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

by William L. Shirer

Goering removed hundreds of republican officials and replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers.

This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany.

Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends.

Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.

The businessmen, who had been so enthusiastic over the smashing of the troublesome labor unions, now found that left-wing Nazis, who really believed in the party’s socialism, were trying to take over the employers’ associations, destroy the big department stores and nationalize industry.

The White Book of the Purge, published by émigrés in Paris, stated that 401 had been slain, but it identified only 116 of them. At the Munich trial in 1957, the figure of “more than 1,000” was given.

had been mistaken by the S.S. thugs for Willi Schmidt, a local S.A. leader, who in the meantime had been arrested by another S.S. detachment and shot.

an officer corps which not only condoned but openly praised a government for carrying out a massacre without precedent in German history, during which two of its leading officers, Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow, having been branded as traitors, were coldbloodedly murdered?

Lloyd George,

“a great man”

The signs “Juden unerwuenscht” (Jews Not Welcome) were quietly hauled down from the shops, hotels, beer gardens and places of public entertainment, the persecution of the Jews and of the two Christian churches temporarily halted, and the country put on its best behavior.

deprived the Jews of German citizenship, confining them to the status of “subjects.”

He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold”

Luther employed a coarseness and brutality of language unequaled in German history until the Nazi time.

“It was a scene of prostitution,” Professor Roepke later wrote, “that has stained the honorable history of German learning.”8 And as Professor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, “The German universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publicly with all their power the destruction of knowledge and of the democratic state. They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny.”

The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554. Academic standards fell dizzily.

it blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocre caliber on the poor quality of the technical colleges.

one of the ironies of fate that the development of the bomb in the United States owed so much to two men who had been exiled because of race from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein from Germany and Fermi from Italy.

in which some half a million Hitler Youth maidens spent a year at domestic service in a city household.

and in March 1939 the government issued a law conscripting all youth into the Hitler Youth on the same basis as they were drafted into the Army. Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled.

It was to carry out the deportation of Poles and Jews first from the Polish provinces annexed outright by Germany and replace them by Germans and Volksdeutsche

“for every German moving into these territories, two people will be expelled to Poland.”

Within a year 1,200,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews had been uprooted and driven to the east.

and the “resettlement,” carried out in zero weather and often during blizzards, actually cost more Jewish and Polish lives than had been lost to Nazi firing squads and gallows.

Mussolini, as usual, blew hot and cold, and Ciano recorded his waverings in his diary.

“we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.”

Not even in medieval times nor further back in the barbarous tribal days had any German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legal as well as actual, to himself.

The Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a source of unskilled labor… Every year the laborers needed by the Reich could be procured from there.

however cruel this may sound, they must be exterminated wherever they are… There should be one master only for the Poles, the German.

This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the master race and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially virulent in regard to Russia.

Every educated person is a future enemy.

many were happy to be freed from the Soviet yoke—even by the Germans.

But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of the German conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian lands, enslave their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soon destroyed any possibility of such a development.

slogan “Liberation from Bolshevism” was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods…

Germany extracted in tribute from the conquered nations a total of 104 billion marks ($26,000,000,000).

But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler’s war machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and Goering.

Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there were four and a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains—in order to remove the traces—burned.

This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully documented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves.

Persons coming out of church or the movies were nabbed.

At times the water supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days…

Every employer has the right to give corporal punishment to his farm workers…

The disposal of the corpses at a number of Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition.

The camp commanders complained toward the end that the crematoria had proved not only inadequate but “uneconomical.”

The bodies were burned, but the gold fillings in the teeth remained and these were retrieved from the ashes if they had not already been yanked out by special squads working

over the clammy piles of corpses.

turned on their Nazi tormentors and fought.

Governor Frank refused to allot enough food to keep even half of the 400,000 barely alive.

At least 100,000 Jews tried to survive on a bowl of soup a day, often boiled from straw,

that he had caught “a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved.” The gas chambers no doubt accounted for the 36,000.

put at between five and six millions by one of the great Nazi experts on the subject,