The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

“The offices,” he found, “were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk… In the year 1916–17 nearly the whole production was under control of Jewish finance… The Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his domination… I saw with horror a catastrophe approaching…”5 Hitler could not bear what he saw and was glad, he says, to return to the front.

Chat he crazy

Only later did Germany’s great war hero subscribe to the myth. In a hearing before the Committee of Inquiry of the National Assembly on November 18, 1919, a year after the war’s end, Hindenburg declared, “As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was ‘stabbed in the back.’”

One had to live in Germany between the wars to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people. The facts which exposed its deceit lay all around. The Germans of the Right would not face them. The culprits, they never ceased to bellow, were the “November criminals”—an expression which Hitler hammered into the consciousness of the people. It mattered not at all that the German Army, shrewdly and cowardly, had maneuvered the republican government into signing the armistice which the military leaders had insisted upon, and that it thereafter had advised the government to accept the Peace Treaty of Versailles.

The gullibility of the Germans is a subject which Hitler often harps on in Mein Kampf. He was shortly to take full advantage of it.

And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics.”6 As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.

the Bavarian capital became a magnet for all those forces in Germany which were determined to overthrow the Republic, set up an authoritarian regime and repudiate the Diktat of Versailles.

His anti-Semitic harangue apparently so pleased his superior officers that he was soon posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.

educational courses, he had heard a lecture by Gottfried Feder, a construction engineer and a crank in the field of economics, who had become obsessed with the idea that “speculative” capital, as opposed to “creative” and “productive” capital, was the root of much of Germany’s economic trouble.

After Feder had finished speaking Hitler was about to leave, when a “professor” sprang up, questioned the soundness of Feder’s arguments and then proposed that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a South German nation with Austria. This was a popular notion in Munich at the time, but its expression aroused Hitler to a fury and he rose to give “the learned gentleman,” as he later recounted, a piece of his mind. This apparently was so violent that, according to Hitler, the “professor” left the hall “like a wet poodle,” while the rest of the audience looked at the unknown young speaker “with astonished faces.”

Drexler’s principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist.

In Vienna, as we have seen, Hitler had learned to scorn the bourgeoisie for the same reason—its utter lack of concern with the working-class families and their social problems. Drexler’s ideas, then, definitely interested him.

Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism.

Hitler’s admiration for Eckart never flagged, and the last sentence of Mein Kampf is an expression of gratitude to this erratic mentor: He was, says Hitler in concluding his book, “one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds.”15

Separatism was very strong in Bavaria at the time and the Bavarians, constantly at odds with the central government in Berlin, were demanding less, not more, centralization, so that Bavaria could rule itself.

No one could say he had not given ample warning, in writing, from the very beginning.

What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.

In the summer of 1920 Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becoming the master propagandist, came up with an inspiration which can only be described as a stroke of genius. What the party lacked, he saw, was an emblem, a flag, a symbol, which would express what the new organization stood for and appeal to the imagination of the masses, who, as Hitler reasoned, must have some striking banner to follow and to fight under. After much thought and innumerable attempts at various designs he hit upon a flag with a red background and in the middle a white disk on which was imprinted a black swastika. The hooked cross—the hakenkreuz—of the swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient times, was to become a mighty and frightening symbol of the Nazi Party and ultimately of Nazi Germany. Whence Hitler got the idea of using it for both the flag and the insignia of the party he does not say in a lengthy dissertation on the subject in Mein Kampf.

“In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”20

Without consulting his comrades he dashed to the window overlooking the Koenigsplatz, where a great throng had gathered, stuck his head out and on his own, as if the idea had just popped into his head, proclaimed the Republic! The saddle maker Ebert was furious. He had hoped, somehow, to save the Hohenzollern monarchy.

In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start.

This the Social Democrats, who were mostly well-meaning trade-unionists with the same habit of bowing to old, established authority which was ingrained in Germans of other classes, could not bring themselves to do. Instead they began by abdicating their authority to the force which had always been dominant in modern Germany, the Army. For though it had been defeated on the battlefield the Army still had hopes of maintaining itself at home and of defeating the revolution. To achieve these ends it moved swiftly and boldly.

The German Army was saved, but the Republic, on the very day of its birth, was lost. The generals, with the honorable exception of Groener himself and but few others, would never serve it loyally. In the end, led by Hindenburg, they betrayed it to the Nazis.

The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate—it was passed on July 31, 1919, and ratified by the President on August 31—was, on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy.

Political power emanates from the people.” Men and women were given the vote at the age of twenty. “All Germans are equal before the law… Personal liberty is inviolable… Every German has a right… to express his opinion freely… All Germans have the right to form associations or societies… All inhabitants of the Reich enjoy complete liberty of belief and conscience…” No man in the world would be more free than a German, no government more democratic and liberal than his. On paper, at least.

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to March 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British historian, writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a “humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history.”2 It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

This was one of the stipulations which infuriated the Germans the most, not only because they resented separating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a corridor which gave Poland access to the sea, but because they despised the Poles, whom they considered an inferior race.

From that day on Germany became a house divided. The conservatives would accept neither the treaty of peace nor the Republic which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army—General Groener excepted—though it had sworn to support the new democratic regime and had itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles. Despite the November “revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power. They owned the industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital. Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political press that would strive from now on to undermine the Republic.

the officer corps managed not only to maintain the Army in its old Prussian traditions, as we have seen, but to become the real center of political power in the new Germany.

But under General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator of the 100,000-man Reichswehr, the Army, small as it was in numbers, became a state within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s foreign and domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s continued existence depended on the will of the officer corps.

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends.

Down in Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, antidemocratic, antirepublican tide. He began to ride it.

Instead of drastically raising taxes on those who could pay, the republican government actually reduced them in 1921.

Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. The General Staff, disguised as the “Truppenamt” (Office of Troops) to evade the peace treaty which supposedly had outlawed it, took notice that the fall of the mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered for a new war.

dictators of the Reich. Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The Bavarian cabinet of Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on September 26 and named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustav von Kahr as State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin it was feared that Bavaria might secede from the Reich, restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and perhaps form a South German union with Austria.