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

by William L. Shirer

Rudolf Hess himself, personally unambitious and doggedly loyal to the Leader, held only the title of pri...

The second private secretary was one Martin Bormann, a molelike man who preferred to burrow in the dark recesses of party life to further his intrigues and who once had served a yea...

The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather,...

Alfred Rosenberg, the ponderous, dim-witted Baltic pseudo philosopher who, as we have seen, was one of Hitler’s earliest mentors and who since the putsch of 1923 had poured out a stream of books and pamphlets of the most muddled content and style, culminating in a 700-page work entitled The Myth of the Twentieth Century

And they had two advantages over their opponents: They were led by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthless enough, and opportunist enough, to go to any lengths to help him get it.

OUT OF THE TURMOIL and chaos of German life there now emerged a curious and devious figure who, more than any other single individual, was destined to dig the grave of the Republic—one who would serve briefly as its last Chancellor and, ironically, in one of the final twists of his astonishing career desperately try to save it, when it was too late. This was Kurt von Schleicher,

In the spring of the same year, as we have seen, he made his first effort to select the Chancellor himself and, with the backing of the Army, talked Hindenburg into appointing Heinrich Bruening to that post.

There were too many political parties (in 1930 ten of them each polled over a million votes) and they were too much at cross-purposes, too absorbed in looking after the special

economic and social interests they represented to be able to bury their differences and form an enduring majority in the Reichstag that could back a stable government capable of coping with the major crisis which confronted the country at the beginning of the Thirties. Parliamentary government had become a matter of what the Germans called Kuhhandel—cattle trading—with the parties bargaining for special advantages for the groups which elected them, and the national interests be damned.

that to attain power one must win the support of some of the existing “powerful institutions.”

Chancellor of Germany was the fifty-three-year-old Franz von Papen, scion of an impoverished family of the Westphalian nobility, a former General Staff officer, a crack gentleman rider, an unsuccessful and amateurish Catholic Centrist politician, a wealthy industrialist by marriage and little known to the public except as a former military attaché in Washington who had been expelled during the war for complicity in the planning of such sabotage as blowing up bridges and railroad lines while the United States was neutral.

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler.

But most of them were so accustomed to being ruled by a monarchist that tgey didnt know democracy could wirk nor did it feel natural to them.

THATS why the middle class is so important. It’s the backbone of democracy

They create a claim, instigate fear, and claim power.

Interesting. This was similar to Hamilton and Madison/Jefferson. It seems that powerful people who refuse to change opinions create life or death scenarios for themselves.

From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light.

So basically the UN had the power to enforce sanctions and they would have been in a position to enforce those sanctions without much resistance (because Germany was still weak militarily and economically) . So, it’s important to back up and enforce those consequences that at one time were put into place. Do what you say you’re going to do! By doing so, Hitler’s bloody reign could have been ended and prevented.

I imagine their hesitance came from the fact that the civilians were in such a weak position. Maybe it would have further complicated economic relations with the Allies. But really, why did they hesitate to?

one of the advantages of a dictatorship over democracy was that unpopular policies which promised significant results ultimately could be pursued temporarily without internal rumpus.

Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and “co-ordinated” under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people.

“Only weaklings suffer no criticism”…

That’s murderous. I feel like up to this point (from what I remember , I have been speed reading this) everything he said could have been justified or been given the benefit of the doubt.

How lonely, to build up your comrades, then once it proves useful ,tear them down.

They army subjected itself to Hitler in return so that they could subject the SA. In reality, there’s always someone with s bigger stick and bigger agenda. Like, it may be convenient to abandon God and follow Satan in the short term, but in the long term, Satan will abandon you.

“If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge [oberster Gerichtsherr] of the German people.” And Hitler added, for good measure, “Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”

I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.

This really did have a religious tone to it.

though they helped to alleviate hardship in a number of individual cases they did nothing to help stem the tide. What could they do? They would often put the question to you, and it was not an easy one to answer.

“We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”

The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany…

The new Nazi era of German culture was illuminated not only by the bonfires of books and the more effective, if less symbolic, measures of proscribing the sale or library circulation of hundreds of volumes and the publishing of many new ones, but by the regimentation of culture on a scale which no modern Western nation had ever experienced.

Among other powers, the chambers could expel—or refuse to accept—members for “political unreliability,” which meant that those who were even lukewarm about National Socialism could be, and usually were, excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of a livelihood.

Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation. Let no one have illusions!

That’s literally the point of art.

despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

I beliee tiktok and social media are the new radio for propaganda. Frhermoe, that why it is so important o watch what you read. Imgin e if instead they read the book of Mormon .

They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny.

Farmer’s could be poor or rich. It just depended on when and where they farmed in history. It seems that monetary riches are dependent on what the country’s leaders value at the time.

in Prussia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some five sevenths of the government’s revenue, as we have seen, was spent on the Army and that nation’s whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people’s welfare but of military policy.

Germany,

In a country where most wages were based at least partly on piecework, this meant that a worker could hope to earn more only by a speed-up and by longer hours.

Indeed, it’s hard for people to rebel as long as they have food in their stomachs. It’s much harder to rebel if that security is threatened to go away for rebelling.