The Coming of the Third Reich
Read The Coming of the Third Reich Online
Authors: Richard J. Evans
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #Military, #World War II
Table of Contents
Part 1 - THE LEGACY OF THE PAST
Part 2 - THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY
Part 4 - TOWARDS THE SEIZURE OF POWER
Part 5 - CREATING THE THIRD REICH
Part 6 - HITLER’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION
‘AGAINST THE UN-GERMAN SPIRIT’
A ‘REVOLUTION OF DESTRUCTION’?
Praise for
The Coming of the Third Reich
“Will long remain the definitive English-language account ... both gripping and precise ... An always reliable, often magisterial synthesis of a vast body of scholarship, and a frequently deft blend of narrative and interpretation, Evans’s book is an impressive achievement.”
—Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
“Brilliant.”
—Richard Cohen, The Washington Post
“Richard Evans’s
The Coming of the Third Reich
gives the clearest and most gripping account I’ve read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis.”
—A. S. Byatt, The Times Literary Supplement
“Richard J. Evans’s
Coming of the Third Reich
is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgeable and reliable ... vivid ... Evans shows how the ingredients for Nazi triumph were assembled and what was needed to make them jell: add war and depression, cook in a turbulent political atmosphere for several years and serve hot.”
—Mark Mazower, The New York Times Book Review
“Why, Mr. Evans asks, did Germany deliver itself over to the Third Reich? Mr. Evans’s answer is a brilliant and sweeping work of history.... He has mastered the vast scholarship on the politics, economics, ideology, and culture of Weimar Germany ... more important, he has synthesized all this knowledge into a lucid, absorbing dramatic and accessible book.”
—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
“A masterly and most illuminating interpretation of its subject, which makes one look forward eagerly to the volumes to come.”
—Roger Morgan, The Times Literary Supplement
“The generalist reader, it should be emphasized, is well served.... The book reads briskly, covers all important areas—social and cultural—and succeeds in its aim of giving voice to the people who lived through the years with which it deals.”
—Roger K. Miller, The Denver Post
“Gripping ... Evans broadens the historic perspective to demythologize how morbidly fertile the years before World War II were as an incubator for Hitler.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible.... A peerless work ... Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Evans provides an erudite, fascinating, and sometimes painfully moving account of one society’s slow collapse into nightmare and evil.”
—Timothy Giannuzzi, Calgary Herald
“One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evans poses and so masterfully grapples with.”
—Abraham Brumberg, The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard J. Evans was educated at Oxford, has taught at Columbia and the University of London, and is currently Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His books include
Death in Hamburg
(winner of the Wolfson Literary Award for History),
In Hitler’s Shadow, Rituals of Retribution
(winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History),
In Defense of History,
and
Lying About Hitler.
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
10 9
Copyright © Richard J. Evans, 2003
All rights reserved
Evans, Richard J.
The coming of the Third Reich : a history / Richard J. Evans.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04058-4
1. Germany—History—1871-1918. 2. Germany—History—1918-1933. 3. National socialism—History. I. Title.
DD221.E94 2004
943.08—dc22
2003063205
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For Matthew and Nicholas
Preface
I
This book is the first of three on the history of the Third Reich. It tells the story of the origins of the Third Reich in the nineteenth-century Bismarckian Empire, the First World War and the bitter postwar years of the Weimar Republic. It goes on to recount the Nazis’ rise to power through a combination of electoral success and massive political violence in the years of the great economic Depression from 1929 to 1933. Its central theme is how the Nazis managed to establish a one-party dictatorship in Germany within a very short space of time, and with seemingly little real resistance from the German people. A second book will deal with the development of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1939. It will analyse its central institutions, describe how it worked and what it was like to live in it, and recount its drive to prepare people for a war that would reinstate Germany’s position as the leading power in Europe. The war itself is the subject of a third and final book that will deal with the rapid radicalization of the Third Reich’s policies of military conquest, social and cultural mobilization and repression, and racial extermination, until it ended in total collapse and destruction in 1945. A concluding chapter will examine the aftermath of the twelve short years of the Reich’s history and its legacy for the present and the future.
These three books are addressed in the first place to people who know nothing about the subject, or who know a little and would like to know more. I hope that specialists will find something of interest in them, but they are not the primary readership for which the books are intended. The legacy of the Third Reich has been widely discussed in the media in recent years. It continues to attract widespread attention. Restitution and compensation, guilt and apology have become sensitive political and moral issues. Images of the Third Reich, and museums and memorials calling attention to the impact of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, are all around us. Yet the background to all this in the history of the Third Reich itself is often missing. That is what these three books aim to provide.
Anyone embarking on a project such as this must inevitably begin by asking whether it is really necessary to write yet another history of Nazi Germany. Surely we have had enough? Surely so much has already been written that there is little more to add? Undoubtedly, few historical topics have been the subject of such intensive research. The latest edition of the standard bibliography on Nazism, published by the indefatigable Michael Ruck in 2000, lists over 37,000 items; the first edition, which appeared in 1995, listed a mere 25,000. This startling increase in the number of titles is eloquent testimony to the continuing, never-ending outpouring of publications on the subject.
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No historian can hope to master even a major portion of such an overwhelming literature. And indeed, some have found the sheer volume of information that is available so daunting, so seemingly impossible to pull together, that they have given up in despair. As a result, there have, in fact, been surprisingly few attempts to write the history of the Third Reich on a large scale. True, recent years have seen the publication of some excellent brief, synoptic surveys, notably by Norbert Frei and Ludolf Herbst,
2
some stimulating analytical treatments, particularly Detlev Peukert’s
Inside Nazi Germany,
3
and some useful collections of documents, of which the four-volume English-language anthology edited with extensive commentaries by Jeremy Noakes is outstanding.
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But the number of broad, general, large-scale histories of Nazi Germany that have been written for a general audience can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The first of these, and by far the most successful, was William L. Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
published in 1960. Shirer’s book has probably sold millions of copies in the four decades or more since its appearance. It has never gone out of print and remains the first port of call for many people who want a readable general history of Nazi Germany. There are good reasons for the book’s success. Shirer was an American journalist who reported from Nazi Germany until the United States entered the war in December, 1941, and he had a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and the illuminating incident. His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter’s despatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. The emigré German scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer’s book presented an ‘unbelievably crude’ account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had ’glaring gaps’ in its coverage. It concentrated far too much on high politics, foreign policy and military events, and even in 1960 it was ‘in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period’. Getting on for half a century later, this comment is even more justified than it was in Epstein’s day. For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer’s book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.
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