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

by Richard J. Evans

One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertainties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

Looking back over a life long enough for him to remember the unification of Germany under Bismarck in 1871 and everything that happened between then and the fall of the Third Reich, Meinecke concluded tentatively that there was something flawed in the German nation-state from the very moment of its foundation in 1871.

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

It was above all in order to protect the autonomy of the Prussian officer corps from liberal interference that Bismarck was appointed in 1862. He immediately announced that ‘the great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority resolutions - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood’.13 He was as good as his word. The war of 1866 destroyed the Kingdom of Hanover, incorporating it into Prussia, and expelled Austria and Bohemia from Germany after centuries in which they had played a major part in shaping its destinies, while the war of 1870-71 took away Alsace-Lorraine from France and placed it under the direct suzerainty of the German Empire. It is with some justification that Bismarck has been described as a ‘white revolutionary’.14 Military force and military action created the Reich; and in so doing they swept aside legitimate institutions, redrew state boundaries and overthrew long-established traditions, with a radicalism and a ruthlessness that cast a long shadow over the subsequent development of Germany.

The army impacted on society in a variety of ways, most intensively of all in Prussia, then after 1871 more indirectly, through the Prussian example, in other German states as well. Its prestige, gained in the stunning victories of the wars of unification, was enormous. Non-commissioned officers, that is, those men who stayed on after their term of compulsory military service was over and served in the army for a number of years, had an automatic right to a job in state employment when they finally left the army. 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 rule-book of an institution like the police force concentrated on enforcing military models of behaviour, insisted that the public be kept at arm’s length and ensured that, in street marches and mass demonstrations, the crowd would be more likely to be treated like an enemy force than an assembly of citizens.

For the disaffected and the unsuccessful, those who felt pushed aside by the Juggernaut of industrialization and yearned for a simpler, more ordered, more secure, more hierarchical society such as they imagined had existed in the not-too-distant past, the Jews symbolized cultural, financial and social modernity.

In 1873, the city’s economy was dealt a hammer-blow when the frantic round of spending and investing that had accompanied the euphoria of the Reich’s foundation came to an abrupt end. A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of railway investments in the United States, brought widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. Small businesses and workshops were particularly badly hit. In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying their livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to believe the claims of Catholic and conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame.

Borrowing from the fashionable theories of the French racist Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Marr contrasted Jews not with Christians but with Germans, insisting that the two were distinct races. The Jews, he declared, had gained the upper hand in the racial struggle, and were virtually running the country; no wonder, then, that honest German artisans and small businessmen were suffering. Marr went on to invent the word ‘antisemitism’ and, in 1879, to found the League of Antisemites, the world’s first organization with this word in its title.

War, as General Friedrich von Bernhardi famously put it in a book published in 1912, was a ‘biological necessity’: ‘Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.’ Foreign policy was no longer to be conducted between states, but between races. Here was one beginning of the downgrading of the importance of the state that was to play such an important role in Nazi foreign policy.78

An insane outlook on war

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations. It represented a new variant of German nationalism, one which was never likely to be shared by conservatives or reactionaries, or endorsed by the Christian Churches or indeed by any form of organized or established religion.84

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, and his most famous concepts, such as the ‘will to power’ and the ‘superman’ were intended by him to apply only to the sphere of thought and ideas, not to politics or action. But the power of his prose allowed such phrases to be reduced all too easily to slogans, ripped from their philosophical context and applied in ways of which he would have greatly disapproved. His concept of an ideal human being, freed from moral constraints and triumphing through will-power over the weak, could be appropriated without too much difficulty by those who believed, as he did not, in the breeding of the human race according to racial and eugenic criteria. Central to such interpretations was the influence of his sister Elisabeth Förster, who vulgarized and popularized his ideas, emphasizing their brutal, elitist aspects, and made them palatable to extreme right-wing nationalists. Writers such as Ernst Bertram, Alfred Bäumler and Hans Günther reduced Nietzsche to a prophet of power, and his concept of the superman to a plea for the coming of a great German leader unfettered by moral constraints or Christian theology.87

It was in this cauldron of war and revolution that Nazism was forged. A mere fifteen years separated the defeat of Germany in 1918 from the advent of the Third Reich in 1933. Yet there were to be many twists and turns along the way. The triumph of Hitler was by no means inevitable in 1918, any more than it had been pre-programmed by the previous course of German history. The creation of the German Reich and its rise to economic might and Great Power status had created expectations in many people, expectations that, it was clear by this time, the Reich and its institutions were unable to fulfil. The example of Bismarck as a supposedly ruthless, tough leader who was not afraid to use violence and deception to gain his ends, was present in the minds of many, and the determination with which he had acted to curb the democratizing threat of political Catholicism and the socialist labour movement was widely admired in the Protestant middle classes. The ‘silent dictatorship’ of Hindenburg and Ludendorff had put the precepts of ruthless, authoritarian rule into practice at a moment of supreme national crisis in 1916 and created an ominous precedent for the future.

The army simply melted away as the Armistice of 11 November was concluded, and the democratic parties were left, as Ludendorff had intended, to negotiate, if negotiate was the word, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

It was in this atmosphere of national trauma, political extremism, violent conflict and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born. Most of the elements that went into its eclectic ideology were already current in Germany before 1914 and had become even more familiar to the public during the war. The dramatic collapse of Germany into political chaos towards the end of 1918, a chaos that endured for several years after the war, provided the spur to translate extreme ideas into violent action.

Kaas demanded among other things much greater independence for the executive from the legislature in Germany. Another leading Centre Party politician, Eugen Bolz, Minister-President of Württemberg, put it more bluntly when he told his wife early in 1930: ‘I 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 Long before 30 January 1933, the Centre Party had ceased to be the bulwark of Weimar democracy that it had once been.33

Other countries were affected by postwar inflation, but none so badly as Germany. At the height of the hyperinflation, which varied from country to country, prices stood at 14,000 times their prewar level in Austria, 23,000 times in Hungary, 2,500,000 times in Poland and 4,000 million times in Russia, although the inflation here was not strictly comparable to its counterparts elsewhere since the Bolsheviks had largely withdrawn the Soviet economy from the world market. These rates were bad enough. But in Germany, prices had reached a billion times their prewar level, a decline that has entered the annals of economic history as the greatest hyperinflation ever. It was noticeable that all these countries had not fought on the winning side in the war. Each country eventually stabilized its currency, but without much reference to the others. No viable new international financial system emerged in the 1920s to compare with the elaborate set of institutions and agreements that was to govern international finance after the Second World War.86

Other writers gave the coming period of revival a new name that was soon to be taken up with enthusiasm by the radical right: the Third Reich. This concept was popularized by the neo-conservative writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book of this title was published in 1923. The ideal of the Reich had arisen, he proclaimed, with Charlemagne and been resurrected under Bismarck: it was the opposite of the government by party that characterized the Weimar Republic. At present, he wrote, the Third Reich was a dream: it would require a nationalist revolution to make it reality. The political parties that divided Germany would then be swept away. When the Third Reich finally came, it would encompass all political and social groupings in a national revival. It would restore the continuity of German history, recreating its medieval glory; it would be the ‘final Reich’ of all.117 Other writers, such as the jurist Edgar Jung, took up this concept and advocated a ‘conservative revolution’ that would bring about ‘the Third Reich’ in the near future.118

After the war, the widespread belief on the right that the German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionaries in 1918 translated easily into antisemitic demagogy. It was, men like Ludendorff evidently believed, ‘the Jews’ who had done the stabbing, who led subversive institutions like the Communist Party, who agreed to the Treaty of Versailles, who set up the Weimar Republic. In fact, of course, the German army was defeated militarily in 1918. There was, as we have seen, no stab-in-the-back. Leading politicians who signed the Treaty, like Matthias Erzberger, were not Jewish at all. If Jews like Rosa Luxemburg were over-represented in the Communist Party leadership, or, like Eugen Levine in the revolutionary upheavals in Munich early in 1919, they were not acting as Jews but as revolutionaries, alongside many non-Jews (such as Karl Liebknecht, whom many right-wingers thought instinctively must be Jewish because of his ultra-left political views).

Hitler was the product of circumstances as much as anything else. Had things been different, he might never have come to political prominence. At the time of the Bavarian Revolution, he was an obscure rank-and-file soldier who had so far played no part in politics of any kind. Born on 20 April 1889, he was a living embodiment of the ethnic and cultural concept of national identity held by the Pan-Germans; for he was not German by birth or citizenship, but Austrian.

His heart ‘overflowed with proud joy’ at the fact that he was now fighting for Germany.19 For the next four years he remained with his regiment, acting as a dispatch runner, gaining promotion to corporal, and winning two decorations for bravery, the second being the Iron Cross, First Class, on the recommendation, ironically, of a Jewish officer. Shortly afterwards he was caught in a poison-gas attack, a frequent occurrence on both sides in the later stages of the war. Temporarily blinded, he was sent to a military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania in the German north-east, to recover. Here he learned in due course of the German defeat, the Armistice and the Revolution.20

Hitler

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be ... The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

The growing cult of Hitler’s personality in the Nazi Party, fuelled by the Italian precedent, also helped convince Hitler himself that it was he, and not some figure yet to come, who was destined to lead Germany into a future national rebirth, a conviction that was indelibly confirmed by the events of the autumn of 1923.54 By this time, the Nazis had also begun to borrow from the Italian Fascists the rigid, outstretched right-arm salute with which they ritually greeted their leader in an imitation of the ceremonies of Imperial Rome; the leader responded by raising his own right hand, but crooked back at the elbow, palm opened upwards, in a gesture of acceptance. The Nazi Party’s use of elaborate standards to carry its flags also derived from the practice of the Italian Fascists. Mussolini’s main practical influence on Hitler at this period, however, was to convince him that the tactic of a march on the capital was the quickest way to power.

Among ordinary Party activists in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity - the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans - followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler. Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these it was only incidental.

On 6 January 1929 Hitler appointed the faithful Himmler as head of his personal Protection Formation - Schutzstaffel, quickly known by its initials as the SS. This had its origins in a small unit formed early in 1923 to act as Hitler’s bodyguard and protect the Party headquarters. It was refounded in 1925, when Hitler realized that the brownshirts under Röhm would never show him the unconditional loyalty which he required. Its initial commander was Julius Schreck, commander of the brownshirt ‘Assault Squad’ before Hitler’s imprisonment, and from the first it was conceived as an elite formation, in contrast to the catch-all mass paramilitary movement of the brownshirts. In the intra-party intrigues of the mid-1920s the SS went through a number of leaders, all of whom failed to assert its independence from the growing power of the brownshirts, though they did manage to build it up as a closely disciplined, tightly knit corps of men. Himmler succeeded where they had failed.

But Hitler had built up around him a crucial group of men whose devotion to him was wholly unconditional - men like Goebbels, Goring, Hess, Himmler, Rosenberg, Schirach and Streicher. Under their leadership, and thanks to Strasser’s organizational talent, the Nazi movement by the middle of 1929 had become an elaborate, well-organized political body whose appeal was directed to virtually every sector of the population. Its propaganda was becoming rapidly more sophisticated. Its paramilitary wing was taking on the Communist Red Front-Fighters and Social Democratic Reichsbanner in the streets. Its internal police force, the SS, was poised to take action against the dissident and the disobedient in its own ranks. It had acquired, modified and elaborated a crude, largely unoriginal, but fanatically held ideology centred on extreme nationalism, hate-filled antisemitism and contempt for Weimar democracy.

But in January 1932 this still lay some way in the future. For the time being, the Nazi Party continued, as before, to finance its activities mainly through the voluntary contributions of its members, through entry fees to its meetings, through the income from its press and publications and through donations from small firms and businesses rather than large ones.

Hitler and his Party offered a vague but powerful rhetorical vision of a Germany united and strong, a movement that transcended social boundaries and overcame social conflict, a racial community of all Germans working together, a new Reich that would rebuild Germany’s economic strength and restore the nation to its rightful place in the world. This was a message that had a powerful appeal to many who looked nostalgically back to the Reich created by Bismarck, and dreamed of a new leader who would resurrect Germany’s lost glory. It was a message that summed up everything that many people felt was wrong with the Republic, and gave them the opportunity to register the profundity of their disillusion with it by voting for a movement that was its opposite in every respect.

What the Nazis did not offer, however, were concrete solutions to Germany’s problems, least of all in the area where they were most needed, in economy and society. More strikingly still, the public disorder which loomed so large in the minds of the respectable middle classes in 1930, and which the Nazis promised to end through the creation of a tough, authoritarian state, was to a considerable extent of their own making. Many people evidently failed to realize this, blaming the Communists instead, and seeing in the violence of the brown-uniformed Nazi stormtroopers on the streets a justified, or at least understandable reaction to the violence and aggression of the Red Front-Fighters’ League.

The reasons for the Nazis’ success at the polls in July 1932 were much the same as they had been in September 1930; nearly two more years of sharply deepening crisis in society, politics and the economy had rendered these factors even more powerful than they had been before. The election confirmed the Nazis’ status as a rainbow coalition of the discontented, with, this time, a greatly increased appeal to the middle classes, who had evidently overcome the hesitation they had displayed two years earlier, when they had turned to the splinter-groups of the right. Electors from the middle-class parties had by now almost all found their way into the ranks of Nazi Party voters.

Whatever police protection had been provided for meetings before 30 January had been entirely removed on the orders of the Interior Ministry.34 Nazi stormtroopers could now beat up and murder Communists and Social Democrats with impunity. On 5 February 1933, in one particularly shocking incident, a young Nazi shot dead the Social Democratic mayor of Stassfurt. A few days later, when the Social Democratic official daily Forwards condemned the killing of a Communist by stormtroopers during a street battle in Eisleben, the Police President of Berlin banned the paper for a week.35

German people, give us four years’ time and then pass judgment upon us. German people, give us four years, and I swear to you, just as we, just as I have taken this office, so shall I leave it. I have done it neither for salary nor for wages; I have done it for your sake! ... For I cannot divest myself of my faith in my people, cannot dissociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my people, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us will hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.45

The appeal to religion in this moment is clearly inserted precisely

Hitler’s dramatic and emotional claim that all he needed was four years was designed to heighten the feeling in his listeners that he was engaged in a Christ-like pilgrimage of self-sacrifice. These sentiments were repeated in further speeches at other venues in the following days, to similarly enthusiastic audiences.

Overriding Papen’s objections to clause 2, the cabinet agreed to present the decree to Hindenburg, who signed it despite the fact that it ceded a significant part of his powers to the Hitler government. It came into effect immediately. Paragraph 1 suspended key articles of the Weimar constitution and declared: Thus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and association, and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property rights are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. Paragraph 2 allowed the government to take over the federated states if public order was endangered. These two paragraphs, valid ‘until further notice’, provided the legal pretext for everything that was to follow in the next few months.66 The Nazi seizure of power could now begin in earnest.

In some cases, for instance, the courts argued that since the Communist Party was no longer able to pursue its policies of changing the German constitution by parliamentary means, it must be trying to change it by force, which was now a treasonable offence, so anyone who belonged to it must be doing the same. Increasingly, therefore, the courts treated membership of the party after 30 January 1933, occasionally even before that, as a treasonable activity. In all but name, the Communist Party was effectively outlawed from 28 February 1933, and completely banned from 6 March onwards, the day after the election.72

The sheer scale of the repression can be gauged by the fact that the Communist Party leadership reported that 130,000 party members had been arrested and imprisoned by the end of 1933, and 2,500 had been murdered. These figures were probably something of an exaggeration, but they did not deceive when it came to estimating the impact of the repression on the party’s organization. In the Ruhr area, for example, almost half the entire party membership was taken into custody. As early as the end of March, the Prussian police reported that some 20,000 Communists had been seized and put into gaol.101 Even the most conservative, quasi-official reckoning put the total number of political arrests in Germany in 1933 at over 100,000, and the number of deaths in custody at nearly 600.102 This was violence and murder on a staggering level, not seen in Germany since the early days of the Weimar Republic.

Germany was well on the way to becoming a dictatorship even before the Reichstag fire decree and the elections of 5 March 1933. But these two events undoubtedly speeded it up and provided it with the appearance, however threadbare, of legal and political legitimation.

With the Enabling Act now in force, the Reichstag could be effectively dispensed with. From this point on, Hitler and his cabinet ruled by decree, either using President Hindenburg as a rubber stamp, or bypassing him entirely, as the Act allowed them to. Nobody believed that when the four years of the Act’s duration had elapsed, the Reichstag would be in a position to object to its renewal, nor was it. As with the Reichstag fire decree, a temporary piece of emergency legislation with some limited precedents in the Weimar period now became the legal, or pseudo-legal basis for the permanent removal of civil rights and democratic liberties. Renewed in 1937 and again in 1939, it was made permanent by decree in 1943. The brownshirt terror on the streets was already comprehensive enough to make it quite clear what was now about to happen. Wels was right to predict that Germany would soon become a one-party state.114

Vicar-General Steinmann was photographed raising his arm in the Nazi salute. He declared that Hitler had been given to the German people by God in order to lead them.134 Catholic student organizations published a declaration of loyalty to the new regime (‘the only way to restore Christianity to our culture ... Hail to our Leader Adolf Hitler’). Catholic newspapers ceased publication or turned themselves into something like Nazi propaganda organs.135

Reflecting on this process a few years later, the lawyer Raimund Pretzel asked himself what had happened to the 56 per cent of Germans who had voted against the Nazis in the elections of 5 March 1933. How was it, he wondered, that this majority had caved in so rapidly? Why had virtually every social, political and economic institution in Germany fallen into the hands of the Nazis with such apparent ease? ‘The simplest, and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason’, he concluded, ‘was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.’ Many, he also thought, had felt betrayed by the weakness of their political leaders, from Braun and Severing to Hugenberg and Hindenburg, and they joined the Nazis in a perverse act of revenge. Some were impressed by the fact that everything the Nazis had predicted seemed to be coming true. ‘There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction. Then of course many jumped on the bandwagon, wanted to be part of a perceived success.’ In the circumstances of the Depression, when times were hard and jobs were scarce, people clung to the mechanical routine of daily life as the only form of security: not to have gone along with the Nazis would have meant risking one’s livelihood and prospects, to have resisted could mean risking one’s ...

The coming of the Third Reich essentially happened in two phases. The first ended with Hitler’s nomination as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. This was no ‘seizure of power’. Indeed, the Nazis themselves did not use this term to describe the appointment, since it smacked of an illegal putsch. They were still careful at this stage to refer to an ‘assumption of power’ and to call the coalition a ‘government of national renewal’ or, more generally, a government of ‘national uprising’, depending on whether they wished to stress the legitimacy of the cabinet’s appointment by the President or the legitimacy of its supposed backing by the nation.118

The Nazis, of course, never won a majority of the vote in a free election: 37.4 per cent was all they could manage in their best performance, the Reichstag election of July 1932. Still, this was a high vote by any democratic standards, higher than many democratically elected governments in other countries have achieved since. The roots of the Nazis’ success lay in the failure of the German political system to produce a viable, nationwide conservative party uniting both Catholics and Protestants on the right; in the historic weakness of German liberalism; in the bitter resentments of almost all Germans over the loss of the war and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles; in the fear and disorientation provoked in many middle-class Germans by the social and cultural modernism of the Weimar years, and the hyperinflation of 1923.

The death of democracy in Germany was part of a much broader European pattern in the interwar years; but it also had very specific roots in German history and drew on ideas that were part of a very specific German tradition. German nationalism, the Pan-German vision of the completion through conquest in war of Bismarck’s unfinished work of bringing all Germans together in a single state, the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race and the threat posed to it by the Jews, the belief in eugenic planning and racial hygiene, the military ideal of a society clad in uniform, regimented, obedient and ready for battle—all this and much more that came to fruition in 1933 drew on ideas that had been circulating in Germany since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Some of these ideas, in turn, had their roots in other countries or were shared by significant thinkers within them - the racism of Gobineau, the anticlericalism of Schonerer, the paganist fantasies of Lanz von Liebenfels, the pseudo-scientific population policies of Darwin’s disciples in many countries, and much more. But they came together in Germany in a uniquely poisonous mixture, rendered all the more potent by Germany’s pre-eminent position as the most advanced and most powerful state on the European Continent. In the years following the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the rest of Europe, and the world, would learn just how poisonous that mixture could be.