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

by Richard J. Evans

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

The story of how Germany, a stable and modern country, in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair is a story that has sobering lessons for us all; lessons, again, which it is for the reader to take from this book, not for the writer to give.

Germany had acquired impressive industrial might; but this had been achieved by an over-concentration on a narrowly technical education at the expense of broader moral and cultural instruction.

How was it that an advanced and highly cultured nation such as Germany could give in to the brutal force of National Socialism so quickly and so easily? Why was there such little serious resistance to the Nazi takeover? How could an insignificant party of the radical right rise to power with such dramatic suddenness? Why did so many Germans fail to perceive the potentially disastrous consequences of ignoring the violent, racist and murderous nature of the Nazi movement?

Such comparative considerations suggest that it is questionable to assume that it was somehow less likely for an economically advanced and culturally sophisticated society to fall into an abyss of violence and destruction than it was for one that was less so. The fact that Germany had produced a Beethoven, Russia a Tolstoy, Italy a Verdi, or Spain a Cervantes, was wholly irrelevant to the fact that all these countries experienced brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century. High cultural achievements across the centuries did not render a descent into political barbarism more inexplicable than their absence would have done; culture and politics simply do not impinge on each other in so simple and direct a manner. 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.

Indeed, many commentators on the left from the 1930s onwards argued that the advanced nature of German culture and society was itself the major cause of Nazism’s triumph. The German economy was the most powerful in Europe, German society the most highly developed. Capitalist enterprise had reached an unprecedented scale and degree of organization in Germany. Marxists argued that this meant that class conflict between the owners of capital and those they exploited had been ratcheted up until it reached breaking point. Desperate to preserve their power and their profits, big businessmen and their hangers-on used all their influence and all the propagandistic means at their disposal to call into being a mass movement that was dedicated to serving their interests - the Nazi Party - and then to lever it into power and benefit from it once it was there.

Among the many aspects of his creation that survived the fall of Bismarck’s German Reich in 1918, the continued use of the term ‘German Empire’, Deutsches Reich, by the Weimar Republic and all its institutions was far from being the least significant. The word ‘Reich’ conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God’s Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all German speakers in Central Europe - ‘one People, one Reich, one Leader’, as the Nazi slogan was to put it.9 There always remained those in Germany who thought Bismarck’s creation only a partial realization of the idea of a true German Reich. Initially, their voices were drowned by the euphoria of victory. But with time, their number was to grow.

They also thereby legitimized the use of force for political ends to a degree well beyond what was common in most other countries except when they contemplated imperial conquests in other parts of the world. Militarism in state and society was to play an important part in undermining German democracy in the 1920s and in the coming of the Third Reich.

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.

On the contrary, military arrogance was strengthened by the colonial experience, when German armed forces ruthlessly put down rebellions of indigenous peoples such as the Hereros in German South-West Africa (now Namibia).20 In 1904-7, in an act of deliberate genocide, the German army massacred thousands of Herero men, women and children and drove many more of them into the desert, where they starved. From a population of some 80,000 before the war, the Hereros declined to a mere 15,000 by 1911 as a result of these actions.

Another genocide I’d never heard of.

The myth of the dictatorial leader was not the expression of an ancient, ingrained aspect of the German character; it was a much more recent creation. It was fuelled in the early twentieth century by the public memory of Bismarck’s tough stance against those whom he regarded as the internal enemies of the Reich.

Already under Bismarck the state increasingly tried to Germanize these minorities, attacking the use of their languages in the schools and actively encouraging settlement by ethnic Germans.

These increasingly ambitious dreams of world power were articulated above all by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, a bombastic, self-important and extremely loquacious man who lost few opportunities to express his contempt for democracy and civil rights, his disdain for the opinions of others and his belief in Germany’s greatness.

Sounds like someone we know.

All over the Continent, the growing forces of democracy threatened the hegemony of conservative elites. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the age of nationalism not just in Germany, but everywhere in Europe, and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ was taking place in many other countries as well.

German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition. It was riven by rapidly deepening internal conflicts which were increasingly exported into the unresolved tensions of the political system that Bismarck had created.43 These tensions found release in an increasingly vociferous nationalism, mixed in with alarmingly strident doses of racism and antisemitism, which were to leave a baleful legacy for the future.

It was developments such as these that made the Jews the target for disgruntled and unscrupulous agitators like Hermann Ahlwardt. 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 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.

Travelling round their farms, he told them that their misfortunes, brought on them in fact by a world depression in agricultural prices, had been caused by the Jews, a distant and to them obscure religious minority who lived far away in the big towns and financial centres of Europe and the Reich.

Christian hostility to the Jews provided a crucial launch-pad for modern antisemitism, not least because it often harboured a strong element of racial prejudice itself and was subsumed into racial antisemitism in a variety of ways. But by the late nineteenth century it was becoming increasingly out of date, at least in its purest, most traditional form, particularly as the Jews were ceasing to be an easily identifiable religious minority and were beginning to convert and marry into Christian society at an increasing pace. Searching for a scapegoat for their economic difficulties in the 1870s, lower-middle-class demagogues and scribblers turned to the Jews, not as a religious but a racial minority, and began to advocate not the total assimilation of Jews into German society, but their total exclusion from it.

Moreover, the antisemitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politics that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum. This, too, remained on the fringes, but, here again, it had now become possible to utter in parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse.

These authors developed a new language of vehemence and violence in their diatribes against the Jews. The Jews, for Langbehn, were a ‘poison for us and will have to be treated as such’; ‘the Jews are only a passing plague and a cholera’, as he put it in 1892. Langbehn’s book went through forty reprints in little over a year and continued to be a best-seller long after, combining scurrilous attacks on what its author called ‘Jews and idiots, Jews and scoundrels, Jews and whores, Jews and professors, Jews and Berliners’ with a call for the restoration of a hierarchical society led by a ‘secret Kaiser’ who would one day emerge from the shadows to restore Germany to its former glory.

Sounds like some QAnon garbage.

‘Aryan’

One aspect of the selectionist turn in Social Darwinism during the 1890s was to put greater emphasis than before on ‘negative selection’. It was all very well improving the race by better housing, health care nutrition, hygiene and sanitation and similar policies, some argued. But this would do little to counteract the influence of society’s abandonment of the principle of the struggle for survival by caring for the weak, the unhealthy and the inadequate. Such a policy, argued some medical scientists, whose views were reinforced by the emergence of the fledgling science of genetics, was bringing about the increasing degeneracy of the human race. It had to be counteracted by a scientific approach to breeding that would reduce or eliminate the weak and improve and multiply the strong.

Still, before the First World War there seems little evidence that Ploetz himself considered the ‘Aryan’ race superior to others, although one of his closest collaborators, Fritz Lenz, certainly did. Ploetz took a ruthlessly meritocratic line on eugenic planning, arguing, for example, that a panel of doctors should attend all births and determine whether the baby was fit to survive or should be killed as weak and inadequate. The Darwinist Alexander Tille openly advocated the killing of the mentally and physically unfit, and agreed with Ploetz and Schallmayer that children’s illnesses should be left untreated so that the weak could be eliminated from the chain of heredity.

The triumphs of German medical science in discovering the bacilli that caused diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis in the nineteenth century had given it unparalleled intellectual prestige as well as inadvertently furnishing antisemites with a whole new language in which to express their hatred and fear of the Jews.

As a result, it had brought about a widespread medicalization of society, in which ordinary people, including an increasing proportion of the working class, had begun to adopt hygienic practices such as washing regularly, disinfecting bathrooms, boiling drinking water and so on. The concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’.

Several fundamental principles united virtually everyone in this motley crowd of scientists, doctors and propagandists for racial hygiene. The first was that heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behaviour. The second, which followed on from this, was that society, led by the state, should manage the population in order to increase national efficiency. The ‘fit’ had to be persuaded, or forced, to breed more, the ‘unfit’ to breed less. Thirdly, however these terms were understood, the racial hygiene movement introduced an ominously rational and scientific categorization of people into those who were ‘valuable’ to the nation and those who were not.

‘Low quality’ - the 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, which some of them at least were already advocating before 1914.

Finally, such a technocratically rationalistic approach to population management presupposed an entirely secular, i...

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.

the creation of a new society ruled by a band of brothers, an elite of vigorous young men who would rule the state rather like a medieval knightly brotherhood.

Academic writers

Writers such as Hans Blüher, strongly influenced by the youth movement, went to even greater extremes in their plea for the state to be reorganized along anti-democratic lines and led by a close-knit group of heroic men united by homoerotic ties of love and affection.

the swastika

What such currents of thought emphasized was in sharp contrast to the bourgeois virtues of sobriety and self-restraint, and diametrically opposite to the principles on which liberal nationalism rested, such as freedom of thought, representative government, tolerance for the opinions of others and the fundamental rights of the individual.

The liberals themselves were still very much a force to be reckoned with, and there were even signs of a modest liberal revival in the last years of peace before 1914.89 But already by this time, serious attempts had begun to weld together some of the ideas of extreme nationalism, antisemitism and the revolt against convention into a new synthesis, and to give it organizational shape. The political maelstrom of radical ideologies out of which Nazism would eventually emerge was already swirling powerfully well before the First World War.

‘hail!’—

‘the Leader’ (Führer

German League for the Prevention of the Emancipation of Women (1912),

😮❗️

The extreme nationalists portrayed themselves as voices in the wilderness; unless they were heard, it would be too late. Desperate peril demanded desperate remedies. Only by a return to the racial roots of the German nation in the peasantry, the self-employed artisan and small businessman, and the traditional nuclear family, could the situation be rescued. The big cities were sinks of un-German immorality and disorder. Strong measures were needed to restore order, decency and a properly German concept of culture. A new Bismarck was needed, tough, ruthless, unafraid to pursue aggressive policies at home and abroad, if the nation was to be saved.

I'm not reading this book expecting to see a simple "here's how any country, anywhere, at any time becomes a brutal autocracy." But I am interested in thoughtfully considering similarities in Germany and the US before autocracy and what the preconditions for autocracy were for Germany then, and if that knowledge provides any insight into the near future of the USA. This paragraph is disturbing because these strains of thought and activism have always been part of the US and seem to be experiencing a surge in Trump's America.

Pushing the civilian politicians aside, Hindenburg and Ludendorff established a ‘silent dictatorship’ in Germany, with military rule behind the scenes, severe curbs on civil liberties, central control of the economy and the generals calling the shots in the formulation of war aims and foreign policy. All of these developments were to provide significant precedents for the more drastic fate that overtook German democracy and civil freedom less than two decades later.

Amongst the minority of ‘Independent Social Democrats’, a few, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founded the German Communist Party in December 1918.

Events in Hungary gave Central Europeans for the first time a taste of the new levels of political violence and conflict that were to emerge from the tensions created by the war.

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 ‘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 problems bequeathed to the German political system by Bismarck and his successors were made infinitely worse by the effects of the war; and to these problems were added others that boded even more trouble for the future. Without the war, Nazism would not have emerged as a serious political force, nor would so many Germans have sought so desperately for an authoritarian alternative to the civilian politics that seemed so signally to have failed Germany in its hour of need.

Given the extent of what Germans had expected to gain in the event of victory, it might have been expected that they would have realized what they stood to lose in the event of defeat. But no one was prepared for the peace terms to which Germany was forced to agree in the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

These provisions were almost universally felt in Germany as an unjustified national humiliation. Resentment was hugely increased by the actions taken, above all by the French, to enforce them. The harshness of the Armistice terms was thrown into sharp relief by the fact that many Germans refused to believe that their armed forces had actually been defeated. Very quickly, aided and abetted by senior army officers themselves, a fateful myth gained currency among large sections of public opinion in the centre and on the right of the political spectrum. Picking up their cue from Richard Wagner’s music-drama The Twilight of the Gods, 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.

The Austrians wanted union; the Germans were prepared to accept union; the principle of national self-determination demanded union. The fact that the Allies forbade union remained a constant source of bitterness in Germany and condemned the new ‘Republic of German-Austria’, as it was known, to two decades of conflict-ridden, crisis-racked existence in which few of its citizens ever came to believe in its legitimacy.

The idea took root in Germany that the whole concept of war crimes, indeed the whole notion of laws of war, was a polemical invention of the victorious Allies based on mendacious propaganda about imaginary atrocities. This left a fateful legacy for the attitudes and conduct of German armed forces during the Second World War.