Richard J. Evans’s major new book unfolds perhaps the single most important story of the twentieth century: how in less than a lifetime this stable and modern country led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. It is a terrible story not least because, as Evans makes abundantly clear, there were so many other ways in which Germany’s history could have been played out. The seeds of the Third Reich’s rise to power may have been sown in Bismarck’s Germany, but it required a devastating sequence of events before they were reaped in the Nazi seizure of control with which Evans ends his sweeping and dramatic narrative.