When you first open a book titled The Third Reich in 100 Objects: A Material History of Nazi Germany, you expect to see artifacts of evil. And certainly those will come, as you turn the pages.

But the book starts, innocuously enough, with a simple paint box. Obviously well used and well cared for, it was Adolf Hitler's paintbox -- tangible evidence of his youthful aspirations to be an artist and something that meant enough to him that he kept it with him until the very end. Who knows, but if his attempts to enroll in Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts had been accepted, the course of human history might have gone much differently.

From there, the items in Roger Moorhouse's excellent book, turn darker.

The second item is Hitler's German Workers' Party card -- another pivotal moment in his rise to power. Hitler, still a soldier at the time, was sent on Sept. 12, 1919, to observe the political party's meeting at a beer hall in Munich; why he was motivated to stand up and speak at the meeting, rather than simply observing, and why he joined in the months that followed isn't entirely clear. His card, numbered 555, shows he was the 55th person to join the fledgling movement; organizers started numbering at 500 to make their membership seem larger. Hitler quickly rose among party leadership, and it was only a few months later he announced he was changing its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party.

The book continues, with key items in the Third Reich's rise and fall, including the Blood Flag, a 100 trillion mark banknote (showcasing the hyperinflation that wrecked Germany's economy in the years after World War I), an early edition of Mein Kampf, a bust of Geli Raubal (Hitler's niece, whom he deeply loved and who committed suicide in his Munich apartment in 1931, at age 23), a Volksempfanger radio set (provided inexpensively throughout Germany to propel Joseph Goebbels' propaganda), a Hitler Youth uniform, an SA dagger, the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate at Dachau (a slogan later used at Auschwitz and elsewhere), German jackboots, a child's Hitler toy, Evan Braun's silver lipstick case, the ubiquitous jerrycans which made it easier to transport fuel and helped drive the Blitzkrieg, an Enigma code machine and even the cyanide vial used by Hermann Goring to escape final justice after the war.

That's just a sampling. Moorhouse has packed a veritable museum of the Third Reich into this book, and his narrative explaining each item puts them into context of Hitler's rise, the Nazi place in German society and the progress of the war. Each item comes with two to four pages of text to explain its provenance, often with additional photographs to further illustrate the item's place in history.

Well organized, thoroughly researched and immensely informative, The Third Reich in 100 Objects is a useful educational tool for anyone striving to understand that period in German history. It's an easy read, easily taken in small doses, that is deeply insightful and quite revealing for a dark period in world history.