This brief, comprehensive history of the Third Reich, part of Palgrave's “European History in Perspective” series, is one of the best of its kind. In nine chapters and less than 300 pages Kirk provides an excellent topical overview of all major aspects of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945. His intention is “to reflect the emphasis and approach of recent research, especially research in German whose findings are not otherwise widely available to an English-speaking readership” (p. 8). In this he has succeeded admirably. Kirk has not limited himself to the recent secondary literature on Nazism, but also makes judicious use of some underused primary sources, particularly the extensive Deutschland-Berichte of the SPD in exile (Sopade) and the published reports of the Sicherheits-Dienst on the popular mood in Germany between 1938 and the end of the war. The book is a model of condensation and synthesis and as such should lend itself very well to classroom use, even if Kirk's concentrated prose and nuanced analysis does not make for an easy read. The brief glossary of terms and abbreviations appended at the end will help students find their way.

Despite his book's brevity, Kirk finds space to at least touch on some major interpretive questions, setting forth opposing views with admirable impartiality but making his own view clear as well, often in pithy and felicitous formulations. Thus he finds “fascism theory” more convincing than “totalitarianism theory”: “Although there are compelling reasons for emphasizing the unique radicalism of Nazi racial policy and genocide,” he writes, “as there are for comparisons between the Nazi police state and that of the Soviet Union, there are—arguably—stronger reasons for seeing Nazism as part of a broader wave of (largely unsuccessful) fascist movements which took hold in much of continental Europe between the wars; movements with similar values, a similar social base and similarly close relations with other extreme nationalist and authoritarian conservative movements” (p. 4). Without denying the populist dimensions of Nazism, Kirk points out that “the Nazi dictatorship was, after all, an initiative from above” and concludes (perhaps with an eye on the present) that “threats to democracy do not come so much from political unrest as from those who manipulate it” (p. 9). On the still controversial question of the extent of working class support for the Nazis, Kirk concedes that the same census data can be interpreted in different ways, depending on whether artisans are included under the broad category of “worker”: “Definitions of class inevitably contain an element of subjectivity, and cannot simply be equated with notional ‘objective’ categories, such as the social and economic groups defined by government departments” (p. 24). On the “Borchardt thesis” that there was no realistic alternative to Brüning's deflationary austerity policies, Kirk expresses some skepticism toward the recent trend, particularly among American historians, to absolve Brüning of responsibility for the collapse of the Weimar parliamentary system: “Brüning's policies were not reluctant measures, but deliberate political choices in a society where powerful interest groups saw every tax on themselves as a mortal blow to their existence …” (p. 30). As for Papen, Kirk makes it quite clear that he was much more intent on destroying the parliamentary system than on controlling the Nazis. Kirk dismisses the notion that the Nazis brought about a revolution, “either in terms of real social change or in the way social reality was perceived” (p. 111): “The regime did not seek to alter social and economic relationships fundamentally, still less dispossess the ruling class or interfere with its vital economic interests; nor did it attempt to sweep away or re-found existing social and political institutions (the army, the bureaucracy, churches, universities), partly because it could not have succeeded and partly because the Nazis did not want that degree of change” (p. 38). In the “intentionalist” vs. “structuralist” dispute Kirk gravitates toward the structuralist side: “The decision-making and implementation of policy that drives political events was a complicated business, and not best explained as the product of an individual or even a collective will” (p. 49).

Not surprisingly, the longest of Kirk's nine chapters are the ones devoted to “Nazism and the Economy” and “The Myth of the ‘National Community’: German Society under Nazism.” In these two chapters Kirk is able to draw extensively on his own research for his monograph, Nazism and the Working Class in Austria (1996) as well as on the wealth of statistical information he collected in The Longman Companion to Nazi Germany (1995). Kirk plays down the novelty of Nazi economic policies, including their much touted work-creation programs, at least until 1936, when the introduction of the Four-Year Plan did mark a real change of course. Economic recovery did help to reduce working-class opposition, but the effect of Nazi support for management rather than labor was “to reinforce rather than transcend or overcome class divisions in German society” (p. 111). On the question of the extent of popular support for the Nazis among “ordinary Germans” Kirk stresses neither Resistenz (Martin Broszat's term for immunity to Nazi propaganda) nor fanatical support, focusing instead on “routine conformity and quiet collaboration” (p. 98), especially among the professional classes. He also points out that specific groups supported some Nazi policies, but opposed others: “Attitudes were selective, temporary, and shifting” (p. 149).

Kirk's book also contains a wealth of fascinating detail, such as the fact that the Center Party was the single greatest beneficiary of women's suffrage (sixty percent of its voters were women). Kirk is adept at fleshing out the many contradictions of Nazism; he points out, for instance, that although more than a third of all Nazi party members in 1933 were under the age of thirty, the party did best in electoral districts with a high proportion of older and retired people. The Nazis also attracted far greater electoral support among university students than among the population at large. Inevitably, in a book that takes on so much in such a short space, some topics come up a bit short. “Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust” and “Foreign Policy and the Second World War” are not treated in the same detail as the internal workings of the Reich, perhaps because these aspects of the Third Reich have received so much greater coverage from historians in the past. Particularly the chapter on the war seems a bit rushed, as if Kirk were only repeating information that everyone already knows. But the level of analysis and interpretation remains uniformly high, and even here there are some unexpected and fascinating details gleaned from his own area of expertise, such as the fact that the plebiscite in favor of Anschluss in 1938 gained an even greater majority in Austria than in Germany itself.

Historiographical trends in the post-communist era, besides undermining the credibility of the so-called “Stamokap” theory of Nazism favored in the GDR, have complicated the history of Nazi society and Nazi culture, which are no longer uniformly seen in clear black-and-white distinctions but in various shades of grey, while at the same time the singularly racist nature of Nazism and the Nazi regime has been reemphasized. These trends in the continuing “historicization” of Nazism are faithfully reflected in Kirk's valuable synthesis, but always with a critical edge. Judged on its scholarly merits, Kirk's Nazi Germany can certainly be recommended as a superior updated alternative to the currently most popular undergraduate texts, Jackson Spielvogel's Hitler and Nazi Germany (5th ed., 2004) and D. G. Williamson's The Third Reich (3rd ed., 2002).