With The Third Reich at War, Richard J. Evans sets the seal on a massive historical trilogy on Hitler's Germany, following The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2004) and The Third Reich in Power (Penguin, 2006). Read together, the three volumes constitute a remarkably comprehensive treatment of the origins, course, and death of the Hitler regime, and are likely to be standard works for a long time to come.

This concluding volume also marks a kind of culmination point for a new kind of treatment of World War II. In the past few decades, scholarly historians have tended to eschew traditional forms of military and diplomatic history when dealing with Hitler, focusing instead on his murderous racism. The Third Reich at War is the exemplar for this trend. Indeed, it might be described as a history of the war without the actual war itself, or at least without much of the actual fighting. Evans freely admits that this is so, that his book “is not a history of the Second World War, not even of the Second World War in Europe” (p. xiii), and noting that even a book of this considerable size will not be able to “pay equal attention to every phase and every aspect of the war” (pp. xiii–xiv).

Even if we allow for that, however, the military side of the war is for all intents and purposes missing in action here. When the subject is military operations, the book offers a by-the-numbers consensus history, unproblematized and noticeably devoid of detail. The discussion of the German invasion of Poland that opens the book has some German divisions attacking here, “other German divisions” attacking there, and includes not a single named formation. The account of the fighting in Norway has the Allies landing “at two points midway along the coast” rather than at Namsos and Andalsnes, their actual destinations. The campaign in France and the Low Countries has generated an enormous literature, replete with historiographical controversies galore, but it, too, receives scant attention in this volume. Once again, the Germans cross the Meuse “in three places” rather than at their actual crossing sites of Sedan, Monthermé, and Dinant. The campaign in France is fortunate, however, compared to the treatment offered to the German campaign in the Balkans, which comes and goes in a single short paragraph. The decisive opening phase of the Stalingrad campaign, which saw the Wehrmacht lunge all the way from the Donets river to the Volga but arrive at Stalingrad too weakened to seize it, is barely mentioned. The vast campaign in the Caucasus gets a single page. The Soviet operation known as “Bagration,” which resulted in the destruction of an entire German army group in July 1944, gets, once again, a lone paragraph.

Like all of Evans's work, this book does have considerable strengths. When the subject is anything other than military operations, the detail level is high. As a history of the Holocaust, it is magnificent—nuanced, passionate, and richly detailed. Likewise, it offers a penetrating analysis of myriad areas: Nazi racial policies from the T-4 “euthanasia” program (which Evans noted was really nothing of the sort) to the resettlement of ethnic Germans; the stresses and strains of the German home front under a rain of Allied bombs; German cultural policy and propaganda during the war; the perversion of science and medicine in the service of Hitler's racial aims. Throughout the volume, Evans handles all these issues and more in his typically deft fashion, managing to paint the big picture and at the same time to make us care about the plight of individuals caught up in this horrible sequence of events.

It is that very strength of the book, however, that brings into relief the perfunctory nature of the military analysis. Let me pose this as an invitation rather than as a complaint. Professor Evans has been studying the Third Reich, its society, and its culture for his entire life. He knows the vast scholarly literature in a way that few others do. Surely, he has developed insights along the way into the way Nazi Germany organized, trained, and armed its military forces, as well as the way in which those forces fought. I, for one, would like to read them. The Third Reich did many things worthy of scholarly attention from 1939-45. Among the most important: it launched one vast military operation after another against its neighbors, and these campaigns deserve more discussion than they received here.

Given the above discussion, it is curious that the dust jacket of The Third Reich at War features, of all things, an action photo: an iconic image of a German infantry squad fighting its way through the rubble of Stalingrad.