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

by Richard J. Evans

There was no denying the Nazis’ supreme contempt for democratic institutions. But it is in the nature of democratic institutions that they presuppose at least a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic politics.

Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights. The Nazis knew this, and exploited the dilemma to the full in the second phase of the coming of the Third Reich, from February to July 1933.

At every point, therefore, Hitler and his associates sought a legalistic fig-leaf for their actions. All along, they avoided as far as possible giving their opponents the kind of opportunity that the Social Democrats had taken up in fighting Papen’s Prussian coup of July 1932 through the courts.

and the speed and enthusiasm with which so many people came to identify with the new regime strongly suggests that a large majority of the educated elites in German society, whatever their political allegiance up to that point, were already predisposed to embrace many of the principles upon which Nazism rested.

The Nazis not only seized political power, they also seized ideological and cultural power in the opening months of the Third Reich. This was not only a consequence of the vague and protean quality of many of their own ideological statements, which offered all things to all people; it also derived from the way in which Nazi ideas appealed directly to many of the principles and beliefs which had spread through the German educated elite since the late nineteenth century. In the wake of the First World War, these principles and beliefs were held, not by an embattled revolutionary minority, but by major institutions of society and politics. It was those who rejected them, in part or in their totality, the Communists and the Social Democrats, who thought of themselves as revolutionaries, and were widely regarded as such by the majority of Germans.