The Coming of the Third Reich, page 1
Table of Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Part 1 - THE LEGACY OF THE PAST
GERMAN PECULIARITIES
GOSPELS OF HATE
THE SPIRIT OF 1914
DESCENT INTO CHAOS
Part 2 - THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY
THE WEAKNESSES OF WEIMAR
THE GREAT INFLATION
CULTURE WARS
THE FIT AND THE UNFIT
Part 3 - THE RISE OF NAZISM
BOHEMIAN REVOLUTIONARIES
THE BEER-HALL PUTSCH
REBUILDING THE MOVEMENT
THE ROOTS OF COMMITMENT
Part 4 - TOWARDS THE SEIZURE OF POWER
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
THE VICTORY OF VIOLENCE
FATEFUL DECISIONS
Part 5 - CREATING THE THIRD REICH
THE TERROR BEGINS
FIRE IN THE REICHSTAG
DEMOCRACY DESTROYED
BRINGING GERMANY INTO LINE
Part 6 - HITLER’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION
DISCORDANT NOTES
THE PURGE OF THE ARTS
‘AGAINST THE UN-GERMAN SPIRIT’
A ‘REVOLUTION OF DESTRUCTION’?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Praise for The Coming of the Third Reich
“Will long remain the definitive English-language account ... both gripping and precise ... An always reliable, often magisterial synthesis of a vast body of scholarship, and a frequently deft blend of narrative and interpretation, Evans’s book is an impressive achievement.”
—Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
“Brilliant.”
—Richard Cohen, The Washington Post
“Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich gives the clearest and most gripping account I’ve read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis.”
—A. S. Byatt, The Times Literary Supplement
“Richard J. Evans’s Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgeable and reliable ... vivid ... Evans shows how the ingredients for Nazi triumph were assembled and what was needed to make them jell: add war and depression, cook in a turbulent political atmosphere for several years and serve hot.”
—Mark Mazower, The New York Times Book Review
“Why, Mr. Evans asks, did Germany deliver itself over to the Third Reich? Mr. Evans’s answer is a brilliant and sweeping work of history.... He has mastered the vast scholarship on the politics, economics, ideology, and culture of Weimar Germany ... more important, he has synthesized all this knowledge into a lucid, absorbing dramatic and accessible book.”
—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
“A masterly and most illuminating interpretation of its subject, which makes one look forward eagerly to the volumes to come.”
—Roger Morgan, The Times Literary Supplement
“The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served.... The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.”
—Roger K. Miller, The Denver Post
“Gripping ... Evans broadens the historic perspective to demythologize how morbidly fertile the years before World War II were as an incubator for Hitler.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible.... A peerless work ... Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Evans provides an erudite, fascinating, and sometimes painfully moving account of one society’s slow collapse into nightmare and evil.”
—Timothy Giannuzzi, Calgary Herald
“One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evans poses and so masterfully grapples with.”
—Abraham Brumberg, The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard J. Evans was educated at Oxford, has taught at Columbia and the University of London, and is currently Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson Literary Award for History), In Hitler’s Shadow, Rituals of Retribution (winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History), In Defense of History, and Lying About Hitler.
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
10 9
Copyright © Richard J. Evans, 2003
All rights reserved
Evans, Richard J.
The coming of the Third Reich : a history / Richard J. Evans.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04058-4
1. Germany—History—1871-1918. 2. Germany—History—1918-1933. 3. National socialism—History. I. Title.
DD221.E94 2004
943.08—dc22
2003063205
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For Matthew and Nicholas
Preface
I
This book is the first of three on the history of the Third Reich. It tells the story of the origins of the Third Reich in the nineteenth-century Bismarckian Empire, the First World War and the bitter postwar years of the Weimar Republic. It goes on to recount the Nazis’ rise to power through a combination of electoral success and massive political violence in the years of the great economic Depression from 1929 to 1933. Its central theme is how the Nazis managed to establish a one-party dictatorship in Germany within a very short space of time, and with seemingly little real resistance from the German people. A second book will deal with the development of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1939. It will analyse its central institutions, describe how it worked and what it was like to live in it, and recount its drive to prepare people for a war that would reinstate Germany’s position as the leading power in Europe. The war itself is the subject of a third and final book that will deal with the rapid radicalization of the Third Reich’s policies of military conquest, social and cultural mobilization and repression, and racial extermination, until it ended in total collapse and destruction in 1945. A concluding chapter will examine the aftermath of the twelve short years of the Reich’s history and its legacy for the present and the future.
These three books are addressed in the first place to people who know nothing about the subject, or who know a little and would like to know more. I hope that specialists will find something of interest in them, but they are not the primary readership for which the books are intended. The legacy of the Third Reich has been widely discussed in the media in recent years. It continues to attract widespread attention. Restitution and compensation, guilt and apology have become sensitive political and moral issues. Images of the Third Reich, and museums and memorials calling attention to the impact of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, are all around us. Yet the background to all this in the history of the Third Reich itself is often missing. That is what these three books aim to provide.
Anyone embarking on a project such as this must inevitably begin by asking whether it is really necessary to write yet another history of Nazi Germany. Surely we have had enough? Surely so much has already been written that there is little more to add? Undoubtedly, few historical topics have been the subject of such intensive research. The latest edition of the standard bibliography on Nazism, published by the indefatigable Michael Ruck in 2000, lists over 37,000 items; the first edition, which appeared in 1995, listed a mere 25,000. This startling increase in the number of titles is eloquent testimony to the continuing, never-ending outpouring of publications on the subject.1 No historian can ho
But the number of broad, general, large-scale histories of Nazi Germany that have been written for a general audience can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The first of these, and by far the most successful, was William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published in 1960. Shirer’s book has probably sold millions of copies in the four decades or more since its appearance. It has never gone out of print and remains the first port of call for many people who want a readable general history of Nazi Germany. There are good reasons for the book’s success. Shirer was an American journalist who reported from Nazi Germany until the United States entered the war in December, 1941, and he had a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and the illuminating incident. His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter’s despatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. The emigré German scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer’s book presented an ‘unbelievably crude’ account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had ’glaring gaps’ in its coverage. It concentrated far too much on high politics, foreign policy and military events, and even in 1960 it was ‘in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period’. Getting on for half a century later, this comment is even more justified than it was in Epstein’s day. For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer’s book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.5
An entirely different kind of survey was provided by the German political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher’s The German Dictatorship, published in 1969. This was the summation of Bracher’s pioneering and still valuable studies of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power, and it was strongest on the origins and growth of Nazism and its relation to German history, precisely those areas where Shirer was at his weakest. Nearly half the book was devoted to these subjects; the rest contained somewhat less extensive coverage of the political structure of the Third Reich, foreign policy, economy and society, culture and the arts, the wartime regime, and the breakdown of the Nazi system. Despite this unevenness, its coverage is masterly and authoritative, and it remains a classic. The great virtue of Bracher’s treatment is its analytical clarity, and its determination to explain, account and interpret everything it covers. It is a book that one can return to again and again with profit. However, it is not only uneven in its treatment of the subject, it is also avowedly academic in its approach; it is often hard going for the reader; and it has inevitably been overtaken by research in many areas during the past three and a half decades.6
If Shirer represented the popular and Bracher the academic side of writing about Nazi Germany, then, recently, one author has successfully bridged the gap between the two. The British historian Ian Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler successfully embeds Hitler’s life in modern German history, and shows how his rise and fall were linked to wider historical factors. But Kershaw’s Hitler is not a history of Nazi Germany. Indeed, following Hitler’s own increasing isolation during the war, its focus inevitably becomes progressively narrower as it goes on. It concentrates on the areas to which Hitler devoted most attention, namely foreign policy, war and race. It cannot by definition adopt the perspectives of ordinary people or deal very much with the many areas with which Hitler was not directly concerned.7 One of the principal aims of the present book and its two succeeding volumes, therefore, is to cover a wide range of major aspects of the history of the Third Reich: not only politics, diplomacy and military affairs but also society, the economy, racial policy, police and justice, literature, culture and the arts, with a breadth that for various reasons is missing in earlier approaches, to bring these together and to show how they were related.
The success of Kershaw’s biography demonstrated that research into Nazi Germany is an international business. The most recent large-scale general account to appear of the subject has also been by a British historian: Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History. It brings home to readers right from the start the violence at the heart of the Nazi regime, to an extent and degree that no other book manages to do. Too often, as Burleigh rightly complains, academic authors paint a somewhat bloodless, almost abstract picture of the Nazis, as if the theories and debates about them were more important than the people themselves. His book dramatically redresses the balance. Burleigh’s major purpose was to deliver a moral history of the Third Reich. The Third Reich: A New History concentrates mainly on mass murder, resistance and collaboration, political violence and coercion, crimes and atrocities. In doing so, it powerfully reasserts a vision of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian dictatorship that has been too often underplayed in recent years. But it omits any detailed consideration of foreign policy, military strategy, the economy, social change, culture and the arts, propaganda, women and the family, and many other aspects of Nazi Germany that have been the subject of recent research. Moreover, in prioritizing moral judgment, it has a tendency to downplay explanation and analysis. Nazi ideology, for example, is dismissed as ‘guff’, ‘pretentious nonsense’ and so on, to highlight the immorality of Germans abandoning their moral duty to think. But there is something to be said for a different approach that, like Bracher’s, takes these ideas seriously, however repulsive or ridiculous they may seem to a modern reader, and explains how and why so many people in Germany came to believe them.8
This history tries to combine the virtues of previous accounts such as these. It is, in the first place, like Shirer’s book, a narrative account. It aims to tell the story of the Third Reich in chronological order, and to show how one thing led to another. Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. But a variety of recent, large-scale narrative histories have shown that it can be done without sacrificing analytical rigour or explanatory power.9 Like Shirer, too, this book attempts to give voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals. The partisan distortion of German historical scholarship under the Nazis, the cult of personality, and the veneration of leadership by history-writers in the Third Reich, caused German historians after the Second World War to react by editing individual personalities out of history altogether. In the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of modern social history, they were interested above all in broader structures and processes.10 The work this generated immeasurably advanced our understanding of Nazi Germany. But real human beings almost disappeared from view in the quest for intellectual understanding. So one of the purposes of the present work has been to put individuals back into the picture; and all the way through I have tried to quote as much as possible from the writings and speeches of contemporaries, and to juxtapose the broader narrative and analytical sweep of the book with the stories of the real men and women, from the top of the regime down to the ordinary citizen, who were caught up in the drama of events.11
