Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The only history U.K. schoolchildren learn today, critics complain, is about World War II. The kids could riposte that grownups never tire of publishing books on the topic. Yet here comes another: “The Third Reich at War.”

This is the third and final volume of a history of Nazi Germany by Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge in England. Like the previous installments in the trilogy, it’s a great brick of a book.

Given all that is on the market already, what does it add?

In terms of coverage of events Evans does the job, beginning on Sept. 1, 1939, when the first of 60 German divisions crashed into Poland, and going through to April 1945, when Red Army troops were raping German women and Nazi generals and admirals were crunching on cyanide capsules.

New insights and guiding themes are however in short supply.

Here and there, Evans seems ready to say something important about the guilt of the German people as a whole for Nazi crimes. He stresses the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, transport workers and medical personnel involved in the systematic murder of Jews, prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled.

Then there were all those German soldiers, many of whom kept snapshots of mass executions and other atrocities in their wallets or sent them to their families and friends to show how manly and pitiless they were toward “barbaric” Poles and Russians.

Inconclusive Judgments

So to what extent did ordinary Germans merit the pulverizing of their homes and cities in ruthless Allied bombing? Or the vengeful conduct of the Red Army in 1945? When it comes to formulating such judgments Evans peters out in inconclusive generalities.

The evidence, he says, doesn’t support the claim of many Germans that they knew nothing about the extermination of Jews. Yet neither can we say they were enthusiastic about it, he adds.

More eloquent is the experience of a Jewish professor, Victor Klemperer, retold in the book. Klemperer miraculously survived years of repression. When the war was finally lost, German friends who had shunned him became chummy again, acting as if nothing had happened and asking him to verify their ignorance of the Holocaust.

The glumly unimaginative style that makes Evans’s account like a long draft of flat beer is at times enlivened with poignant details. The best-selling Nazi newspaper was jauntily titled the Racial Observer, for example. And I hadn’t known that the “V” in the V-1 and V-2 rockets aimed at London stood for Vergeltung, or retribution: They were considered revenge for British bombing.

‘Stop Babbling’

The war was rich in historical ironies, too, as on the day propaganda boss Joseph Goebbels barked at Richard Strauss, a composer less favored by the Fuehrer than the lighter Franz Lehar.

“Stop babbling about the significance of serious music!” Goebbels bellowed. “Lehar has the masses, you don’t. Tomorrow’s culture is different from that of today. You, Herr Strauss, are of yesterday.”

Even Nazis could sometimes see the future.

Such occasional diversions aside, this history rarely comes alive. Even the diaries and letters selected for quotation are leaden. And when it comes to summing up the stupendous events he has chronicled, Evans is curiously inarticulate and galumphing. Here he is on postwar Germany:

“Germany had become a leveled-down, middle-class society, differing in its nature from east to west, but sharing a common transcendence of traditional class structures.”

You would never guess that one of those Germanys was a liberal democracy in the making, the other a Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship.

The point was better made by German sculptor Arno Breker, whose aggressive, pseudo-heroic style made him Hitler’s favorite. When Josef Stalin offered a commission in 1946, Breker was smart enough to decline.

“One dictatorship is enough for me,” he replied.

“The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany From Conquest to Disaster” is published by Allen Lane in the U.K. and by Penguin Press in the U.S. (926 pages, 30 pounds, $20).

(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and Member of Parliament, is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: George Walden in London at GWASHCH@aol.com.

Last Updated: December 1, 2008 19:00 EST