The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2015-06-18 17:30:55.444436 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1151810 City New York Donor The current gold-standard survey. Clear and well written. No stunning new insights which is probably a good thing. liberal democracy had been imposed on Germany by the victorious allies. None of the political parties active in Germany during the era felt any moral commitment to it. Thus in a crisis, nobody supported it.

The coming of the Third Reich - Open Library The coming of the Third Reich - Open Library

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Finally, Evans spends a long time, too long to really interest me, on “Hitler’s Cultural Revolution.” The Nazis focused both on Jews in high culture and, theoretically separately, on generally degenerate culture (in fairness, Weimar produced an awful lot of the latter). For example, using a technique we sometimes see used to suppress speech today, the conductor Otto Klemperer (the cousin of the diarist) had his performances cancelled “on the usual specious grounds that public safety could not be guaranteed if he appeared on the rostrum.” This cultural suppression was hit or miss in the early days, but increased in severity and harm to people, and of course resulted in substantial emigration. Evans notes that the Nazis did not propagandize about the past; they, like Mussolini, the Italian Futurists, and the American Progressives, were focused on the future, which perhaps held (idealized) elements of the past, but which was to be a new thing, excluding all real aspects of the past. And then the book ends, to be followed by two more volumes, taking Germany through the war. By 1930 at the latest, it had become clear that the Presidential power was in the hands of a man who had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies.” What made this turnaround possible was the fact that parliamentary government no longer functioned in Germany. The country was run by Presidential decree, exercised through an appointed Chancellor. Hindenburg, in his 80s and after 7 years as President, was tired and declining. He never considered democratic alternatives. There was no effective leadership from the more moderate parties. In his preface, Richard Evans fishes up a phenomenal statistic. The standard bibliography of works on the Nazi period stood at more than 37,000 entries in the year 2000, having increased from 'a mere 25,000' in 1995. This is an average rate of 2,400 new items a year. I know that it is untrue to claim that the only bit of history now taught to British school pupils is the Third Reich. But it probably is true that it is the only bit of history they are almost all taught about.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.”

The Third Reich Trilogy - Wikipedia

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 SupplementBerna Günen. "Richard J. Evans, Le Troisième Reich. L'avènement, vol. I et Le Troisième Reich, 1933-1939, vol. II" . Retrieved 2011-10-24.

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed

It's a complicated story. Unlike what my (and maybe your) high school teacher said, it wasn't inflation. It wasn't because the Germans hate Jews, it wasn't because of the Treaty of Versailles, or any other one reason. It was a whole slew of reasons that all came together with the help of a few unfortunate historical accidents and unintentional precedents that allowed Hitler to be chosen as Reich Chancellor and then to carry out a reign of state sponsored terror on his own population to eliminate / neutralize opposition and dissent. The Third Reich Trilogy (review)". BlueRectangle. Archived from the original on 2013-01-07 . Retrieved 2011-10-24. Impressive ... perceptive ... humane ... the most comprehensive history in any language of the disastrous epoch of the Third Reich' The whole of modern German history has been a nostalgic and mad attempt at regaining the old glories of the Holy Roman Reich which was also called the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation'. This was soon ended by the Napoleonic Wars that threw Germany into confusion and made it a faction of warring states. Advocacy of a German nation began to become an important political force in response to the invasion of German territories by France under Napoleon. And the more distant Germany grew from that state, the more they remembered the First Reich as the ideal state when Germany was superior and dreamed of returning to these glory days. Hitler was not German. He was born in Austria and his family emigrated to and from Germany in his early years. His father was serving in the Austrian Government and his conflicts with his father was among the reasons postulated as having caused Hitler to develop a strong affinity for Germany and a hatred for Austria. He started considering Germany his spiritual homeland. Hitler dreamed of becoming an artist but his strict and architectural paintings were rejected as unfit by the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. This led him to cultivate a deep anti-establishment mentality.Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. But the chronology is not the same as the cause. Ontogeny does not really recapitulate phylogeny as expressed in that now discredited theory. In other words one cannot really understand the “cosmic why” of an event by knowing the when of an event. This is why this work is so dissatisfying to me through no flaw in the considerable talents of Richard Evans. But there was another reason. As Evans explains in his preface, he considers many previous Third Reich histories to be contaminated by the rage or horror of their authors. This offends Evans's professional conscience: 'It seems to me inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment. For one thing, it is unhistorical; for another, it is arrogant and presumptuous.' The reader, in other words, is apparently in for a unique experience: a value-free history of the Nazis. That would be drab indeed. Many questions perplex us about the Nazis, about the atrocities they committed and about the beginnings of the Second World War. How could one of the most advanced, highly cultured, industrialized and modern nation states in Europe allow such horrors to come to pass? How could democracy be replaced so easily? How did an extremist party lurking at the fringes of political life take over the entire government in such a shot time without ever raising the wrath of the bigger parties or of the people? How did they establish a one party state without ever commanding a majority in any single election?

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans | Goodreads The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans | Goodreads

From now on it is not up to you to decide whether or not something is true, but whether it is in the interests of the National Socialist Revolution.” In the context of the Industrial Revolution, Jews rapidly urbanized and experienced a period of greater social mobility. With the decreasing role of religion in public life tempering religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, and resentment at the socio-economic success of the Jews led to the newer, and more virulent, racist antisemitism.Evans paints a heartbreaking scenario of the many opportunities (albeit with hindsight) whereby Hitler could have been stopped. These include ... The rise of the Nazi party took several decades and happened from a combination of happenstance and several factors. A combination of economic upheaval, military loss, widespread propaganda, ultra-nationalism, conspiracy theories, normalizing political violence, proliferation of paramilitary groups and ethnic resentment all contributed to the rise and take over of the Nazi party. It seemed like the foundation of the Weimar republic was on shaky footing to begin with. It was parliamentary political legislation with a representative electorate consisting of chiefly social democrats, liberals, central and conservative parties. It was a fractured coalition from the onset. It was also an extremely fractious time during the inception of the republic with each political group having their own paramilitary and siloed off worlds of party propaganda. The communist party was becoming very popular, especially in the context of the Bolshevik revolution. The communist party within Germany wanted the same thing the Bolsheviks did: a vanguard revolution and overthrow of the government. The nationalists at this time were conservative and wanted the return of the Bismarcian monarchy reich. It’s a myth that the Weimar republic was on its way to being a healthy and stable democracy. It was birthed and reared within boiling political turmoil which proved fatal for the republic. It was very far from achieving stability from the beginning. Instead of moral judgments, Evans puts in lively and often contentious historical judgments. He, for instance, thinks that German history before about 1813 is totally irrelevant to the rise of National Socialism; he won't hear the old argument that Luther contributed to an ethos of resigned obedience to Satanic rulers. I think he might be wrong about that. But he is absolutely right about another irrelevance, when he warns that the consumption of high culture (Bach, Cranach, Goethe and all that) tells you nothing whatever about whether the consumer will take to political barbarism. To my regret, he also demolishes my own belief that the Weimar Republic did have a few 'golden years' and might have succeeded. Inspired by Mussolini’s coup in Italy, Hitler tried the Beer Hall Putsch thing which didn’t go over very well. And then he went to prison and wrote his stupid book while the Nazi party was actually made illegal at this point. (So much for censorship). The Nazi party was starting to build pretty good infrastructure but were still very fringe. But they got exactly what they needed to catalyze them into popularity: The Great Depression. The communists surged during the depression and were a fairly violent and extremist group who were more focused on seizing power away from the social democrats. The left wind infighting made everyone who politically mattered at this time kind of blind to the awful potential of the Nazi party. Traditionally conservative elements of the police force, military and civil service began to actively collude with right wing and Nationalist elements to undermine the Weimar democracy in the late 1920's and early 1930's, as the electoral success of the communist party continued to worry traditionalists who longed for a return to centralized state authority and a strong dictatorial leader. This gave the formerly extremist Nazi's room to maneuver and manipulate their way into power.