the extent that the occupation of conquered territory provided cheap consumer goods to ease domestic shortages. Alternatively, if the Third Reich was not a consensual “community,” did defeatism and opposition undermine it? Stargardt says no. In fact, he believes the regime's failures persuaded Germans to participate in its apocalyptic vision of total victory or annihilation. It was the dread of defeat and occupation rather than defeatism or opposition that compelled the Reich's citizens and soldiers to stick it out despite growing disenchantment with their leaders.

No national institution offered an alternative to the catastrophe that loomed, as the following examples attest. Aside from pockets of resistance, the regime had, in the first year of its existence, all but destroyed organized labor. It subsequently persuaded many workers to accept National Socialism, not least because rearmament had ended unemployment. The military's capitulation was equally complete inasmuch as its leaders, whatever their reservations as to the pace and timing of the Führer's initiatives, shared his imperialist agenda. The assassination attempt against Hitler of July 20, 1944, a plot that involved few senior officers, desperately strove to restore a “decent” Germany that could negotiate peace with the Allies. When it failed, the conspirators met with universal contempt for allegedly undermining the morale of soldiers at the front. Stargardt is particularly strong in tracing the waning authority of the churches. The disappearance of public challenges to euthanasia after mid-1941 left parishioners isolated and devoid of resources to save relatives in asylums. To be sure, despite the nationalism that justified the “crusade” against “Godless” (and “Jewish”) Bolshevism, Catholic bishops of an earlier generation condemned calls for retaliation against Allied bombing, which they considered God's punishment for secularization, but they faced the outrage of younger clergy and parishioners who wanted revenge. The Protestant and Catholic churches, along with the Nazi Party, staged elaborate public rituals of commemoration for the victims of the bombings, but none of these offered comfort or explanation for the enormity of mass suffering. Only the companionship of family, close friends, neighborhoods, and other small social networks offered any possibility of succor.

Stargardt's blurring of the boundaries between victim and perpetrator is entirely convincing. Yet is he right to question arguments that have informed the scholarship on the Third Reich, notably the idea of Nazism as a consensual dictatorship or the prevalence of defeatism or opposition after Stalingrad? The author's rich and detailed analysis of popular mobilization justifies his skepticism of the latter. But the regime did enjoy considerable support (or at least tolerance), especially among the middle classes, because, among other “achievements,” it had destroyed organized labor, remedied the “disproportionate” role of Jews in German life, disciplined the “work shy,” rolled back the Versailles treaty, and engineered an economic recovery. As Stargardt acknowledges in his introduction, Nazism's promise to rid Germany of the regional, religious, and class divisions that undermined national cohesion exerted a powerful appeal after the so-called seizure of power. And, as Peter Fritzsche has argued, Nazism provided opportunities for individuals to “become” Nazis (Life and Death in the Third Reich [2008]). Whether by joining the labor service or youth groups, researching one's genealogy to secure an Aryan passport, or signing up for Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) tours, Germans could overcome their reservations about National Socialism and join the Volk. Indeed, Stargardt appears to accept the idea that the regime's ability to rule derived at least as much from popular and elite support as it did from its deployment of terror. Although Nazism assaulted its internal and external victims, especially the Jews, Stargardt notes that the dictatorship was careful when it came to dealing with Volksgenossen. It operated a “two-speed police state” that “calibrate[d] its violence so that the majority of Germans did not feel it” (79). In sum, even if most Germans did not share the Nazi regime's radicalism, there was enough ideological overlap between the Third Reich and its citizens to pave the road to catastrophe.

Stargardt's deeply researched book nevertheless significantly advances the scholarly debate by illuminating the complexities that ordinary Germans described in their own words as they confronted the consequences of a genocidal war. To return to the issue that Stargardt raises at the outset of his study, we can indeed ask why Germans fought to defend the Reich Chancellery in Berlin whereas the Japanese surrendered before their enemies reached the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. As Yukiko Koshiro has recently argued (Imperial Eclipse: Japan's Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945 [2013]), despite the ferocity with which Japan fought its war, it surrendered after the Soviet Union attacked Manchuria, believing (mistakenly) that the Soviets would support an important role for Japan in order to forestall American hegemony in East Asia. For the Third Reich, by contrast, there could only be a fight to the death. Its quest for Lebensraum in the east at the Soviet Union's expense left the Nazi regime and its citizens with no option but to face disaster. Germans had seen the war as an opportunity to escape the encirclement by Germany's enemies that had led to ruin in 1918, only to suffer even more the second time around. Indeed, it was their fear that they would pay a far greater price than they had in 1918 that drove them to fight on.