Coming Home To The Third Reich

During the 1930s, Germany's industrialization, rearmament and economic plans taxed the existing manpower, forcing the country to explore new ways of acquiring Aryan-German labor. Eventually, the Third Reich implemented a return migration program which used various recruitment strategies to entice Germans from Canada and the United States to migrate home. It initially used the Atlantic Ocean to transport German-speakers, but after the outbreak of World War II, German civilians were brought from the Americas to East Asia and then to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Soviet Union. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended this overland route, but some Germans were moved on Nazi ships from East Asia to the Third Reich until the end of 1942. This book investigates why Germans who had already established themselves in overseas countries chose to migrate back to an oppressive and authoritarian country. It sheds light on some aspects of the Third Reich's administration, goals and achievements associated with return migration while also telling the individual stories of returnees.

During the 1930s, Germany's industrialization, rearmament and economic plans taxed the existing manpower, forcing the country to explore new ways of acquiring Aryan-German labor. Eventually, the Third Reich implemented a return migration program which used various recruitment strategies to entice Germans from Canada and the United States to migrate home. It initially used the Atlantic Ocean to transport German-speakers, but after the outbreak of World War II, German civilians were brought from the Americas to East Asia and then to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Soviet Union. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended this overland route, but some Germans were moved on Nazi ships from East Asia to the Third Reich until the end of 1942. This book investigates why Germans who had already established themselves in overseas countries chose to migrate back to an oppressive and authoritarian country. It sheds light on some aspects of the Third Reich's administration, goals and achievements associated with return migration while also telling the individual stories of returnees.

"Brilliant.” —Washington Post "The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement “The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served. . . . The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving “voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.” —Denver Post There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

History of Nazi Germany.

Travelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, fascists, artists, tourists, and even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler—one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes, and its ultimate destruction.

'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES

"[G]ripping, immaculately researched . . . In Mr. Ullrich’s account, the murderous behavior of the Reich’s last-ditch loyalists was not a reaction born of rage or of stubbornness in the face of defeat—common enough in war—but of something that had long ago tipped over into the pathological." —Andrew Stuttaford, Wall Street Journal The best-selling author of Hitler: Ascent and Hitler: Downfall reconstructs the chaotic, otherworldly last days of Nazi Germany. In a bunker deep below Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945—Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer’s suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich. In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society’s descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home. A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.

In this riveting book, Michael Burleigh sets Nazi Germany in a European context, showing how the Third Reich's abandonment of liberal democracy, decency and tolerance was widespread in the Europe of the period. He shows how a radical, pseudo-religious movement, led by an oddity with dazzling demagogic talents, seemed to offer salvation to a German exhausted by war, depression and galloping inflation. 'This is a monumental book.' Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph 'If I had to recommend one book on the Third Reich, this would be it.' Daniel Johnson, Daily Telegraph 'It is a breathtaking achievement, at once broader and deeper than any other single volume ever published on the subject. Indeed I would go further: it is the product of authentic historical genius.' Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times 'Happily, Michael Burleigh now fills that bibliographical gap, with a readable and highly knowledgeable account of that ghastly period. You will never be bored by this extraordinary book.' Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday