The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1)

by Richard J. Evans

some twenty years - were civil servants, not party politicians, and they were beholden to the Kaiser, and not to the people or to their parliamentary representatives.

This meant that the vast majority of policemen, postmen, railwaymen and other lower servants of the state were ex-soldiers, who had been socialized in the army and behaved in the military fashion to which they had become accustomed.

the party put its faith in the courts to prevent persecution.

It had to be counteracted by a scientific approach to breeding that would reduce or eliminate the weak and improve and multiply the strong. Among those who argued along these lines was Wilhelm Schallmayer, whose essay advocating a eugenic approach to social policy won first prize in a national competition organized by the industrialist Alfred Krupp in 1900.

He also advocated the killing of the mentally ill through the use of chemical injections and electrocution. Haeckel was a racist, too, and pronounced the verdict that no woolly-haired race

German term was minderwertig, literally, ‘worth-less’—became a stock term used by social workers and medical men for many kinds of social deviant before the First World War. By labelling people in this way, the race hygienists opened the way towards the control, the abuse and finally the extermination of the ‘valueless’ by the state, through measures such as forcible sterilization and even execution,

Yet others took a different lesson altogether from the writings of the great philosopher. Nietzsche was a vigorous opponent of antisemitism, he was deeply critical of the vulgar worship of power and success which had resulted (in his view) from the unification of Germany by military force in 1871,

The nationalists’ beliefs were laid bare in a particularly dramatic way in 1912, when the Chairman of the Pan-German League, the lawyer Heinrich Class, writing under a pseudonym, published a manifesto with the arresting title: If I Were the Kaiser. He was not modest in his aims.

many people began to believe that the army had only been defeated because, like Wagner’s fearless hero Siegfried, it had been stabbed in the back by its enemies at home. Germany’s military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff claimed shortly after the war that the army had been the victim of a ‘secret, planned, demagogic campaign’ which had doomed all its heroic efforts to failure in the end.

have long been of the opinion that the Parliament cannot solve severe domestic political problems. If a dictator for ten years were a possibility - I would want it.’32

government had been printing money without the economic resources to back it. Before the war, the dollar had been worth just over 4 paper marks on the exchange in Berlin. By December 1918 it took nearly twice as many marks to buy a US dollar.

curriculum, railed against its supposed primitivism as a product of what he called ‘nigger blood’, the ‘musical expression of Americanism’.

key role in this was played by the ‘youth movement’, a disparate but rapidly growing collection of informal clubs and societies that focused on activities such as hiking, communing with nature

The judges were all the more independent because the vast majority of them regarded laws promulgated by legislative assemblies rather than by a divinely ordained monarch as no longer neutral but, as the chairman

The regular courts had little time for the principles enunciated in the Law for the Protection of the Republic. Judges almost invariably showed leniency towards an accused man if he claimed to have been acting out of patriotic motives, whatever his crime.164 The Kapp putsch of 1920, for instance, led to the condemnation of only one of the participants in this armed attempt to overthrow the legitimately elected government, and even he was sentenced to no more than a brief period of confinement in a fortress because the judges counted his ‘selfless patriotism’ as a mitigating factor.

there was one achievement through which the Weimar Republic could claim the loyalty and gratitude of the masses, it was the creation of a new welfare state.

The creation of a free and comprehensive welfare system as the entitlement of all its citizens was one of the major achievements of the Weimar Republic,

one death for every 35 inhabitants of the Reich.

Thus, the Weimar welfare administration quickly became an instrument of discrimination and control, as officials made it clear to claimants that they would only receive the minimum due to them, and

Ages.175 What angered the somewhat obsessive Adolf G. was not just the poverty in which he and his family were condemned to live, but

legitimacy of the constitution in which these promises were enshrined.

‘vermin’ or ‘pest’ to describe criminals, denoting a new, biological way of conceptualizing the social order as a kind of body, from which harmful parasites and alien micro-organisms had to be removed if it was to flourish.

‘a life unworthy of life’,

simply be killed.

Klemperer occasionally let slip that he felt his career blocked by the fact that he was Jewish.

one of Eisner’s socialist admirers walked into the Parliament shortly afterwards, drew a gun, and in full view of all

he told his audience that they should not believe ‘that you can fight a disease without killing the cause,

The Myth of the Twentieth Century

claimed never to have read more than a small part of it and disliked what he saw as its pseudo-religious tone,

‘The Germans have forgotten how to hate.

Hitler, he painted watercolours, though in his case only as a hobby.

seen by some historians as a kind of blueprint for Hitler’s later actions, a dangerous and devilish book that was unfortunately ignored

sudden collapse of the economy in the wake of the Stock Exchange crash in New York, it came.

feeling that the Comintern was behind strikes,

conspiratorial structure of the Comintern,

‘If we do one day achieve power,’ he had declared in a public address given on 17 October 1932, ‘we will hold on to it, so help us God. We will not allow them to take it away from us again.’

opened an international motor show in Berlin, and announced an ambitious programme of road building and tax breaks to help automobile manufacturers.

but anybody who had ever spoken out against Hitler’s movement, was in danger.

stole cars and pick-up trucks from Jews, Social Democrats and trade unions,

‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun!’

But I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise to me.’

‘Our opponent is the Jew and anyone who submits to him.’

pursuit of the Party Programme’s statement that Jews could not be full German citizens and therefore, clearly, could not enjoy full civil rights.

state employment as targets for dismissal.

the ignominy of having fallen prey to it.’

particularly strong among those too young to have fought in the war,

vehemence of his rhetorical denunciations of the unloved Republic,