The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. 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 Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with.”― Abraham Brumberg, The Nation Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgable and reliable.”— Mark Mazower, New York Times Book Review

The coming of the Third Reich : Evans, Richard J : Free The coming of the Third Reich : Evans, Richard J : Free

It has an admirable scope, and because it is a trilogy, with room to breathe, it can discuss a lot of different things in one place. Accordingly, you get healthy discussions on Germany’s various pre-Hitler anti-Weimar political parties, the role of propaganda, the dire economic situation (and its effect on the already-shaky Weimar regime), and the latent anti-Semitism endemic to Germany since time immemorial, which started to mutate after World War I. But the chronology is not the same as the cause. Ontogeny does not really recapitulate phylogeny as expressed in that now discredited theory. In other words one cannot really understand the “cosmic why” of an event by knowing the when of an event. This is why this work is so dissatisfying to me through no flaw in the considerable talents of Richard Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich will force us to reassess our view of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. With tremendous authority, skill and compassion, Evans re-creates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. One by one these disasters ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command. The consequences of this assault would change the world in ways that we will always have to live with.the arrogant assumptions by the military and some industrialists that Hitler could be used but also controlled ... Schleicher: if Hitler establishes a dictatorship in Germany, the army will be the dictatorship within the dictatorship ... Papen: within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak There were Gypsies, Ukrainians, Czechs, the halt, the lame: all to be shipped away or shot. The SS cleared Polish asylums, made patients stand in line, then buried them - 2,000 in a few brutal weeks of 1939. And, of course, there were Jews; the Polish Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, then of Germany itself. 'The Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experiencing today,' Hitler told Goebbels in 1942. 'As our enemies are annihilated, they will experience their own annihilation... We must accelerate this process with cold ruthlessness, and in so doing we are rendering an incalculable service to a human race tormented by Jewry for millennia.' That service charge in cold statistics: three million murdered in the camps, 1.3 million killed by the SS, 700,000 disposed of in mobile gas chambers, a million starved to death. Incalculable, unforgettable infamy. In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin?

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People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.” All this was possible, of course, because of the weakness of the state and the emasculation of the ruling class. We have our problems, and we do have an emasculated ruling class, but organized violence is not permitted or desired, much less political assassinations. The closest analog in America is not today, but the widespread leftist violence of the 1970s, something we are still very far from. Nor is there now unseemly violence in Congress, as there was in Weimar (and in the run-ups to both the Spanish Civil War and the American Civil War). Sure, maybe we’ll get there. But there’s precious little evidence of that, and much more evidence of Huxley-ite enervation of the masses and the elites by entertainment and drugs of various types, not the political awakening of a hard core and their turn to violence. Evans argues the collapse of Weimar was inevitable and desired by all parties, left and right. Brüning, Hindenburg and von Papen had already dug its grave and collected the nails. The only question was which form of autocratic government would follow. Of course they thought they could "save themselves from the wolf by inviting him into the sheepfold". I, for one, have many times puzzled over the moral and philosophical quandaries presented by the existence and early “success” of the Nazis in 20th century Germany. The Germans that produced Brecht and Kant, Goethe and Hesse, Beethoven and Bach also produced and developed Hitler and the Nazis and Buchenwald and Auschwitz. I’d hoped that a well-written and well-documented history, such as this book, would help me to better understand questions that are, after all, more metaphysical, ontological, and moral--than historical. Hitler was finally sworn in as Reich chancellor and that was kind of the beginning of the end. He used the emergency powers of the republic to effectively seize control of the government and begin a form of martial law. With his paramilitary groups, the brown shirts, SS, storm troopers all were well organized and ready to seize the day. All it took was the Reichstag Fire, which the author agrees was a lone-wolf communist terrorist who started it. The Reichstag Fire decree gave Hitler the excuse he needed to expunge the political landscape of all his political enemies. And the enemies were many: marxist, communists, Catholics, intellectuals, musicians, artists, homosexuals, transexuals, pacifists, scientists and the Jews. The Dachau camp was started early on as a place to banish Nazi political enemies. Somewhere by 1933, Germany became a true one party state. It happened legally and with the consent of a large part of the population, probably around 35%. Social democrats and communists were arrested, tortured and murdered. The Nazi paramilitary had free reign to wreak terror and violence literally everywhere and they did so with impunity. The judiciary became highly Nazi sympathetic. Under the guise of fighting “cultural bolshevism”, book burnings became routine and eventually the burning of bodies became mundane.Evans has presented his case well. However, he fails to account for the extraordinary evil of the Nazi Regime which made it fundamentally different in nature from those that existed in Italy, Spain and Hungary. These are both controversial matters and I find it disturbing that Evans, who provides numerous footnotes, fails to do so here.