The Rise of the Third Reich is the first of three books in Richard Evans's monumental study of Nazism, with over 250,000 copies sold in English and translated into thirteen languages.

Germany may have sown the winds of the Third Reich since Bismarck's time, but it took a dramatic chain of events before it reaped a storm with the Nazis' rise to power. In a country torn apart by economic, political, and social divisions, the major blows of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression, along with critical separate phenomena and events – from street fights between the SA and leftists to successive elections, from the Beer Hall Putsch to the Reichstag fire, from Hitler’s rhetorical prowess to Joseph Goebbels’s relentless propaganda machine – paved the way for an all-encompassing racist ideology and unchecked violence, which would be unleashed from the heart of Germany across Europe and the world.

For those of us who now know the outcome, this history appears particularly terrifying in its slow but relentless – and seemingly inevitable – unfolding, masterfully narrated here by the author. And it is even more frightening because, as he shows, there were many other ways in which the fate of Germany could have been played out, avoiding the tragic escalation from the fragile Weimar Republic to Hitler’s rise to power.

In this and the subsequent books of his monumental trilogy, Richard Evans, one of the world's leading historians, tells the most important story of the 20th century, and perhaps the most critical issue still to be understood: how, within a few decades, Germany — which in 1900 seemed to be one of the most advanced and dynamic nations in the world — managed to lead Europe into a moral, physical, and cultural catastrophe, the repercussions of which we are still living through.