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

by William L. Shirer

A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.

Adolf’s mother was his father’s second cousin,

From

he became a teetotaler, a nonsmoker and a vegetarian to boot, at first out of necessity as a penniless vagabond in Vienna and Munich, and later out of conviction.

He wanted to be a artist, he had a good relationship with his mom, and this vignette. With just tgese facts who would have predicted Adolf Hitler's future? he was being forced to studt something he didnt want to study. I suppose its very important no on e feels forced to do anything .

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.

He was able to create the illusion that jews were the cause of a much worse problem: human trafficking. By crashing then to be an awful monster, it became tolerable, heroic even, to antagonize the Jews.

A politician who gives gratitude to god can be a very powerful image.

So it had all been in vain.

Very relatable. I dobt agree with hitler, but ive shared This feeling

He never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench, of the front line. He was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times about the war’s aims and Germany’s manifest destiny.

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.

That’s one way to make weak people feel strong. Weak because they too, no matter how big or tough or valiant they were, had lost the war

Sturmabteilung, from which the name S.A. came. The storm troopers,

Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority…

People who are use to war have a hard time with peace.

“I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.

That makes him all the more despicable

The 14 points were hastily thrown together, using verbiage that appealed to the masses. They weren’t thought through. It’s amazing. The US constitution was put together in a few days. However, the ideas and concepts were contemplated years leading up to it. Not only that, but the men who drafted it studied diligently in preparation for that beloved day in 1840-something. That tells me that hard work and study leads to truth, and truth stays forever.

“We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!”

There is somesthing really sinister and off about that statement.

Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government.

They must have felt enormous pressurd at that point. With 3000 people cheering in the other room, it must have been impossible fcor them to speak up now

He really is adding a religious element to his speeches.

“Indo-Iran” or seems like everything is Iran v Israel.

This is very religious

nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.”

The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state’s approaching decline…

This makes sense to hitler when you realize he saw the aristocrats and bourgeois steal from and take advantage of the laborers

a “world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”

And

That one day he would build it and rule it he had no doubts whatsoever, for he was possessed of that burning sense of mission peculiar to so many geniuses who have sprouted, seemingly, from nowhere and from nothing throughout the ages.

I dont like that this spirit includes hitler, but i like nd relate tgo thbe notfion tgat man can come cfrfom bothin g and turn himsef intfo something

Japan and Egypt had similar beliefs.

Thats f-ed up.

Schelling even argued that “a nation comes into existence with its mythology… The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, [is] presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.”

Interesting that Hamilton thought the same way. It’s interesting how the competitive nature flows through us all, regardless of time or place. We all want to be good, we all wanted to be great. We all want to be better than ourselves and our neighbor.

for these two things—personality and influence—belong together…

For the greater a man’s works are for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight…”30

Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution.

“To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!”

I imagine this is what the telestial kingdom will be like

Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means.

Parliamentary government was breaking down at a moment when the economic crisis made strong government imperative.

They contributed to Hitler out of Greed. Fear of communist state control economies and something from the republic that I can’t remember.

Goering had returned to Germany at the end of 1927, following a general political amnesty which the Communists had helped the parties of the Right put through the Reichstag.

This is what Goering did for Hitler: give him lucrative and useful social connections.

Ernst Roehm had broken with Hitler in 1925 and not long afterward gone off to join the Bolivian Army as a lieutenant colonel. Toward the end of 1930 Hitler appealed to him to return and take over again the leadership of the S.A., which was getting out of hand. Its members, even its leaders, apparently believed in a coming Nazi revolution by violence, and with increasing frequency they were taking to the streets to molest and murder their political opponents. No election, national, provincial or municipal, took place without savage battles in the gutters.

Gregor Strasser was undoubtedly the Number Two man in the Nazi Party. A forceful speaker and a brilliant organizer, he was the head of the party’s most important office, the Political Organization, a post which gave him great influence among the provincial and local leaders whose labors he supervised. With his genial Bavarian nature, he was the most popular leader in the party next to Hitler,

Otto, Gregor Strasser’s brother, had fallen by the wayside.

He was too communist for Hitler

Goebbels, the fourth member of the Big Five around Hitler, had remained an enemy and rival of Gregor Strasser ever since their break in 1926. Two years after that he had succeeded Strasser as propaganda chief of the party when the latter was moved up to head the Political Organization.

the Nazi leader was quite content to see strife among his principal subordinates, if only because it was a safeguard against their conspiring together against his leadership.

Wilhelm Frick, the fifth and last member of the group, was the only colorless personality in it. He was a typical German civil servant.

Heinrich Himmler, the poultry farmer, who, with his pince-nez, might be mistaken for a mild, mediocre schoolmaster—he had a degree in agronomy from the Munich Technische Hochschule—was gradually building up Hitler’s praetorian guard, the black-coated S.S.

There was Dr. Robert Ley, a chemist by profession and a habitual drunkard, who was the Gauleiter of Cologne,

Hans Frank, the bright young lawyer and leader of the party’s legal division.

Walther Darré, born in 1895 in the Argentine, an able agronomist who was won over to National Socialism by Hess and whose book The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race brought him to Hitler’s attention and to...