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

by Richard J. Evans

the myth of the mass rape of German women by French colonial troops became so powerful that the few hundred mixed-race children to be found in Germany in the early 1930s were almost universally regarded as the offspring of such incidents.

The Stormer (Der Stürmer), which rapidly established itself as the place where screaming headlines introduced the most rabid attacks on Jews, full of sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, made-up accusations of ritual murder and titillating, semi-pornographic stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls.

Yet Streicher was not just a thug. A former schoolteacher, he was also a poet whose lyrics have been described as ‘quite attractive’, and, like Hitler, he painted watercolours, though in his case only as a hobby.

He may not have been an effective administrator, Hitler conceded, and his sexual appetite led him into all kinds of trouble, but Hitler always remained loyal to him. At times, when it was important for Nazism to present a respectable face, The Stormer could be an embarrassment; but only as a matter of tactics, never as an issue of principle or belief.

the Bavarian government managed to persuade the authorities in Berlin to hold the trial not in the Reich Court in Leipzig, but before a specially constituted ‘People’s Court’ in Munich, where they had more control over events.

Despite the fact that the participants in the putsch had shot dead four policemen and staged an armed and (in any reasonable legal terms) treasonable revolt against a legitimately constituted state government, both offences punishable by death, the court sentenced Hitler to a mere five years in prison for high treason, and the others were indicted to similar or even lighter terms. Ludendorff, as expected, was acquitted. The court grounded its leniency in the fact that, as it declared, the participants in the putsch ‘were led in their action by a pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will’.

Hitler’s beliefs were clearly laid out in My Struggle, for all to see who wished to. No one familiar with the text could have emerged from reading it with the view that all Hitler wanted was the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, the restoration of the German borders of 1914 or the self-determination of German-speaking minorities in Central Europe. Nor could anyone have doubted the visceral, fanatical, indeed murderous quality of his antisemitism. But beliefs and intentions are not the same as blueprints and plans.

What remained central through all these tactical twists and turns, however, was the long-term drive for ‘living-space’ in the East, and the fierce desire to

annihilate the Jews.

Hitler did not, as was sometimes later said, even by himself, embark on a path of ‘legality’ in the wake of the failed putsch. But he did realize that toppling the Weimar ‘system’ would require more than a few ill-directed gunshots, even in a year of supreme crisis such as 1923. Coming to power clearly required collaboration from key elements in the establishment, and although he had enjoyed some support in 1923, it had not proved sufficient. In the next crisis, which was to occur less than a decade later, he made sure he had the army and the key institutions of the state either neutralized, or actively working for him, unlike in 1923.80

Hitler was released on parole, by a decision of the Bavarian Supreme Court and against the advice of the state prosecutorial service, on 20 December 1924. He still had almost four years of his sentence to run, during which he had to be careful not to violate the conditions of his parole.

Nothing demonstrated more clearly than this the changed situation of extreme nationalism in Germany: the all-powerful military dictator of the First World War had been pushed out to the margins of politics by the upstart Nazi politician; the general had been displaced by the corporal.

With Ludendorff safely out of the way, Hitler had no serious rival on the extreme right any more. He could now concentrate on bringing the rest of the ultra-nationalist movement to heel.

Max Amann told one local activist towards the end of 1925, Hitler takes the view on principle that it is not the job of the Party leadership to ‘install’ branch leaders. Herr Hitler takes the view today more than ever that the most effective fighter in the National Socialist movement is the man who pushes his way through on the basis of his achievements as a leader. If you yourself write that you enjoy the trust of almost all the members in Hanover, why don’t you then take over the leadership of the branch?102 In this way, Hitler thought, the most ruthless, the most dynamic and the most efficient would rise to positions of power within the movement.

Pushing aside the traditional, rather stuffy duelling corps and fraternities, the League gained a reputation for provocative actions, and campaigned on issues such as the reduction of overcrowding in lectures (by imposing a limit on the number of Jewish students), the dismissal of pacifist professors, the creation of new chairs in subjects like Racial Studies and Military Science, and the harnessing of the universities to the national interest, away from the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. By the summer of 1932, they had already gained a much-trumpeted success in combination with right-wing professors and local politicians in hounding Emil Julius Gumbel, a particularly hated figure as a Jew, a socialist, a pacifist and a campaigner against right-wing judicial bias, from his chair in Heidelberg, prompting the declaration from a Frankfurt magazine that ‘Heidelberg has thus opened the era of the Third Reich in the sphere of academia’.123

Even though total membership of the Nazi Students’ League did not even reach 10 per cent of national fraternity membership, the Nazis had completely taken over student representation in Germany.

In the shorter run, it helped the Party direct its electoral appeal towards virtually every constituency in German society, helping to politicize social institutions that had previously considered themselves more or less unpolitical in their nature. It meant that the Party would be able to expand with ease should it suddenly gain a rapid influx of new members.

Far more important were durable popular antisemitic propagandists such as Theodor Fritsch, whose Handbook on the Jewish Question, published in 1888, reached its fortieth edition in 1933. Fritsch’s publishing house, the Hammer Verlag, survived the First World War, and continued to produce a lot of popular pamphlets and tracts which were quite widely read amongst rank-and-file Nazis.

More significant still, however, was the inspiration provided by the basic elements of Nazi propaganda – the speeches by Hitler and Goebbels, the marches, the banners, the parades. At this level, ideas were more likely to be acquired through organs such as the Nazi press, election pamphlets and wall-posters than through serious ideological tracts. Among ordinary Party activists in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity – the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans – followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler.

Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these it was only incidental. The younger they were, the less important ideology was at all, and the more significant were features such as the emphasis on Germanic culture and the leadership role of Hitler. By contrast, ideological antisemitism was strongest amongst the older generation of Nazis, testifying to the latent influence of antisemitic groups active before the war, and the nationalistic families in which many of them had grown up.133

Only the oldest activists joined in the expectation of getting a job or receiving financial support. For the young, it did not matter so much.149 Nazi student leaders often got themselves deeply into debt by paying personally for posters and pamphlets.150 With many others it must have been the same.

Yet not everyone was mesmerized by Hitler’s speaking. A serious and idealistic young middle-class Nazi like Melita Maschmann, for example, admired him as a ‘man of the people’ who had risen from obscurity, but even at the annual Party rally she was so busy, as she wrote later, that ‘I could not permit myself the “debauchery” of ecstatic rapture’. Parades and shows she found boring and pointless. For her, Nazism was more a patriotic ideal than a cult of the individual leader.

highly rationalized industrial centres such as Berlin or the Ruhr, manual wage labourers accounted for a higher proportion of Party members. Younger workers, who had not joined a union because they had never had a job, were particularly susceptible to the appeal of the Nazi Party in Saxony.

By the early 1930s, however, the proportion of middle-and upper-class Party members in the Saxon Nazi Party was increasing, as the Party became more respectable. Slowly, the Nazis were escaping their modest and humble roots and beginning to attract members of Germany’s social elites.

To the young Himmler, still only in his mid-twenties, and hopelessly adrift in the choppy seas of post-putsch paramilitary politics, Hitler offered certainty, a leader to admire, a cause to follow. From 1925 onwards, when he joined the newly reconstituted Nazi Party, Himmler developed a boundless hero-worship of the Nazi leader; he kept a portrait of Hitler on his office wall and is even on occasion said to have engaged it in conversation.

Then he had become a specialist in selective animal breeding, which led him into the politics of ‘blood and soil’, though not immediately into the Nazi Party. Himmler imbibed from Darré a fixed belief in the destiny of the Nordic race, the superiority of its blood over that of the Slavs, the need to keep its blood pure, and the central role of a solid German peasantry in ensuring the future of the Germanic race. Driven by this obsession with the peasantry, Himmler for a while himself took up farming, but he did not do well, since he spent too much time in political campaigning, and the times were in any case bad for agricultural business.

men like Goebbels, Göring, Hess, Himmler, Rosenberg, Schirach and Streicher. Under their leadership, and thanks to Strasser’s organizational talent, the Nazi movement by the middle of 1929 had become an elaborate, well-organized political body whose appeal was directed to virtually every sector of the population.

The Nazi movement despised the law, and made no secret of its belief that might was right. It had also evolved a way of diverting legal responsibility from the Party leadership for acts of violence and lawlessness committed by brownshirts and other elements within the movement. For Hitler, Goebbels, the Regional Leaders and the rest only gave orders couched in rhetoric that, while violent, was also vague: their subordinates would understand clearly what was being hinted at and go into action straight away. This tactic helped persuade a growing number of middle-and even some upper-class Germans that Hitler and his immediate subordinates were not really responsible for the blood shed by the brownshirts on the streets, in bar-room brawls and in rowdy meetings, an impression strengthened by the repeated insistence of the brownshirt leaders that they were acting independently of the Nazi Party bosses.

Throughout the early 1930s, men could be seen on street corners, with placards round their necks: ‘Looking for work of any kind’. Schoolchildren, when asked for their opinion on the matter by sociologists, often replied that the unemployed became socially degraded,

‘My father has now been unemployed for over three years,’ wrote one 14-year-old schoolgirl: ‘We still used to believe earlier on that father would get a job again some time, but now even we children have abandoned all hope.’

Crime rates as such did not climb as spectacularly as they had done during the inflation, but there was a 24 per cent increase in arrests for theft in Berlin between 1929 and 1932 none the less. Prostitution, male and female, became more noticeable and more widespread, the product of Weimar’s sexual tolerance as much as of its economic failure, shocking the respectable classes by its openness. At its lower end, hawking and street-selling shaded off into begging.

descending into a morass of misery and criminality. In this situation, people began to grasp at political straws: anything, however extreme, seemed better than the hopeless mess they appeared to be in now.

As individual countries started drawing up the monetary drawbridges, industry began to suffer. There was virtually no growth in industrial production in Germany in 1928–9 and by the end of that winter unemployment had already reached nearly two and a half million. Investment slowed down sharply, possibly because companies were spending too much on wages and welfare payments, but more likely because there was simply a shortage of capital.

An attempt to create a larger internal market by forging a customs union between Germany and Austria was squashed by international intervention, for the political motivation behind it – a step in the direction of the political union between the two countries that had been banned by the Treaty of Versailles – was obvious to everyone.

For the Communists, the class struggle passed from the workplace to the street and the neighbourhood as more and more people lost their jobs. Defending a proletarian stronghold, by violent means if necessary, became a high priority of the Communist paramilitary organization, the Red Front-Fighters’ League.

Founding ‘committees of the unemployed’, the party staged parades, demonstrations, ‘hunger marches’ and other street-based events on an almost daily basis, often ending in prolonged clashes with the police. No opportunity was lost to raise the political temperature in what the party leaders increasingly thought was a terminal crisis of the capitalist system.

There was already a legacy of bitterness and hatred bequeathed by the events of 1918–19, when members of the Free Corps in the service of the Social Democratic minister Gustav Noske had murdered prominent Communist leaders, most notably Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

I was class-conscious because class-consciousness had been a family tradition. I was proud to be a worker and I despised the bourgeois. My attitude to conventional respectability was a derisive one. I had a keen one-sided sense of justice which carried me away into an insane hatred of those I thought responsible for mass suffering and oppression. Policemen were enemies. God was a lie, invented by the rich to make the poor be content with their yoke, and only cowards resorted to prayer. Every employer was a hyena in human form, malevolent, eternally gluttonous, disloyal and pitiless. I believed that a man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying at no lawless deed as long as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the revolution had triumphed.

Thälmann’s faith in the revolution was absolute, and in consequence so too was his faith in the only revolutionary state in the world, the Soviet Union.

Led by a man such as Thälmann, the Communist Party thus seemed a looming threat of unparalleled dimensions to many middle-class Germans in the early 1930s.

White-collar workers lost their jobs, or feared that they might, as banks and finance houses got into difficulties. Tourist agents, restaurants, retailing, mailorder firms, a huge variety of employers in the service sector ran into trouble as people’s purchasing power declined. The Nazi Party, now equipped with its elaborate structure of specialist subdivisions, saw this, and began to direct its appeal to the professional and propertied middle classes.

he did not refer to the Jews in the speech even once – and by emphasizing his belief in the importance of private property, hard work and proper rewards for the able and the enterprising. However, the solution to the economic woes of the moment, he said, was mainly political. Idealism, patriotism and national unity would create the basis for economic revival.

the People’s Party broke with the coalition over the Social Democrats’ refusal to cut unemployment benefits, and the government was forced to tender its resignation on 27 March 1930.35

The army threw its weight into the political process initially in order to protect itself from budgetary cutbacks, which it successfully did. While all around it state institutions were having their budgets slashed, the army’s stayed intact. But it still remained generally aloof from the Nazi Party.

The trial outraged other young officers, even those who were not inclined to collaborate with the Nazis. The army leadership, wrote one of them, had caved in to the ‘Novemberists’ and tried men whose only motivation was ‘unselfish love of the fatherland’. Ninety per cent of the officers, he added, thought the same way.

Brüning’s major task was to deal with the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. He chose to do this by radically deflationary measures, above all by cutting government expenditure. Government revenues were sinking fast, and the possibilities of borrowing to meet the state’s obligations were virtually non-existent.

Wait a while and just you’ll see, And Brüning will come up to you With the ninth emergency decree And make mincemeat out of you.

This was a message that had a powerful appeal to many who looked nostalgically back to the Reich created by Bismarck, and dreamed of a new leader who would resurrect Germany’s lost glory. It was a message that summed up everything that many people felt was wrong with the Republic, and gave them the opportunity to register the profundity of their disillusion with it by voting for a movement that was its opposite in every respect.

Below this very general level, the Nazi propaganda apparatus skilfully targeted specific groups in the German electorate, giving campaigners training in addressing different kinds of audience, advertising meetings extensively in advance, providing topics for particular venues and picking the speaker to suit the occasion. Sometimes local non-Nazis and prominent sympathizers from conservative backgrounds shared the platform with the main Nazi speaker.

growing divisions of German society into competing interest-groups in the course of the Depression and tailored their message to their particular constituency. Antisemitic slogans would be used when addressing groups to whom they might have an appeal; where they were clearly not working, they were abandoned. The Nazis adapted according to the response they received; they paid close attention to their audiences, producing a whole range of posters and leaflets designed to w...