The central questions of Peter Fritzsche's new book, Life and Death in the Third Reich, have long bedeviled historians of the Third Reich. To what extent did Germans imbibe Nazi ideology? To what degree did they identify with and participate in the Nazi regime's hideous racial order? In his compelling study, Fritzsche begins provocatively by agreeing with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial thesis that Germans shared an “eliminationist” anti-Semitism with Nazi leaders. Yet Fritzsche seeks not merely to “make the case that more Germans were Nazis and Germans more National Socialist than was previously thought” (p. 7). Rather, he sees the nazification of Germans as a process by which Germans “struggled with the Nazi revolution in various keys of desire, fascination, and dismay” (pp. 7–8). If Germans grappled with the morality of Nazi anti-Jewish policies, euthanasia, and the conduct of the war, the regime won them over with myriad opportunities to “become” a “Volk comrade.” In so doing, the Third Reich enabled Germans to identify with the “collective fate and collective trials of the nation” (p. 11), and follow the Nazi regime to the bitter end.

The sources for examining popular opinion in the Third Reich are particularly rich even if they can be problematic, beginning with the well-used situation reports of the German Social Democratic Party in Exile (Sopade) and the Meldungen aus dem Reich compiled by the Gestapo and SD. While by no means ignoring these, Fritzsche imaginatively focuses on a substantial collection of letters and diaries. Although they are not representative in his view, they allow us to read, or listen into, what Germans privately admitted to themselves and to one another, practices that conveniently complemented the autobiographical work that the regime itself encouraged in their community camps. In addition to the individual ruminations found in them, letters and diaries are invaluable in describing the local activities of the Nazi party and its organizations where Nazi ideology played out and how people engaged them. Contrary to Ian Kershaw, whose influential work of the 1980s, The “Hitler Myth,” argued that the Führer's charisma was the key to assuring popular consent to the regime's goals despite the Nazi party's unpopularity, Fritzsche sees the party's local commitments as having ensured the success of the Nazi project. How? Its efforts to mobilize Germans addressed a deep-seated yearning to transcend Germany's historic divisions of class, region, and religion that were especially acute after World War I. Although undeniably coercive, organizations such as the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls, the Reich Labor Service, Winter Relief, and the military brought countless Germans together in new ways. The cheerful entertainment provided by the national media conveyed the happiness of individuals as the fulfillment of the Volk community, while reinforcing a sense of belonging that embraced the racially acceptable and excluded the unacceptable. Although inflating the number of workers that it supposedly benefited, Strength through Joy's tours, concerts, and sports programs could make a good case that it opened bourgeois leisure practices to ordinary Germans. Above all, the need to acquire the Ahnenpass (Aryan Passport), which was essential to access the regime's social benefits, encouraged Germans to affirm that their membership in the Volk community was explicitly racial. Yet coercion was not the only reason that Germans researched their family trees. The Ahnenpass built upon a bourgeois mania for geneology that well preceded the Third Reich.

To be sure, knowledge of Nazism's poisonous impact on “community aliens,” especially Jews, was never absent. As Fritzsche perceptively argues, trains and train stations, to give one example, allowed Germans and their victims to peer into the radically different worlds of life and death in the Third Reich. The transporting of Jewish deportees, foreign workers, and prisoners entered the sightlines of German civilians and Wehrmacht troops. The acquisition of housing, furnishings, and other goods from exiled or deported Jews, while giving material reality to the regime's promises of economic prosperity and a generous welfare state, linked an emergent consumerism with dispossession . . . not least because many Germans participated in the party's violent attacks on Jews, either as activists or as jeering bystanders. Although Jews all but disappeared from public discussion after 1942 once the regime had removed them (as did the letters and diaries of Jews that documented the daily horror that they experienced), a furtive, if incomplete, awareness of the human consequences of the Nazi regime's “empire of destruction” lurked in Germans' communications with each other. German soldiers and civilians hung on until the Third Reich collapsed because they had become complicit in the Nazi project and feared retribution if Germany lost, and because the Third Reich had done what the Weimar Republic could not, provide an antidote to military defeat in 1918, “complete political and moral chaos,” and “the end of collective national life” (p. 267). Although Germany suffered catastrophic losses on the battle front and home front during the last few months of the war, the disaster ironically encouraged the “Volk community” to persist in a new way after the end of the Third Reich, through a shared sense of victimhood that disavowed responsibility for Nazi crimes.

Fritzsche completes the story that he began in the 1990s in Germans into Nazis, his engagingly written examination of the emergence of popular identification with the nation that subverted the social hierarchies of Imperial Germany during the Great War, and ultimately enabled National Socialism to take power in 1933. Instead of examining the attitudes of Germans as static entities analytically separate from the various components of Nazi ideology or the Nazi leadership on high, Fritzsche's emphasis on Germans becoming Nazis allows us to appreciate the integration of feelings of satisfaction and pride, fear and foreboding with the growing conviction that without Nazism, there would be no nation at all. Moreover, by allowing us to see that identifying with the Nazi project involved not just participation at the local level, but also the personal and private negotiation with what Nazism represented, Life and Death in the Third Reich shows more clearly than previous works on popular opinion how the legitimacy of the Nazi regime derived from the desperate need for wholeness and renewal regardless of the consequences. For its part, the Nazi party did not simply assume that Germans shared its racism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism. It persuaded them that its goals were necessary to ethnic resurrection.