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

by Richard J. Evans

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.