Vom Koenig zum Fuehrer

by Stephan Malinowski

In the mountain of books that have been written about the Third Reich, surprisingly little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis' rise to power. While often confidently referred to, the 'fateful' role played by the German nobility is rarely, if ever, investigated in any real detail. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s.As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In a real twist of historical irony, members of the nobility were as prominent in the destruction of Weimar democracy as they were to be years later in Graf Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility's social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years - and the troubled m�salliance to which this was to lead between the majority of Germany's nobles and the National Socialists.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, World War II

Hardcover

First published June 11, 2003

About the author

Stephan Malinowski, geb. 1966 in Berlin (West), Studium der Geschichte und Politikwissenschaft in Berlin (FU, TU, HU) und Montpellier (Universite Paul Valery). Magister 1994 an der TU Berlin. 1995-1998 DAAD-Stipendiat am Europäischen Hochschulinstitut in Florenz. 1998-2002
Wiss. Mitarbeiter an der TU Berlin (Neue Geschichte), 2002/03 Wiss. Mitarbeiter am Historischen Seminar der Universität zu Köln, April 2003 Wiss. Ass. (Dr. phil.) am Friedrich Meinecke Institut der FU Berlin.
ür seine Dissertation wurde er im Jahr 2004 als erster Preisträger mit dem Hans-Rosenberg-Gedächtnispreis ausgezeichnet.

Nach seiner Promotion wurde er im April 2003 Wissenschaftlicher Assistent am Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut der FU Berlin, wo er bis 2008 als Dozent tätig war. In den Jahren 2005/2006 war er Kennedy-Fellow am Center for European Studies an der Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts). Er lehrte an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und war von 2008 bis 2009 Fellow am Institute for advanced studies der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Von 2009 bis 2012 lehrte er deutsche und westeuropäische Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts am University College Dublin.[3] Seit Sommer 2012 unterrichtet er an der School of History, Classics & Archaeology der University of Edinburgh.[4] Neben Arbeiten zur deutschen Geschichte ist Malinowski auch mit Beiträgen zur französischen und europäischen Kolonialgeschichte hervorgetreten.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and important book but it is as important to understand what this book isn't as what it is. This is not a work that draws on or refers to memoirs like 'Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945' or 'Purgatory of Fools: A memoir of the Aristrocrats War in Nazi Germany' both by the White Russian princesses Marie Vassiltchikov and Tatiana Vassiltchikov (though the second book is under Tatiana's married name of Metternich) and it has nothing to do with execrable books like 'The Palace and the Bunker: Royal Resistance to Hitler' by Frank Millard. Though it complements it goes much deeper then fine books like 'Go-Betweens for Hitler' by Karina Urbach and 'Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany' by Jonathan Petropoulos. Finally you will find no stories about 'Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe' in this book.

What this book provides is an examination of how the 'German Nobility' (I'll have more to say about this complex and potentially meaningless term) responded and contributed to the rise of Hitler. It is an examination of 'nobility' in the same way that other groups such as doctors, lawyers, academics, etc. have been studied. It is an 'academic' book but it is easily read and understood by anyone who has a serious interest in history. It is not full of jargon but it is packed with fascinating, and diverse, information which is unavoidable. This is the result of the complexity of what the German 'nobility' was. The differences include, but are not limited to, the differences between the Prussian 'service' nobility the 'mediatised' princes of the Holy Roman empire, the ex 'ruling' families of the princely states, the split between the Catholic nobility of Southern Germany and Protestant nobilities of Northern Germany, never mind the differences between those with money and those without.

The important thing to remember is that before WWI the 'nobility' was a legally recognised group. The 'German' army, again before WWI, was the Prussian army and a decision was made not to enlarge that army because non-nobles would have had to be admitted in large numbers to the officer corps (please see my footnote *1 below). Of course in the Weimar republic all that 'support' and recognition disappeared. What Prof. Malinowski looks at is how, as a body, nobles reacted to this. It doesn't make for a pleasant tale. Nobles, like academics, lawyers, doctors and others, were shockingly keen to curry favour with the Nazis as a way of protecting what they still had and under a spurious delusion that the Nazis 'needed' them. The fact that the Nazis belief was based on 'blood' not class should have told them all they needed to know about their future in the thousand year Reich.

Of course the Stauffenberg bomb plot grew out of various noble groupings but when you compare the length of time it took them to act and compare it to Georg Elser's nearly successful 1939 attempt to assassinate Hitler by placing a bomb in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller beer hall it makes me wonder why no one has made a film about him.

I have never seen such a disappointing collection of reviews on GR for an outstanding book as could be found as of February 2025. You can ignore mine but please consult some of the very fine reviews you can find online of which I refer you to the following and are not inaccessible behind paywalls:
Review: https://helenroche.com/work/2023/02/2...
Review: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Review: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/wha...
Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-...

*1 That the army was basically the Prussian army (even if it contained theoretically 'independent' units from other German 'kingdoms' like Bavaria) in part explains the enthusiasm, particularly amongst middle class Germans, for the German Navy. Prussia had no navy, so the navy was an 'Imperial' and 'German' institution free of historic associations.

[W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contrary to conventional wisdom that the Nazi movement and its ideology were largely driven and influenced from the bottom-up, Malinowski’s tome argues that it stemmed in no smart part from the aristocracy and it’s pre-Nazi institutions. For example, one can trace from the author’s book, how the later Aryanization of Germany and Nuremberg laws, had their beginnings in the codified by-laws and dogma of aristocratic pre-Third Reich groups, that shockingly spared no less than one of preeminent families of the second republic. Furthermore, the shadow of the Final Solution can be seen in an eerily prophetic quote the author provides from an august Hohenzollern leader, exclaiming that the Jews should be gassed, almost a decade before Hitler became the Fuhrer. The hysteria and bloodshed that would soon be ushered in with the rise of Adolph would not have been possible without the machinations and sway of the nobility, as Malinowski brilliantly asserts.

[Pirate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fascinating subject but sadly I found this clunky and too professorial -- though with the caveat I did not darken the portals of university......however continual reminders that in the next chapter we will discuss x topic continually halted the flow of the narrative...I would have loved to pursue it to the end especially when one swings round to the heroic von Stauffenberg, von der Schulenburg and many others of the aristocratic class. However, like some runners in the Grand National having hunted round the first circuit and succeeded I pulled up soon after going out into the country for the second time as the fences had not been to my liking first time round but just wanted to give it one more go ergo with this book....at page 200. I apologise to the author who is obviously an authority and put a lot of effort into it but not one for me.

[Mike Augustine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads as an academic work. As such it is loaded with repetitive pedantic material that could have been recast for the lay public if the publisher had desired us as the primary audience. I understand that this was not the case. For those willing to work through the text, a fairly convincing scholarly coverage of how the Post WW1 German nobility and, to a lesser degree, the larger population fostered conditions that supported, directly and indirectly, the empowerment of the Nazis. The tome shows how an awful regime can gain power when it can appeal to the greed or desperation of segments of the populace even if it’s ideology is suspect and how it’s continuation relies on post-realization self interest.

[K Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very academic and very detailed analysis of this topic, which the author pointed out has not been fully explored in the past. It was interesting, but could drag in places, such as those where I thought that the action under discussion was over-analyzed to make a point. Still a worthwhile read, and interesting history.

[Mat]

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