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

by Richard J. Evans

They were both part of a general secularization of thought in the late nineteenth century, aspects of a far wider rebellion against what increasing numbers of writers and thinkers were coming to see as the stolid and stultifying complacency of the liberal, bourgeois attitudes that had dominated Germany in the middle part of the century. The self-satisfaction of so many educated and middle-class Germans at the achievement of nationhood in the 1870s was giving way to a variety of dissatisfactions born of a feeling that Germany’s spiritual and political development had come to a halt and needed pushing forward again.

The German people, they believed, were surrounded by enemies, from the ‘Slavs’ and ‘Latins’ encircling Germany from without, to the Jews, Jesuits, socialists and sundry subversive agitators and conspirators undermining it from within. Pan-German racism was expressed in the linguistic usage through which they reduced every nation to a simple, uniformly acting racial entity – ‘Germandom’, ‘Slavdom’, ‘Anglo-Saxondom’ or ‘Jewdom’. Other races were outbreeding the Germans and threatening to ‘flood’ them; or, like the French, they were declining and therefore exerting a corrupting influence through their decadence. The extreme nationalists portrayed themselves as voices in the wilderness; unless they were heard, it would be too late. Desperate peril demanded desperate remedies. Only by a return to the racial roots of the German nation in the peasantry, the self-employed artisan and small businessman, and the traditional nuclear family, could the situation be rescued. The big cities were sinks of un-German immorality and disorder. Strong measures were needed to restore order, decency and a properly German concept of culture. A new Bismarck was needed, tough, ruthless, unafraid to pursue aggressive policies at home and abroad, if the nation was to be saved.

Still, he too conceded that even if it was economically inadvisable to expel the Jews from Germany, it was important to ‘exclude the Jewish influence from the army and the administration and as far as possible to limit it in all the activities of art and literature’. In the press, too, he considered, ‘Jewdom has found its most dangerous happy-hunting-ground’, though a general restriction of press freedom as advocated by Gebsattel would, he thought, be counterproductive. Antisemitic stereotypes had thus penetrated to the highest levels of the state, reinforced in the Kaiser’s case by his own reading of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which he praised as a wake-up call to the German nation.

So high were the stakes for which everybody was playing in 1914–18, that both right and left were prepared to take measures of an extremism only dreamed of by figures on the margins of politics before the war.

Very quickly, aided and abetted by senior army officers themselves, a fateful myth gained currency among large sections of public opinion in the centre and on the right of the political spectrum. Picking up their cue from Richard Wagner’s music-drama The Twilight of the Gods, many people began to believe that the army had only been defeated because, like Wagner’s fearless hero Siegfried, it had been stabbed in the back by its enemies at home. Germany’s military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff claimed shortly after the war that the army had been the victim of a ‘secret, planned, demagogic campaign’ which had doomed all its heroic efforts to failure in the end.

the new organization presented itself as being above the party-political fray, committed only to the German nation, not to any abstract ideology. Teachers, Protestant pastors, army officers and many others jumped on the bandwagon. Within a year, the Fatherland Party was claiming a membership of no less than one and a quarter million.

The most dramatic and serious effects were on the price of food. A woman sitting down in a café might order a cup of coffee for 5,000 marks and be asked to give the waiter 8,000 for it when she got up to pay an hour later. A kilo of rye bread, that staple of the German daily diet, cost 163 marks on 3 January 1923, more than ten times that amount in July, 9 million marks on 1 October, 78 billion marks on 5 November and 233 billion marks a fortnight later, on 19 November.

Scandal-sheets undermined the Republic with their sensational exposure of real or imagined financial wrongdoings on the part of pro-Republic politicians; illustrations could convey the contrast with Imperial days. The massive publicity the popular press gave to murder trials and police investigations created the impression of a society drowning in a wave of violent crime.

Hugenberg’s press empire might not have saved the Nationalists from decline; but its constant harping on the iniquities of the Republic was another factor in weakening Weimar’s legitimacy and convincing people that something else was needed in its stead. In the end, therefore, the press did have some effect in swaying the minds of voters, above all in influencing them in a general way against Weimar democracy.115

When the Third Reich finally came, it would encompass all political and social groupings in a national revival. It would restore the continuity of German history, recreating its medieval glory; it would be the ‘final Reich’ of all.117 Other writers, such as the jurist Edgar Jung, took up this concept and advocated a ‘conservative revolution’ that would bring about ‘the Third Reich’ in the near future.118

The Free Corps spawned a whole canon of novels celebrating the veterans’ hatred of revolutionaries, often expressed in blood-curdling terms, portraying murder and mayhem as the ultimate expression of a resentful masculinity in search of revenge for the collapse of 1918 and the coming of revolution and democracy.120 In place of the feeble compromises of parliamentary democracy, authors such as these, and many others, proclaimed the need for strong leadership, ruthless, uncompromising, hard, willing to strike down the enemies of the nation without compunction.121 Others looked back to an idyllic rural world in which the complexities and ‘decadence’ of modern urban life were wholly absent, as in Adolf Bartels’s novel The Dithmarshers, which had sold over 200,000 copies by 1928.122

Their loyalty was given, not to the new Republic, but to the same abstract ideal of the Reich which their counterparts in the officer corps continued to serve; an ideal built largely on memories of the authoritarian system of the Bismarckian Reich.

But what mattered about the behaviour of the judges was the message it sent to the public, a message bolstered by numerous prosecutions of pacifists, Communists and other people on the left for treason throughout the Weimar years.

‘The Germans have forgotten how to hate. Feminine complaining has taken the place of masculine hatred.’

‘Since I am an immature and wicked person,’ he wrote with characteristic openness, ‘war and unrest appeal to me more than well-behaved bourgeois order.’52 He had no interest at all in ideas, and glorified the rough and brutal lifestyle of the soldier in his acts as well as his creed. He had nothing but contempt for civilians, and revelled in the lawlessness of wartime life. Drinking and carousing, fighting and brawling cemented the band of brothers among whom he found his place; women were treated with disdain, strangers to the military life had no place in his world.

The stupidity of democracy. It will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed. The persecuted leaders of the NSDAP became parliamentary deputies and so acquired the use of parliamentary immunity, allowances and free travel tickets. They were thus protected from police interference, could allow themselves to say more than the ordinary citizen, and apart from that they also had the costs of their activity paid by their enemy.

Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights.