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The 12-year Reich: A Social History Of Nazi Germany 1933-1945 Paperback – August 22, 1995

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

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"In chilling detail, this social history brilliantly demonstrates the awesome power of a brutal government to corrode the human spirit."--Wall Street Journal




"Invaluable for every student of the Nazi era."--New York Times Book Review





The 12-Year Reich, the first comprehensive social study of the Third Reich, shows what the Nazi regime proffered as the "ideal" society and how the German people responded. Along with the violence, corruption, persecution, public extravaganzas, the ever-present Party, and the cult of the Fuhrer, a ghastly imitation of ordinary life went on.





How did people talk during the Third Reich? What films could they see? What political jokes did they tell? Did Nazi ranting about the role of women (no make-up, smoking, or dieting) correspond with reality? What was the effect of the regime on family life (where fathers were encouraged to inform on sons, and children on parents)? When the country embraced National Socialism in 1933, how did that acceptance impact the churches, the civil service, farmers, housewives, businessmen, health care, sports, education, "justice," the army, the arts, and the Jews? Using examples that range from the horrifying to the absurd, Grunberger captures vividly the nightmarish texture of the times and reveals how Nazis effectively permeated the everyday lives of German citizens. The result is a brilliant, terrifying glimpse of the people who dwelt along the edges of an abyss-often disappearing into it.
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From the Back Cover

The 12-year Reich, the first comprehensive social study of the Third Reich, shows what the Nazi regime proffered as the 'ideal' society and how the German people responded. Along with the violence, corruption, persecution, public extravaganzas, the ever-present Party, and the cult of the Fuhrer, a ghastly irritation of ordinary life went on.

About the Author


Richard Grunberger is the author of Germany 1918-1945, Hitler's SS, and Red Rising in Bavaria. He lives in London.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Da Capo; First Edition (August 22, 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0306806606
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0306806605
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1.28 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2022
    In a way, reading The 12 Year Reich has made it harder to understand the Nazis. They’re not exactly the military-Fundamentalist-big biz alliance that modern liberals imagine them as. But it’s difficult to say what they are. They were obsessed with fighting and dying, and believed it to be man’s highest ambition — but their support was shakiest among the aristocratic military. They were opposed to sinful modern life, makeup, atonal music and women’s education — but they also had a tense relationship with the church. Nazism was backward looking, idolizing small farmers and artisans — but also obsessed with material and technological progress, and some of their strongest support came from young people and academics. One thing is very certain though: Nazis did not like the Jews.

    Even though he makes that clear, one notable quality of this book is that unlike most historians of Nazi Germany, Grunberger doesn’t really dwell on Nazi atrocities. He doesn’t dance around them, exactly, but it’s clear that they aren’t the focus of his work. In the course of his chapter on Nazi medicine, he devotes two sentences to the 350 doctors deployed to concentration camps, involved in “medical experiments which defy description, and to selection for the gas chambers.” Enough said!

    The rest of the chapter covers prosaic subjects like nutrition, infectious disease, wartime shortages of doctors, and the typically perverse Nazi attitude towards childbirth: Women weren’t supposed to have painkillers during labor “since it would have been unfitting for German women to undergo the supreme experience of their existence with their consciousness dimmed.”

    It’s hard to fault Grunberger for not focusing on the Nazis’ worst atrocities. The book is overstuffed already, and those subjects have been covered elsewhere. But watch out, because this book is so engrossing, and German society (even in its less-malevolent aspects) so bizarre that you might forget yourself and be tempted to tell your friends some interesting facts about Nazi society, but let me tell you: People don’t want to hear them.

    Reading this book, one notices how little the National Socialists have in common with the Neo-Nazis who evoke their memory. The racist, blood-and-soil atavism that people associate with Nazism is only half the story. On the one hand they valorize the peasants and their traditional volkisch lifestyle — on the other hand, “The Food Estate regulated and enforced both prices and delivery quotas most minutely; for instance, each hen had to lay sixty-five eggs per year. There were monthly visits to farms, when Food Estate controllers milked the cows and determined the prescribed milk yield…”

    This kind of central planning was an intrinsic part of the Nazi project, and you can read similar examples in every chapter. National Socialists we’re socialists, after all (and as Grunberger makes clear with exhaustive figures, their central planning was an economic drag on Germany, even as it crawled out of the Great Depression.) But when people speak of Nazism potentially making a comeback in the 21st century, I do not think they’re imagining a “strength-through-joy” program to send workers on state-run vacations.

    One odd fact about this book is that although it’s called “The 12 Year Reich,” nearly all of the social history focuses on the first 6, when Germany was at peace. How religion (or the family, or food or workers) was handled during the war is often described in just a few pages. And I think that’s telling. Nazi Germany was a bizarre country in part because it was *not* especially bizarre during wartime. Micromanaging people’s consumption, curtailing their freedom of speech and assembly, aggressively dictating working hours and factory management — these are all things that (perhaps to a lesser extent) other countries do in times of total war. In other words, Nazi Germany was a country always at war, whether actually fighting or not.

    Reading about their permanent state of DEFCON-2, it’s hard to imagine that the Nazi regime could have ended any other way than it did. The National Socialist revolution was never going to wind down like the Francoist government of Spain. From the moment of its birth, the Third Reich was destined to collapse in a cataclysmic war.

    If this book has one overarching lesson, it’s that Nazism is not just something that happens when a people lose faith in democracy and modernity. Nazism was a distinctly German phenomenon. At the beginning of most of the chapters (e.g. The Army, The Workers, Religion) he discusses the unique German attitude towards each, and how those attitudes led naturally to Nazism. For instance, he notes that “The clause in the Versailles Treaty prohibiting universal military service appeared to some observers as the germ cell of Nazism. ‘Prohibition of the army was like prohibition of religion, of specific and sacrosanct practices without which life could not be imagined — and this resulted in unlimited recruitment to the Nazis from within the nation.’”

    The most significant chapter in this regard is the very first, about the Weimar Republic, and its own genesis in the collapse of the German Empire. In what is the most beautiful prose I’ve seen in a history book (the whole book is excellently written) he sums up the genesis of Nazi Germany:

    “Though the coming of the Third Reich may have lacked the quality of inevitability sometimes attributed to it, it is difficult not to consider the Weimar Republic’s fate as inescapable. The political immaturity of the German people (especially of the elite), a deformed social system and a malfunctioning economy all interacted to bring about its collapse. But the particular form this collapse took was by no means predetermined. In Germany (where, incidentally, public executioners exercised their office in top-hat and frock-coat) the hangmen of democracy might as easily have worn gold braid as brown shirts, since the perverted minority Republican governments of 1932 faced the choice of either instituting a narrow army-backed, Presidential dictatorship or of surrendering to the broadly-based Nazi movement.

    “The alternative adopted on 30 January 1933 (the day of the so-called ‘seizure of power’) was in fact the more democratic one — absurd though that may sound. Although Hitler failed to give Germany the proffered Millennium, he did drag her, half-heartedly kicking and screaming, into the century of the common man.”
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2016
    I read this years ago and let the copy get away from me somehow.. I was glad to have found the pocketbook version again.. I feel it is important to re-read how the Nazi state was developed in light on this year's POTUS election.. A very intense and detailed insight into this chapter in the history of our world... It may be a harbinger of things to come..
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2013
    This hardcover edition was the perfect replacement for my decades-old paperback copy that was falling apart. This book is loaded with fascinating nuggets of information that I've not found elsewhere.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2015
    I found this book when conducting a bit of research on punishment methods (in social space) in Nazi Germany. Reading around in the book, I've found it to be very well researched and thorough. There is no single book on this period that one needs to read, in my opinion. Instead, this is one of many books that I've found very useful.

    As a social history, as opposed to a military or political history, this book has a different and important perspective.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2016
    Until you read a book like this and get into the German-Nazi mind-set, you cannot make comparisons with present Federal administration.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2013
    First published in 1971, this is one of the few books to describe in detail what life was like for the average German living under the Nazi regime. The complexities and contradictions of social and economic life during those 12 years, as well as the government's often ad hoc, makeshift policies, are well described here. The author also demonstrates that prosperity in Germany in the 1930s was only relatively higher than it had been in the 1920s.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2000
    I picked up a copy of this book in a used bookstore some years ago, and it's not too bad. The best part of the book is the chapter on humor in the Third Reich, sometimes the other thousands of books on this topic seem to forget that real people lived their lives during this time, and those lives included the occasional joke about the government. Of course, joking about the Nazi government was not advisable, and the chapter discusses that aspect as well.
    The book is filled with information about what it was like to live as an ordinary citizen of the Third Reich. There is a small collection of photographs as well. Curiously, it leaves any discussion of the Jews until the last chapter.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2005
    The nazis, at the moment of imposing a ferrous submission to the citizens created a systems without backgrounds in the history. The women were simply a vehicle to bring babies to the world, four at least to obtain the Cross of Iron in the anniversary of Hitler's mother. If you wish to establish racial love affair that meant for the eyes of the Regime against the law.

    In this society you could denounce your parents, sisters, brothers, daughter or son if they constituted a serious obstacle to the Regime's health.

    But you will find treasured photographs and hard to get documents of this opprobrious age. Grunberger made a careful incision with the scalpel of his talent and passionate documentation work, to reveal us inedited aspects about the social insights through those years.

    This text is a must for all those who want to know the details about one of the most terrible periods of the German history and a clear warning for the new generations who still are thinking in elusive dreams about possible answers to a world in crisis.

    Jorge Santayana wrote once: "Those who do not know the history are condemned to repeat it"
    9 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Debora Scatena
    5.0 out of 5 stars the 12 year Reich
    Reviewed in Canada on August 10, 2011
    I rented this book from my University's library and since I did enjoy it so much, I decided to get my own copy.

    The book is great, clearly explained and goes in detail on language changes used by Third Reich as well. I do recommend it to whoever is interested on a social point of view on the subject.
  • MarkAntony
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in Canada on November 2, 2014
    Wonderfully written investigation and expose of the impact of Nazism on everyday life in Nazi Germany.