Pierre Aycoberry (1925–2012)

Title says it all: the collective fears and desires of the great mass of German people during the rise and fall of the Nazi party. Not an attempt to document the psychology of these people, nor an attempt to "explain" the arc of history by appealing to the innate character of German citizens in the 1930s -- there are enough of those books already. This one merely tracks the changing fortunes of various groups under Nazism -- skilled workers, soldiers, mothers, church officials, business leaders, and so on. Turns out that German society was much more heterogenous than I could have guessed, that the cult of personality that surrounded Hitler vied with other impulses -- the desire for law and order, patriotism, hatred of communism -- in the minds of German citizens, making the unfolding of history much more haphazard than I imagined. A useful corrective to the overly simple-minded idea that any given set of enemies can just be "evil" -- that they also have a confusing history of ambiguities and conflicting goals.… (mere)