Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich, may have had a moment, reading Richard Evans’ review of his book in the current New York Review of Books Warriors of Virtue dvdrip

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, where his spirits lifted and he began to smile. After all, Evans begins his review by writing that Fritzsche “writes with his customary flair and verve, and packs an enormous amount into a relatively short volume.” Evans goes on to call the book “immensely readable and intelligent,” and Fritzsche might have felt pretty secure at that point.

Alas, such security proves to be as fleeting as that of 1938 Poland.

Evans invokes the “voluntarist return” school of Nazi historians that tends to minimize the complicity of the ordinary German on the street in the crimes of the ruling regime – invokes it only to damn it and Fritzsche just about as thoroughly as he’s likely to get damned in the popular press, for short-sightedness and a willful soft-pedaling of the facts. It’s a sobering sight:

Thus for example Fritzsche alludes, like other exponents of the “voluntarist return,” to the fact that only three thousand or so prisoners remained in concentration camps by the mid-1930s . But like them he fails to realize that a major reason for the low number was the fact that the task of repression had been taken over by the regular courts and judicial system, which had put more than 23,000 political prisoners behind bars in Germany’s state prisons and penitentiaries by this time.

Blood on Satan’s Claw trailer Fritzsche can at least be grateful to our own Steve Donoghue, who in his much shorter review of Life and Death in the Third Reich stopped where Evans was only getting warmed up, with the generous praise of a powerful, intelligent work. It’s Fritzsche’s slight misfortune (it could have been worse, after all – they could have ignored him) that the NYRB chose to enlist the greatest living Nazi historian to examine his work; that’s an exam few indeed could pass unscathed.

Other highlights of this issue include a stimulating (though mostly wrong) essay by Christopher Benfey on the poetry of Herman Melville, another rock-solid entry from the always-trenchant American Revolution historian Edmund S. Morgan, and an amiable piece by John Updike on those two Boston painting prodigies, John Singleton Copley and Winslow Homer, to which only one or two small corrections might be added, foremost that when Copley painted Samuel Adams in 1772, he was hardly a “rising firebrand” anymore. Edmund White on Marguerite Duras is also a hoot, just about the most polite

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cheek-slap imaginable!