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

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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 Professor Evans is history's master of the Holocaust. He knows its macabre facts and figures; his Reich books demonstrate in chilling detail how German hatred and resentment for failure turned in on itself and millions of its own inhabitants; he does not spare civil servants or doctors or scientists, or simple pillars of German society - they knew what was happening, they shared the guilt. Worse, they saw it as part of their own war effort, defending Germany against the dark forces that had brought it down. Extermination was not some irrational spasm consuming a few lunatics in temporary power. It was deliberate and condoned, in its own surreal context.

The Coming of the Third Reich: Richard J. Evans

While these were pan-European trends, a dangerous precedent was set in Germany during the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther described Jews as a " base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth." Luther wrote that they are " full of the devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine," and the synagogue is an " incorrigible whore and an evil slut". This treatise is supposed to have had a major influence on the Nazi movement. 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 Pan-Germanism was a central theme of Nazi ideology, and this ideal was present throughout Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other areas with a German presence before the Nazi's conception. Anti-Semitism was also a central tenant, and this ideal was popular even amongst the more mainstream political parties in the Weimar Republic, as it was a popular sentiment among many average German's suffering under economic hardship during the turbulent 1920's and 30's. A brilliantly clear and comprehensive exposition of the complex events of 1930-32 which led to the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, corresponding exactly to the next chapter(s) I will be writing in my novel-in-progress CHOOSING HITLER.And then the Nazi party got serious about legally taking control of the country. They continued to streamline their propaganda and their messaging and started to seize more of the voting electorate. They made enormous electoral gains in 1930, although never enjoying a majority. The party then gained even more seats and became the dominant party along with the communists, both of whom wanted to destroy the parliament. It was the normalizing of political extremism that made the republic crumble. The Nazi party became the rainbow coalition of political discontent. As the Nazis gained more momentum, they refined their messaging and soared with popularity which included their deeply anti-semetic position which had become maybe even more fortified by the early 1930s. The rise of the Nazi party took several decades and happened from a combination of happenstance and several factors. A combination of economic upheaval, military loss, widespread propaganda, ultra-nationalism, conspiracy theories, normalizing political violence, proliferation of paramilitary groups and ethnic resentment all contributed to the rise and take over of the Nazi party. It seemed like the foundation of the Weimar republic was on shaky footing to begin with. It was parliamentary political legislation with a representative electorate consisting of chiefly social democrats, liberals, central and conservative parties. It was a fractured coalition from the onset. It was also an extremely fractious time during the inception of the republic with each political group having their own paramilitary and siloed off worlds of party propaganda. The communist party was becoming very popular, especially in the context of the Bolshevik revolution. The communist party within Germany wanted the same thing the Bolsheviks did: a vanguard revolution and overthrow of the government. The nationalists at this time were conservative and wanted the return of the Bismarcian monarchy reich. It’s a myth that the Weimar republic was on its way to being a healthy and stable democracy. It was birthed and reared within boiling political turmoil which proved fatal for the republic. It was very far from achieving stability from the beginning. Writers such as Hans Blüher, strongly influenced by the youth movement, went to even greater extremes in their plea for the state to be reorganized along anti-democratic lines and led by a close-knit group of heroic men united by homoerotic ties of love and affection.” A key role in this process was played by antisemitic writers like the popular novelist Julius Langbehn, whose book Rembrandt as Educator (published in 1890) declared the Dutch artist Rembrandt to be a classic north German racial type, and pleaded for German art to return to its racial roots, a cultural imperative that would later be taken up with great enthusiasm by the Nazis.” Even though Hitler did not command a full majority, he was able to pressurize the parliament to vote for an Enabling Act. THis was achieved by banning Communist and Nation Socialist party members from attending the vote, which effectively made the Act illegal by all standards. Nevertheless, the vote was passed and the Act gave the Nazis complete legislative control for the next four years.

The Coming of the Third Reich - Penguin Books UK

avocatul Raimund Pretzel s-a întrebat ce se întâmplase cu cei 50% dintre germani, care votaseră împotriva naziștilor la alegerile din... 1933. Cum fusese posibil, se mira el, ca această majoritate să fie cedat atât de rapid? De ce aproape toate instituțiile sociale, politice și economice ale Germaniei căzuseră în mâinile naziștilor cu atâta ușurință? ”Cel mai simplu, dacă priviți mai îndeaproape, aproape întotdeauna motivul principal”, a concluzionat el, ”a fost frica. Alătură-te bătăușilor ca să scapi de bătaie”.”The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, is a book on the origins of the Nazi Party in Germany. The book is quite innovative in that it doesn't start with Hitler or any other central party figure. Instead, Evans starts with the development of the Nazi ideology, and how it was present throughout Germany far before the Nazi's arrived in mainstream Weimar politics. Throughout the book, Evans several times cites Raimund Pretzel, whose posthumously published memoirs (under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner) are very much worth reading, in part because they were written in 1939, and give an excellent first-hand overview of this time from the perspective of a politically disengaged, “Aryan” German. In particular, Pretzel notes the erosion of the rule of law in the legal profession (he was a lawyer). Actually, if I had to choose, I would recommend Pretzel’s memoirs over Evans’s; there is a lot less detail, but basically the same story, and the first-hand perspective adds a lots to the reader’s grasp that litanies of fact do not. The French, one columnist noted, called a million million a trillion, while ‘for us on the other hand, a trillion is equal to a million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000), and we must only hope to God that we don’t get into these or even higher numerical values with our everyday currency, merely because of the overcrowding of the lunatic asylums that it would cause.” Shirer was aware that he was writing his history at a very early point in time. First published in 1960, Shirer started the project less than 15 years after the regime came to an end. His justification was that the Nuremberg Tribunal had thrown open the German archives for its investigation and hence the usually 30 year waiting period for the archival material did not apply. In this regard Shirer was perfectly correct.