This slim volume merits consideration for its own qualities and as an artifact of twenty-first-century Germany. Der Zweite Weltkrieg is part of a sixteen-volume series, Deutsche Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, a post-reunification project intended for a general audience and written by a new generation of scholars. The contributors are part of the Berlin Republic by age and methodology. Their approaches incorporate Kulturgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, and Mentalitätsgeschichte along with conventional political, economic, and military aspects. Their intention is to historicize the modern German experience. This volume, at least, succeeds admirably.

In keeping with the concept of the series Schmidt, of Würzburg University, presents World War II in the context of “long duration,” as twentieth-century Germany's watershed. The war, Schmidt asserts, was a catharsis for German society. It left in its wake a spectrum of shattered illusions and betrayed loyalties, surmounted by an enduring image of depraved hubris. National Socialism's destructive dynamic of racism and imperialism capitulated an unwilling Germany into the modern world. It left a dual legacy: the enduring establishment of a liberal-democratic political order in the west, and a social-revolutionary opposite pole in the east.

The following 180 pages present the matrices of those consequences. Schmidt briefly and accurately describes Hitler's prewar exploitation of Europe's short-sighted reaction to Nazi blackmail and Nazi ideology. He presents the impact of a way of war based on surprise, speed, and mobility, tested in Poland and brought to fruition in 1940 against a western alliance still failing to understand the nature of its enemy. Schmidt does not address the Holocaust, which is allocated its own volume in the series, but he highlights German policy in occupied Poland as from the beginning prefiguring the “war of plunder and annihilation” Hitler began preparing against the U.S.S.R. even before the guns fell silent in France.

That war could not be undertaken from a standing start. Britain remained unbowed, and thoughts of an invasion faded with the Battle of Britain. Instead Germany pursued a “peripheral strategy” in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Its lack of success only encouraged Hitler and the Wehrmacht to initiate the war they were convinced Germany could win: against the Soviet Union. Schmidt presents Operation Barbarossa as an all-or-nothing option, a quick victory or a lingering defeat. Its predictable failure was a result of comprehensive overstretch at the front and behind the lines: a feckless overconfidence that proposed reaching objectives 900 miles from the starting points in four months, while simultaneously waging war against an entire people.

The declaration of war against the U.S. in December 1941 was correspondingly unplanned, a “flight forward,” laying the foundation for a Grand Coalition that beginning in 1942 deployed overwhelming material and moral force against a Reich increasingly lacking in both. The Allies differed significantly on how to deal with postwar Germany. What they were able to agree on was the necessity for total victory, embodied in the concept of unconditional surrender and concretized at Teheran and Yalta.

Schmidt describes Soviet geographic and economic successes as reflecting the Anglo-American delay mounting a second front: what was not achieved on the battlefield could not be won at the conference table. A good part of that delay reflected Germany's bitter determination to continue the war in defiance of the changing balance of forces. Efforts to establish a European imperium gridlocked in the face of metastasizing resistance. As the tide of the air war changed, the Reich became a fortress without a roof. Above all, Hitler's determination to resume the offensive in Russia led to the Stalingrad catastrophe and its aftermath at Kursk: the permanent crippling of Germany's ground-offensive capabilities, the system's only trump card.

As the noose around Germany's neck tightened during 1943, the Wehrmacht and the people continued to follow their Führer. Hitler had dismantled the traditional state apparatus and the secondary social institutions. The “Führer myth” and its accompanying terror machine combined to limit any form of resistance and isolate the resisters. July 20 may have been an “uprising of conscience.” It was also too little and far too late.

June 1944 initiated the war's final stage. D-Day in the west and Operation Bagration in the east caught the shrinking Reich in the jaws of a giant vise, not to be stopped by local counterattacks such as the Ardennes offensive. Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1944, symbolized the downfall of the Third Reich and the German society that had acclaimed and supported it to the finish. The German threat was ended. So was Europe's global dominance. But in ends lay a beginning: Germany's liberation from the structures and mentalities that had turned Europe into a wilderness of ruins and corpses.