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

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Upon finishing Richard Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich, however, I started to question my appetite. 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. For example, Evans totally buys the story that a Dutch Communist named Lubbe was the sole perpetrator of the Reichstag fire ... Evans: Lubbe confessed to starting the fire ... it was confirmed by subsequent investigation that he had worked alone ... and does not mention a contemporaneous memorandum by Ernst Oberfohren (published a few days before he committed suicide or was murdered) that Joseph Goebbels thought up the idea of burning down the Reichstag and that Hermann Goering supervised the actual burning. 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. anti-bolshevism (enhanced by the events following the revolution in Russia and the start of the Soviet Union) and anti-communism (fuelled by several botched attempted revolutions in Germany)

The Coming of the Third Reich: Richard J. Evans

Chapter 1, which leads up to the early Weimar years (i.e. from the 1860s to the 1920s), gives us the ingredients which were stirred into the pot when Nazi ideology was brewed. Essentials among these were: Instead of moral judgments, Evans puts in lively and often contentious historical judgments. He, for instance, thinks that German history before about 1813 is totally irrelevant to the rise of National Socialism; he won't hear the old argument that Luther contributed to an ethos of resigned obedience to Satanic rulers. I think he might be wrong about that. But he is absolutely right about another irrelevance, when he warns that the consumption of high culture (Bach, Cranach, Goethe and all that) tells you nothing whatever about whether the consumer will take to political barbarism. To my regret, he also demolishes my own belief that the Weimar Republic did have a few 'golden years' and might have succeeded.Richard Evans has indeed produced a formidable work. It is well presented, well documented, and fills a seriously needed gap in modern historical writing. It is not difficult reading; and it clearly places the Nazi’s rise to power in the context of European and World Historical Events of the early twentieth century. It provides an almost step-by-step recounting of each of the events that not only made the Nazi’s rise to power possible, but almost inevitable. Many of my own questions surrounding the facts of importance, such as the Reichstag Fire, are dissected and displayed for “viewing”. This is a service to the historical record that is difficult to overestimate.

THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH | Kirkus Reviews THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH | Kirkus Reviews

Richard J. 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, Times Literary Supplement

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sustained the electoral fortunes of the National Liberals and other parties further to the right from the 1860s to the 1880s no longer functioned effectively. Many of these agitators had achieved their status by working hard to get a university degree then moving up slowly through the ranks of the less fashionable parts of the civil service. Here, too, a degree of social anxiety was a”

The Coming of the Third Reich by Sir Richard J. Evans The Coming of the Third Reich by Sir Richard J. Evans

They could not rid themselves of their Marxist ideology without losing a large part of their electoral support in the working class; yet on the other hand a more radical policy, for example of forming a Red Army militia from workers instead of relying on the Free Corps, would surely have made their participation in bourgeois coalition governments impossible and called down upon their heads the wrath of the army.” A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of .. investments in the United States, brough widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. Small businesses and workshops were particularly badly hit. In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying thier livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to belive the claims of ... conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame." 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. 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 The inability to form a majority government lead to Hindenburg inviting Hitler to be the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The party still had no political majority and Hitler was intended to be only a rubber stamp. But then came the famous Reichstag Fire Decree, which was the response to the parliament being set on fire by an alleged communist party member. this gave Hitler an excuse to allege a Communist Plot against Germany and suspend basic rights and undertake a violent suppression of the Communist party, which was a much bigger party than the nazis in terms of parliamentary representatives. He then called for a re-election. With the Communist Party effectively suppressed, Nazis were able to gain a majority vote but was still short of the 51% required for an absolute majority.

The coming of the Third Reich

If you read only one account of the Nazis, the set of three of which this is the first is what I would recommend. Amongst the vast number of books on Nazism including a huge number of good ones this stands out because of its masterly and balanced distillation from staggering amounts of reading. Of course there are many reasons for the rise of the Nazis and how this could have happened in a developed, educated, Western democracy. The ridiculous crippling vengeful victory terms set out by the Allies was a major factor, helping lead to multiple economic crises for Germany in the 20s. Though I know much about the period, I do not consider myself an expert. So I thought, this may be a worthwhile experience, especially since the author, as a Brit, is looking in from the outside, and he wrote this summary of available knowledge fairly recently (2003). Another motivation was provided by some recent encounters with pre-WW1 Austria (in J.Roth, but also in the interesting new crime series on Vienna by F.Tallis). If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.” Can you see where these quotations are leading? Substitute one scapegoat for another, switch all references to Jews to `Liberals' or `Secular Humanists' and you'll notice that the same conditions of overheated Reaction that unhinged Germany in the early 1920s have become prevalent in the USA in the current decade. In fact, one of the best reasons for studying the Coming of Nazism in Germany is to evaluate whether rabid rightwing agitation in the USA really does replicate the conditions that allowed Hitler to claim a mandate. As the novelist Sinclair Lewis realized in the 1930s, observing the rise of Nazism, it's not enough to just shrug one's shoulders and declare that "It Can't Happen Here."

The Coming of the Third Reich (The History of the Third Reich The Coming of the Third Reich (The History of the Third Reich

The death of democracy in Germany was part of a much broader European pattern in the interwar years; but it also had very specific roots in German history and drew on ideas that were part of a very specific German tradition."We're used to other pens portraying 1939-45 as a titanic battle for survival between evenly matched forces, an equal struggle we almost lost. It's far rarer to have the practical situation clinically analysed, to see how the Reich - in weaponry, manpower, strength and resilience - was always overmatched. Once surprise had banished inertia and Britain had avoided defeat in 1940, the Allies were virtually inevitable victors; and Hitler as military leader was a fantasist in thrall to his own illusions. World domination? 'Germany's economic resources were never adequate to turn these fantasies into reality, not even when the resources of a large part of Europe were added to them.' The dream could never have come true. Although the Communists were anti-Weimar, the problem for many voters was that they were also anti-capitalist, and therefore were a threat to people's jobs. As a result, many middle class Germans didn't see the Communists as a viable alternative, even in the worst of the hyperinflation and, later, the Great Depression. The Social Democrats weren't able to establish effective measures during the Great Depression, and the Communists seemed content to passively wait until world capitalism collapsed. 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. Sir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich at War. Read more Details These are both controversial matters and I find it disturbing that Evans, who provides numerous footnotes, fails to do so here.