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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...