The Coming of the Third Reich

by Richard J. Evans

Overview

"The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement

There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans’s history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian’s art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143034698
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/25/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	29,372
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 10.88(h) x 1.21(d)
Age Range:	18 - 17 Years

About the Author

Richard J. Evans was born in London and educated at Oxford University. He has taught at Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London, and since 2014 has been the Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge. His many publications include an acclaimed three-volume history of the Third Reich and a recent collection of essays, The Third Reich in History and Memory. A Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is a past winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and was twice a History Honoree at the Los Angeles Times Book Awards. In 2012 he was appointed Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List, for services to scholarship.

Read an Excerpt

On 10 May 1933, German students organized an "act against the un-German spirit" in nineteen university towns across the land. They compiled a list of "un-German" books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares and set them alight. In Berlin the book-burning event was joined at the students’ request by Joseph Goebbels. He told them that they were "doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames" in what he called a "strong, great and symbolic act.”

One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect, to the accompaniment of slogans such as "Against class struggle and materialism, for the national community and an idealistic outlook: Marx, Kautsky"; "Against decadence and moral decay, for discipline and morality in family and state: Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner."  The works of Freud were consigned to the flames for their "debasing exaggeration of man’s animal nature"; the books of the popular historian and biographer Emil Ludwig were burned for their "denigration" of the "great figures" of German history; the writings of the radical pacifist journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Karl von Ossietzky were destroyed for their "arrogance and presumption." A particular category in itself was reserved for Erich Maria Remarque, whose critical novel All Quiet on the Western Front was thrown onto the fire "against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War, for the education of the nation in the spirit of military preparedness." Many other books besides those read out in these incantatory slogans were thrown onto the pyres. The national student organization issued "twelve theses against the un-German spirit" to accompany the action, demanding the introduction of censorship and the purging of libraries and declaring: "Our opponent is the Jew and anyone who submits to him."

Already by 12 March, in a prelude to this action, stormtroopers had ransacked the library of the trade union center in Heidelberg, removed books and burned them in a small bonfire outside the door. A similar event had taken place outside Magnus Hirschfeld’s sex research institute in Berlin on 6 May.  But the 10 May book burning was on a much larger scale and much more thoroughly prepared. Students had been combing libraries and bookshops in readiness for the occasion since the middle of April. Some booksellers courageously refused to hang up posters advertising the event in their shop windows, but many others gave in to the threats with which the students accompanied their action. In Heidelberg, where the book burning took place on 17 May, the students processed with flaming torches, accompanied by SA, SS and steel helmets and members of the dueling corps, and threw Communist and Social Democratic insignia into the flames as well as books. The event was accompanied by the singing of the Horst Wessel Song and the national anthem. Speeches were delivered in which the action was presented as a blow against the "un-German spirit." The Weimar Republic had incorporated this "Jewish-subversive" spirit; it was now finally consigned to history.

All of this marked the culmination of a widespread action "against the un-German spirit" set in motion weeks before by the Propaganda Ministry. As so often in the history of the Third Reich, the apparently spontaneous action was in fact centrally coordinated, although not by Goebbels, but by the national student union. The Nazi official in charge of purging Berlin’s public libraries helpfully provided a list of the books to be burned, and the central office of the national student union wrote and distributed the slogans to be used in the ceremony. In this way, the Nazi student organization ensured that the book burning took a roughly similar course in all the university towns where it was carried out. And where the students led, others followed, in localities across the land. At a celebration of the summer solstice of 1933 in the small town of Neu-Isenburg, for instance, eight thousand people watched "Marxist" literature being burned in a huge pile in an open space behind the fire station. As the local women’s gymnastics club danced around the fire, the local party leader gave a speech, followed by a rendition of the Horst Wessel Song by the assembled multitude.  Book burning was by no means a practice confined to the highly educated.

But one precedent above all others inspired the action of 10 May 1933. The Nazi book burning was a conscious echo of an earlier ritual performed by radical nationalist students at the celebration of the 18 October 1817 three hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous launching of the Reformation with the publication of his theses attacking the Catholic Church. At the close of the day’s festivities at the Wartburg castle in Thuringia, the students had thrown symbols of authority and "un-German" books such as the Code Napoléon onto a bonfire in a form of symbolic execution. This action might have provided a precedent in Germany’s canon of nationalist demonstrations, but in fact it had little in common with its later imitation in 1933, since a principal concern of the Wartburg festival was to express solidarity with Poland and to demonstrate in favor of the freedom of the German press, still constricted by massive censorship from the police regime inspired by Prince Metternich. Still, as the flames rose to the skies in Germany’s ancient seats of learning on 10 May 1933, encouraged or tolerated by the newly Nazified university authorities, there must have been more than a few who recalled the poet Heinrich Heine’s comment

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Maps and Diagrams
Preface

1. The Legacy of the Past
German Peculiarities
Gospels of Hate
The Spirit of 1914
Descent Into Chaos

2. The Failure of Democracy
The Weaknesses of Weimar
The Great Inflation
Culture Wars
The Fit and the Unfit

3. The Rise of Nazism
Bohemian Revolutionaries
The Beer-Hall Purtsch
Rebuilding the Movement
The Roots of Commitment

4. Towards the Seizure of Power
The Great Depression
The Crisis of Democracy
The Victory of Violence
Fateful Decisions

5. Creating The Third Reich
The Terror Begins
Fire in the Reichstag
Democracy Destroyed
Bringing Germany Into Line

6. Hitler's Cultural Revolution
Discordant Notes
The Purge of the Arts
'Against the Un-German Spirit'
A 'Revolution of Destruction'?

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich...gives the clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before aznd during the rise of the Nazis."—A. S Byatt, in the Times Literary Supplement

"Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgable and reliable..."—Mark Mazower in the New York Times Book Review

"[A] first-rate narrative history that informs and educates and may inspire readers to delve even deeper into the subject."—Booklist

“…Brilliant…”–Washington Post

“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.”—Denver Post

“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 Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with.”―Abraham Brumberg, The Nation

“This first part of what will be Evans’ three-volume history of Hitler’s regime is the most comprehensive and convincing work so far on the gall of Weimar and Hitler’s rise to power.”―Foreign Affairs

Editorial Reviews

"Richard J. 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, Times Literary Supplement

"Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgable and reliable." —Mark Mazower, New York Times Book Review

"[A] first-rate narrative history that informs and educates and may inspire readers to delve even deeper into the subject." —Booklist

"Brilliant.”–Washington Post

“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.” —Denver Post

“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 Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with.” ―Abraham Brumberg, The Nation

“This first part of what will be Evans’ three-volume history of Hitler’s regime is the most comprehensive and convincing work so far on the gall of Weimar and Hitler’s rise to power.” ―Foreign Affairs

From the Publisher

Evans has accomplished his goal of writing a readable account of the origins of the Third Reich from the unification of Germany in 1871 to the establishment of the Nazi regime in 1933. He provides many insights into the political culture of imperial and Weimar Germany, the mentality of the Nazi storm troopers and the impacts of the inflation of the early 1920s and the depression and unemployment of the early 1930s.
— The Washington Post

Omer Bartov

Richard J. Evans's Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis -- knowledgeable and reliable, and playing to the author's strengths as it highlights the interconnections between politics and society. Evans, the author of several books about Nazi Germany, reminds us at the outset that we should not read too much into the activities of nasty but small anti-Semitic and nationalist extremist groups before World War I. Instead he underscores the importance of the postwar crisis, a Germany left bitterly divided between Social Democrats and Communists, an economy ravaged by unemployment and a country led astray by a political and industrial elite with no real commitment to democracy. This is a vivid although familiar account of why the Weimar Republic collapsed. 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

Evans asks, in different ways, whether the movement's rise to power was as irresistible as the Nazis tried to make it seem.

New York Newsday

On March 30, 1933, two months after Hitler achieved power, Paul Nikolaus, a Berlin cabaret comedian, wrote disconsolately, "For once, no joke. I am taking my own life.... [U]nfortunately I have fallen in love with my Fatherland. I cannot live in these times." How Germans could remain in love with their fatherland under Nazism and even contribute willingly to its horrific extremism is the subject of Cambridge historian Evans's gripping if overwhelmingly detailed study, the first of three projected volumes. Readers watch a great and historic culture grow grotesquely warped from within, until, in 1933, a dictatorial state was imposed upon the ruins of the Weimar republic. A host of shrill demagogues had, in the preceding decades, become missionaries to an uneasy coalition of the discontented, eager to subvert Germany's democratic institutions. This account contrasts with oversimplified diagnoses of how Nazism succeeded in taking possession of the German psyche. Evans asserts that Hitler's manipulative charisma required massive dissatisfaction and resentment available to be exploited. Nazism found convenient scapegoats in historic anti-Semitism, the shame of an imposed peace after WWI and the weakness of an unstable government alien to the disciplined German past. Although there have been significant recent studies of Hitler and his regime, like Ian Kershaw's brilliant two volumes, Evans (In Hitler's Shadow, etc.) broadens the historic perspective to demythologize how morbidly fertile the years before WWI were as an incubator for Hitler. 31 illus., 18 maps. (Feb. 9) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This first part of what will be Evans' three-volume history of Hitler's regime is the most comprehensive and convincing work so far on the fall of Weimar and Hitler's rise to power. Unlike past accounts suggesting that things could have turned out differently had some of the key players been less foolish, Evans builds, stone by stone, a monument to prove that Hitler's ascent was the only possible outcome even though the Nazi Party never captured an absolute majority of votes. He begins with the legacy of the past: how "mainstream parties" adopted anti-Semitic ideas; how pseudoscientific notions of racial hygiene developed starting before 1914; how Germany's defeat in World War I allowed Nazism to emerge as a serious political force by causing Germans to seek "an authoritarian alternative to the civilian politics that seemed so signally to have failed Germany in its hour of need." He finds the Weimar Constitution no worse than many others, but "the fatal lack of legitimacy from which the Republic suffered magnified the constitution's faults many times over." With that lack of legitimacy compounded by hyperinflation, depression, and cultural clashes, the Nazis managed to prevail through a deadly combination of violence and propaganda, both unprecedented in their intensity.

The last part of the book is a detailed, depressing account of Hitler's transformation of Germany in a few months in 1933, including the "cultural revolution" in which both Martin Heidegger and storm troopers played key roles. The Nazi "revolution," Evans concludes, was meant to be "the world-historical negation of its French predecessor," offering "a synthesis of the revolutionary and the restorative." Unconcerned with overthrowing the social system, Nazism focused on "race, culture and ideology"-and on creating "a dictatorship the like of which had never yet been seen."

Foreign Affairs

Do we really need another history of the Third Reich? Evans (history, Cambridge Univ.; Lying About Hitler) answers that while studies of Nazism have proliferated, what is lacking is a narrative and analytical history directed at the general reader. His projected trilogy aims to provide just that. This impressive first volume covers the period from the founding of modern Germany (1871) through Hitler's coming to power (1933). Evans argues that to regard Hitler's rise as the logical by-product of a fundamental flaw in the German character often requires bending evidence for this thesis from disparate events and themes throughout German history. Although Evans does not regard Nazism as inevitable, he does not lose sight of the myriad anti-Semitic movements that populated the German landscape, along with the various forces-militarism, socialism, capitalism-vying for influence in German society. Germany was an industrial giant by 1914, yet paradoxically its economic success concealed the fact that it had not yet completed the process of nation building. Evans argues that during the crisis of 1933, the leaders of the Weimar republic assumed that the Nazis had at least "a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic politics." Hitler, however, was adept at using democratic institutions, while planning their destruction. Recommended for all libraries.-Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible. But by no means inevitable, writes Evans (History/Cambridge Univ.; In Defense of History, 1999, etc.); indeed, many of the material and cultural conditions for the rise of a regime that "would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and kill nearly six million in the process" were more pronounced in France and Russia than in Germany. Yet, he notes, "Nazism, while far from being the unavoidable outcome of the course of German history, certainly did draw for it success on political and ideological traditions and developments that were specifically German in their nature." Some of those traditions arose during the reign of Otto von Bismarck, who, in unifying Germany, universalized military service and "saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state," answerable to a strong leader alone. Others welled up from Social Darwinist thinkers who believed that the fittest should survive and the weakest be eliminated, thus improving racial stocks and building supermen. The early Nazis found comfort in the example of Weimar leader Paul von Hindenburg, who "had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies"; they found more comfort in the brutal example of the Russian Revolution and the Leninist state, which threatened to spill over into Germany and drove many a middle-class man and woman far to the right. All these strains came together such that there was "substantial overlap between the Nazis' ideology and that of the conservatives [and] even, to a considerable extent, that ofGerman liberals"-opening the door to the Nazi ascendancy while offering hope to many Germans of the time that their country's future would be one "in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome" and prosperity and national pride restored. A peerless work, the first of a projected three volumes. Of immense importance to general readers-and even some specialists-seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime.

Kirkus Reviews