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

by William L. Shirer

At one period in the mid-Thirties the hissing of German films became so common that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warning against “treasonable behavior on the part of cinema audiences.

Dr. Goebbels proved himself right, in that the radio became by far the regime’s most effective means of propaganda, doing more than any other single instrument of communication to shape the German people to Hitler’s ends.

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.

But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service “of a new national state”—a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

All teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.”

They began to teach what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics.

There was also Professor Wilhelm Mueller, of the Technical College of Aachen, who in a book entitled Jewry and Science saw a world-wide Jewish plot to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization. To him Einstein, with his theory of relativity, was the archvillain. The Einstein theory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor “directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.”

It was 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.

For the first few months in 1933, a few party radicals tried to get control of the business associations, take over the department stores and institute a corporate state on lines which Mussolini was attempting to establish.

After June 1935 the state employment offices were given exclusive control of employment; they determined who could be hired for what and where.

Finally, on June 22, 1938, a special decree issued by the Office of the Four-Year Plan instituted labor conscription. It obliged every German to work where the State assigned him. Workers who absented themselves from their jobs without a very good excuse were subject to fine and imprisonment.

Kraft durch Freude

Now Hitler decreed that a car should be built for him to sell for only 990 marks—$396 at the official rate of exchange. He himself, it was said, took a hand in the actual designing of the car, which was done under the supervision of the Austrian automobile engineer Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.

Dr. Ley’s ingenious plan was that the workers themselves should furnish the capital by means of what became known as a “pay-before-you-get-it” installment plan—five marks a week, or if a worker thought he could afford it, ten or fifteen marks a week. When 750 marks had been paid in, the buyer received an order number entitling him to a car as soon as it could be turned out. Alas for the worker, not a single car was ever turned out for any customer during the Third Reich. Tens of millions of marks were paid in by the German wage earners, not a pfennig of which was ever to be refunded. By the time the war started the Volkswagen factory turned to the manufacture of goods more useful to the Army.

To be sure, not many judges were eliminated by this law, but they were warned where their duty lay. Just to make sure that they understood, Dr. Hans Frank, Commissioner of Justice and Reich Law Leader, told the jurists in 1936, “The National Socialist ideology is the foundation of all basic laws, especially as explained in the party program and in the speeches of the Fuehrer.”

This so incensed Hitler and Goering that within a month, on April 24, 1934, the right to try cases of treason, which heretofore had been under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, was taken away from that august body and transferred to a new court, the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, which soon became the most dreaded tribunal in the land. It consisted of two professional judges and five others chosen from among party officials, the S.S. and the armed forces, thus giving the latter a majority vote.

Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.

Geheime Staatspolizei, simply the “Secret State Police”—GESTAPO for short—and

It was only in April 1934, when Goering appointed Himmler deputy chief of the Prussian Secret Police, that the Gestapo began to expand as an arm of the S.S. and, under the guiding genius of its new chief, the mild-mannered but sadistic former chicken farmer, and of Reinhard Heydrich, a young man of diabolical cast20 who was head of the S.S. Security Service, or S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst), become such a scourge, with the power of life and death over every German.

As Dr. Werner Best, one of Himmler’s right-hand men in the Gestapo, explained, “As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.”

Since after the Blood Purge of June 1934 there was no more resistance to the Nazi regime, many Germans thought that the mass “protective custody” arrests and the confinement of thousands in the concentration camps would cease.

The S.S. Fuehrer saw more clearly than the Minister that the purpose of the concentration camps was not only to punish enemies of the regime but by their very existence to terrorize the people and deter them from even contemplating any resistance to Nazi rule.

But at the beginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler’s men were as yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi “medical research,” had to wait for the war.

Thus thousands of decreed laws—there were no others in the Third Reich—were explicitly based on the emergency presidential decree of February 28, 1933, for the Protection of the People and the State, which Hindenburg, under Article 48 of the constitution, had signed. It will be remembered that the aged President was bamboozled into signing the decree the day after the Reichstag fire when Hitler assured him that there was grave danger of a Communist revolution. The decree, which suspended all civil rights, remained in force throughout the time of the Third Reich, enabling the Fuehrer to rule by a sort of continual martial law.

As Dr. Hans Frank reminded a convention of lawyers in the spring of 1936, “There is in Germany today only one authority, and that is the authority of the Fuehrer.”

Hitler’s first joyous excitement had given way to fear. “We are faced with a new Sarajevo!”

On Saturday, March 16—most of Hitler’s surprises were reserved for Saturdays—the Chancellor decreed a law establishing universal military service and providing for a peacetime army of twelve corps and thirty-six divisions—roughly half a million men. That was the end of the military restrictions of Versailles—unless France and Britain took action. As Hitler had expected, they protested but they did not act.

Germany, Hitler proclaimed, had not the slightest thought of conquering other peoples.

Germany has solemnly recognized and guaranteed France her frontiers as determined after the Saar plebiscite… We thereby finally renounced all claims to Alsace-Lorraine, a land for which we have fought two great wars… Without taking the past into account Germany has concluded a nonaggression pact with Poland… We shall adhere to it unconditionally…. We recognize Poland as the home of a great and nationally conscious people.

Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity* and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.

In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down.

Germany’s feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco–German border.

On January 30, 1937, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, proclaiming “the withdrawal of the German signature” from the Versailles Treaty—an empty but typical gesture, since the treaty was by now dead as a doornail—and reviewing with pride the record of his four years in office. He could be pardoned for his pride, for it was an impressive record in both domestic and foreign affairs. He had, as we have seen, abolished unemployment, created a boom in business, built up a powerful Army, Navy and Air Force, provided them with considerable armaments and the promise of more on a massive scale. He had singlehandedly broken the fetters of Versailles and bluffed his way into occupying the Rhineland. Completely isolated at first, he had found a loyal ally in Mussolini and another in Franco, and he had detached Poland from France. Most important of all, perhaps, he had released the dynamic energy of the German people, reawakening their confidence in the nation and their sense of its mission as a great and expanding world power.

“From now on I take over personally the command of the whole armed forces.” As head of state, Hitler of course had been the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, but now he took over Blomberg’s office of Commander in Chief and abolished the War Ministry, over which the now moon-struck bridegroom had also presided.

February 4, 1938, is a major turning point in the history of the Third Reich, a milestone on its road to war. On that date the Nazi revolution, it might be said, was completed.

Despite the delirium of the Austrians at the prospect of seeing the Fuehrer in the capital, Himmler asked for an extra day to perfect security arrangements. He was already carrying out the arrest of thousands of “unreliables”—within a few weeks the number would reach 79,000 in Vienna alone.

I happened to broadcast at seven-thirty that evening, a half hour after the polls had closed, when few votes had yet been counted. A Nazi official assured me before the broadcast that the Austrians were voting 99 per cent Ja. That was the figure officially given later—99.08 per cent in Greater Germany, 99.75 in Austria.

Dr. Schacht stoutly defended the methods, arguing that the Anschluss was “the consequence of countless perfidies and brutal acts of violence which foreign countries have practiced against us.

It was this writer’s impression in Berlin from that moment until the end that had Chamberlain frankly told Hitler that Britain would do what it ultimately did in the face of Nazi aggression, the Fuehrer would never have embarked on the adventures which brought on the Second World War—an impression which has been immensely strengthened by the study of the secret German documents. This was the well-meaning Prime Minister’s fatal mistake.

Ulrich von Hassell became a sort of foreign-affairs adviser to the resistance leaders.

By the end of June Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Russia, was advising Berlin that the Soviet Union was “hardly likely to march in defense of a bourgeois state,” i.e., Czechoslovakia.

The first such emissary of the plotters, selected by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, was Ewald von Kleist, who arrived in London on August 18. Ambassador Henderson in Berlin, who was already anxious to give Hitler whatever he wanted in Czechoslovakia, advised the British Foreign Office that “it would be unwise for him [Kleist] to be received in official quarters.”

According to Schmidt’s version, taken from his own shorthand notes made while he was interpreting, Chamberlain did say that, but added that “he could state personally that he recognized the principle of the detachment of the Sudeten areas… He wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their approval of his personal attitude.” From this surrender at Berchtesgaden, all else ensued.

Within the Chancellery there was further bad news—this from abroad. There was a dispatch from Budapest saying that Yugoslavia and Rumania had informed the Hungarian government that they would move against Hungary militarily if she attacked Czechoslovakia.

In scarcely four and a half years this man of lowly origins had catapulted a disarmed, chaotic, nearly bankrupt Germany, the weakest of the big powers in Europe, to a position where she was regarded as the mightiest nation of the Old World, before which all the others, Britain even and France, trembled. At no step in this dizzy ascent had the victorious powers of Versailles dared to try to stop her, even when they had the power to do so.

In the autumn of 1938 another turning point for Nazi Germany was reached. It took place during what was later called in party circles the “Week of the Broken Glass.” On November 7, a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee by the name of Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath.

On the flaming, riotous night of November 9, 1938, the Third Reich had deliberately turned down a dark and savage road from which there was to be no return.

World opinion was shocked and revolted by such barbarity in a nation which boasted a centuries-old Christian and humanist culture. Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of “the Jewish world conspiracy.”

Hitler’s sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a virus. Individually, as this writer can testify from personal experience, many Germans were as horrified by the November 9 inferno as were Americans and Englishmen and other foreigners. But neither the leaders of the Christian churches nor the generals nor any other representatives of the “good” Germany spoke out at once in open protest. They bowed to what General von Fritsch called “the inevitable,” or “Germany’s destiny.”