Under The Reich: Six Years in the Devil's Workshop

How does a civilized nation become a machine for cruelty?

In January 1933, the trams still ran on time in Berlin. Cafés were full. Children went to school. Professors taught their classes. Shopkeepers opened their doors. Most Germans believed their country’s institutions would hold.

Six years later, Europe stood at the edge of catastrophe.

In Under the Reich: Six Years in the Devil’s Workshop, Elliot J. Ward delivers a gripping and deeply human account of how Nazi Germany was built—not in a single violent moment, but piece by piece, law by law, silence by silence.

Through vivid storytelling grounded in historical records, diaries, government documents, survivor testimony, and contemporary accounts, Ward takes readers inside the lives of ordinary people living through the collapse of democracy:

the professor who believes the crisis will pass,

the worker who trusts the extremists can be controlled,

the shopkeeper who keeps his head down,

the officials who compromise “just this once,”

and the citizens who watch their neighbors disappear while convincing themselves life is still normal.

From the Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Act to Dachau, the book burnings, the Night of the Long Knives, and the machinery of propaganda and fear, Under the Reich reveals how authoritarianism does not arrive fully formed—it is constructed gradually, with the participation, exhaustion, fear, and obedience of ordinary people.

This is not simply a history of Nazi Germany.

It is a warning about how free societies surrender themselves.

Powerful, unsettling, and urgently relevant, Under the Reich is for readers of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Ordinary Men, and On Tyranny—a haunting examination of what happens when fear becomes politics, truth becomes negotiable, and decent people decide to look away.