The Coming of the Third Reich

As Karl Marx once wrote, people make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. So it is that academic Richard J. Evans from Cambridge University approaches the superb first volume of the planned trilogy of a complete history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, ?The Coming Of the Third Reich?, recognizing the existential constraints people living in the era of National Socialism faced. As Professor Evans puts it, not only are men constrained and shaped by the unique and quite specific web of cultural and social conditions in which they are enmeshed, but they also view these particular conditions through a particular perspective, and through the prism of a socially prescribed set of values, beliefs, and ideologies. Thus, the author argues that in the vast bibliography of works covering the history of the Nazi era, no one has yet covered the epoch in a fashion that does justice to the complex welter of ways, as sociologist C. Wright Mills would phrase it, in which biography and history meaningfully intersect such that one can appreciate what it was like for an individual to live in the times of the National Socialists, and to experience life on the ground as real people who lived through the turbulent 1930s and 1949s did.Indeed, this trilogy is offered in a brilliant attempt to render such a comprehensive history that makes sense of how it that such a baffling and troubling phenomenon could arise in what was considered the most economically, socially, and culturally advanced society of the early 20th century. This volume recounts the story of the origins of the Third Reich in 19th century Germany, from the its very beginnings as Bismarck?s foundling empire, through the events of the First World War, and the turbulent unrest and dissatisfaction of the Weimar years. It also describes the rise of the National Socialists through what the author describes as being an ingenuous combination of electoral success and massive political violence that took place in the chaotic epoch of the Great Depression. The book's central theme centers around how the Nazis managed to forge a one-party dictatorship in a democratic society so quickly, and with so little organized resistance.This volume is, much like William Shirer's classic effort in ?The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich?, a narrative account of the events surrounding the events of the Nazi era. It is a massively documented effort to document the story of the Third Reich in chronological order, and much as Shirer did, attempts to ?give voice to the people who lived through the years? of Nazi rule. The author is quite passionate in voicing his own concern that history once more render for the reader an intelligence recounting of the experiences of ordinary individuals, of the sheer complexity of the their existential constraints and available options, and the often incomprehensible choices they faced. So, what Evans aims to give to the reader in the early 21st century is a better understanding of the Nazi era by recreating all of its elements, in all their complexity and interweaving perplexity, thus reminding readers that, as L.P. Hartley said, "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there".Given the fact that it remains as important today as ever to understand both how and why the Nazis came to power with such speed and relative ease, it is critical to better appreciate the nature of life in the Third Reich, to comprehend why their opponents failed to stop them, and to better realize the nature and the operation of the machinery of the Nazi regime once it had grasped the reins of power. Moreover, it remains crucial to understand the complex mechanism through which the operation and goals of the Third Reich so quickly and fatefully engulfed the rest of Europe and then the world in such a bloodbath of carnage and ruin.Indeed, while the 20th century has no shortages of such catastrophes, including the soviet purge of the 1930s, none of the other such events had such terrifying and cataclysmic consequences for the rest of the world. What Evans offers us here is the masterful opening volume of a trilogy explaining in excruciating detail and breathtaking comprehensiveness the story of how Germany led Europe and the rest of the world into the depths of Hell. It is a book well worth the time and effort to read it. Enjoy!

As a long-time WWII buff, Evans's book deepened my understanding about the origins of the Third Reich. I'd recommend it to WWII students and anyone else who wants to learn about the period.Evans focuses on the nature of German society at the time, and in a way de-emphasizes the role of Hitler himself in the coming of the Reich. Hitler, when put in the context of Germany as a whole, was just what Germany wanted. Evans explains why that is in this book.The first words of the first chapter set the theme for the entire work: after 1918, Germany wanted another Bismarck, a strong leader. Many Germans were united in their common hatred of the imposed Weimar democracy. They also hated the Versailles treaty and its restrictions on Germany. While many right-wing groups had existed before and during the time of the Nazis, the Nazis succeeded through a combination of a strong message that they tailored to each audience; the personality of Hitler, which other parties across the political spectrum lacked; and strong-arm tactics on the streets. The Social Democrats were frequently associated with Weimar democracy and everything it represented; they also introduced policies such as emergency measures and using the Steel Helmets as paramilitaries to quell revolutions.While many people voted Communist, one of the critical questions is why that party wasn't able to withstand the shift to the right and the Nazi onslaught. After all, the Communists had their own toughs who could (and did) fight the Brownshirts, and in many ways the Communists were the Nazis' chief rivals.Although the Communists were anti-Weimar, the problem for many voters was that they were also anti-capitalist, and therefore were a threat to people's jobs. As a result, many middle class Germans didn't see the Communists as a viable alternative, even in the worst of the hyperinflation and, later, the Great Depression. The Social Democrats weren't able to establish effective measures during the Great Depression, and the Communists seemed content to passively wait until world capitalism collapsed.In contrast, the Nazis offered everything that the Germans wanted: a Germany beyond parties, beyond old class divides, beyond politics, really. The Nazis promised a utopian vision of a Germany united by race. While this ideal would be hard for many mainstream voters to embrace today, then, in Germany, the party achieved electoral success in parliament based on it. It should be noted that not every German voted Nazi. Indeed, the Nazis never achieved an absolute or overwhelming parliamentary majority, but they did control enough Reichstag seats (about 40%) to become the dominant party in 1933.The Nazi success opened the door for their eventual seizure of total power. Once they were included in a right-wing coalition government, the Nazis were able to establish a one-party state. Appointments of Nazis as internal ministers allowed them to co-opt police departments, which went along quite willingly with Nazi mandates. As Evans explains, it had been well established by the 1930s that "Communists"="criminals" anyway. The Reichstag fire furthered the assault on Communists through emergency decrees (again, with precedents set before the Nazis came to power). The Communist Reichstag deputies weren't allowed to vote on the Enabling Act by Goering, the chamber's president, a clearly illegal measure.While the Nazis were clearly and openly anti-Semitic, virulently and violently so, this didn't seem to bother voters. Evans shows, using key examples from the arts and sciences, that many Germans (not everyone, of course) probably shared these beliefs in some measure. Too, the Nazis downplayed some of the worst aspects of their program to suit audiences' sentiments. The Nazis promised to end the chaos on the streets, which, as Evans points out, was often of the Nazis' own making. Political murders, book burnings, and concentration camps also occurred during this period. One is left with the impression that many Germans knew these things were going on, but either approved or looked the other way at these "excesses." Nazism billed itself as a movement, and while it generated jubilant displays of terror, perhaps these emotions would cool in time, perhaps once Hitler was in power, or taught respectability by Hindenburg. Perhaps.Throughout, Evans relates the political and social circumstances with clear, concise prose. He uses examples of everyday people, and others in all walks of life, to illustrate the nature of German society at the time. He shows that Hitler didn't happen in a vacuum, and that in many ways Hitler's rise was a product of his time and place.

Historical writing, I've learned, is a conversation over the years, in the hopes of more nearly portraying events as they really happened. Such is the case with Evans' The Coming Of The Third Reich.The problem with writing about the third Reich has been multifold: first, Germany was a closed society during most of its twelve years of existence. Too, following WWII and despite scrupulous record-keeping by Nazi officials, historians had to contend with these officials creating self-saving spin for their actions. As well, that regime's heinous social crimes created an emotional atmosphere around National Socialism's twelve years that colored the facts.It's been said that had the Soviets lost their war with Germany, their equally heinous crimes against humanity preceding and during WWII would have been seen in the same malevolent light in which we now see Germany's.I'm an armchair historian at best, my knowledge of this war piecemeal. So as I approached Evans' book, certain questions remained:* With anti-Semitism so prevalent in Germany in the run-up to the Nazi years, why didn't the Jews get out of Dodge? Why were they taken so unawares?* Did the German people buy into the National Socialist agenda wholesale? I.e., are the German people as a whole as culpable as Hitler and his inner circle for what transpired during these twelve years?* Given the Nazi Party's name, how did its approach to socialism compare to other socialistic and communistic experiments in the twentieth century?This is a book review, not an essay, so I'll leave it to the reader to plumb Evans' fine scholarship for answers. Suffice it to say that the author did answer these questions to my satisfaction. And Evans' book isn't a grandiose op-ed piece; he provides over a hundred pages of footnotes and bibliography for his detailed perspective on how - and why - the National Socialists came to power in Germany.It seems proper form in such writing to provide illustrative photos, and Evans does. But he takes visual aids a step further, providing many pages of demographic maps regarding the National Socialist rise to power.And his prose, while sufficiently scholarly in tone, is very readable. He uses the distancing effects of passive voice, and he summarizes in the opening sentences of paragraphs - things skilled fiction writers won't do. Still, his writing is hardly dry. I'm tempted to cite examples, but I won't - -But for those interested in this aspect of European history and culture and are willing to buy the book, but hardly have time to read its nearly 500 pages, Evans provides an excellent summary of his arguments at text's end.Were I to summarize his summary: Evans' depiction of Germany from the Weimar years to seems to be a historical anomaly. The Nazis didn't seize power; they were elected. Yet their representation in the Reichstag was never a plurality. The Nazis rise, in a few words, was due almost totally to the charisma of Hitler in rousing emotions to "renew" Germany following the Weimar experience, and to Goebbels' propaganda talents in isolating and shutting off dissenting views.This book will be an important one to historians. But it should also be read by everyone concerned with the power of propaganda and charismatic leadership in the modern world.

This is a superb history, published in 2003, of a horrifying sequence of events in Germany leading up to 1933 when Hitler and the NSDAP (Nazi Party) came to power. Evans argues that it was the Depression that fatally weakened the Weimar Republic, and the ruthless organization of the Nazi Party successfully took advantage of its collapse. He further argues that the only alternative to Nazi rule would have been a military dictatorship -- the Weimar democracy was too weak and fractured to save.It is all too easy for those of us on the Left to say "if only the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD) had formed a unified front" then the powerful German working class could have stopped the Nazis from taking power. But Evans makes clear that there were very good reasons for each side not to trust the other, and that such unity would have taken a miracle to accomplish.I have been under the impression that while Hitler was obviously an effective demagogue, he lacked organizational leadership skill. Ordering the invasion of Russia is irrefutable evidence that he was not a military genius. But Evans shows that Hitler was, in fact, a capable organizational leader, patiently and skillfully maneuvering the NSDAP through the ten years from the ill-fated "Beer-Hall Putsch" of 1923 to the seizure of power in 1933, aided by Goebbels, Goring, and others. What is left a mystery, though, is how he went from being a penniless, talent-less artist to the powerful Führer.Many facile comparisons have been made of our current political situation to that in Germany described in this book. The actual history makes clear that the situation of Germany after the defeat in WW1 -- the fragile nature of the ensuing Republic, with paramilitary violence rampant -- was radically different than what we face in the U.S. in the 2020s. It's bad now, but it was far worse then.

Interesting reading.

I am a 67 years old retired high school history teacher and have been studying Hitler and the Holocaust since reading Shirer's "Rise and Fall" when I was in the 6th grade over half a century ago. Since then I have pretty much devoured dozens of histories, hundreds of articles, and dozens more novels about the "what, how, and why" Hitler was able to rise to power and why the nascent anti-semitism that had been part of European culture for over a thousand years somehow morphed into the holocaust. My obsession with the subject stems from both my abiding passion for history and my realization that my father, who served in the Army Air Corps during WW II, was but two or three generations removed (depending which branch of the family tree was being examined) from his 100% German roots. Hence the thought occurred to me early on in my studies ; "What if one or more of our ancestors had not left Germany? Dad could just as easily been in the Luftwaffe, the SA, or even the SS, he was, after all, very patriotic.So, since I have described how I came to read this book as well as my bonafides to review it I guess I should get on to my review. Evans' book is one of the finest I have ever read on both the roots of German culture in the years both preceding and after the Great War as well as how the Weimar Republic Collapsed into the Third Reich. The documentation is superb and the writing is interesting and compelling. Evans avoids the flaw incumbent in the work so many historians; "I researched this fact, it is going in the book, damn it!" which allows the work to move at a very nice pace. Many a night while reading the book I was staying up far past my bedtime because I simply could not put it down. I am very well versed in the subject matter but somehow Evans has managed to write a book that is readable and interesting to an expert such as I and is at the same time completely approachable and understandable to someone with but the most limited background in the period. I can hardly wait to immerse myself in the ensuing two volumes. However I do not expect the third volume to grip me quite so firmly as I am far more interested in how the Third Reich and its leader came to be than again reading a tale of the evil it did. If you are new to the detailed study of this subject I highly recommend reading this work and then moving on to Timothy Snyder's "Black Earth" a book that does a better job of explaining Hitler's political theories and philosophies than any other work I have read so far.

“The Coming of the Third Reich” is the first volume of British historian Richard J. Evans’ masterful three-volume history of Nazi Germany. In it, Evans tells the story of what happened in Germany from the end of World War I (1918) to the consolidation of power by the Nazis in mid-1933. Evans traces Adolf Hitler’s rise from an obscure, down-and-out street artist in Vienna to his assumption of power as Germany’s Reich Chancellor in 1933. He also shows how and why the Weimar Republic – Germany’s first attempt at democracy – failed, and how the National Socialist party was able to exploit that failure for its own ends.I found the most interesting chapters of “The Coming of the Third Reich” are those that show how the Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists “coordinated” (their term) the entire nation under their dictatorial, one-party regime once they had attained power. The Nazis used a combination of legal means – the promulgation of several laws passed by the government – as well as street riots, murder, intimidation, and thuggery – to consolidate their power over the nation. Every aspect of German society – art, music, literature, science, journalism, education, business, industry, finance, and others – was subject to this brutal “coordination” by the Nazis. A key feature of the National Socialist program was, of course, Hitler’s promise to eliminate the Jews from German society. Evans describes in great detail how Hitler and his minions, with the tacit approval of many Germans, began implementing their brutal and ultimately genocidal plan to eradicate the Jews from not only Germany, but Europe as well.Richard J. Evans writes with a lively and engaging style that held my interest throughout this book’s 672 pages. (It only took me ten days to read it from cover to cover.) I do not think “The Coming of the Third Reich” is quite as easy to read as William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” but in many ways, I think it is much better. It provides greater detail, and there is much more historical analysis that accompanies its fast-paced narrative. I gained a tremendous amount of new knowledge from “The Coming of the Third Reich,” and enjoyed reading it tremendously. Highly recommended.

It's just the sum of the contingencies of what people and nature do to each other in the irrevesrible course of time. There's nothing `inevitable' in history until it seems so after the fact. "Destiny" is a mere sleight of tongue, and `manifest destiny' is a declaration of intent rather than an anaylsis of past events, which would read truer as `manifesto: destiny.' Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Toynbee and such were theologians, not historians; the `Westward March' of the World Spirit is just a rhetorical parade toward the justification of national misbehavior, whether the music is the Horst Wessel Song or The Stars and Stripes Forever.That's my own formulation, and it might well be too florid to suit Professor Richard J Evans. Nevertheless I think it expresses his fundamental skepticism toward any kind of historical determinism. Evans is not a Marxist of whatever caliber, but he's just as little a Wagnerian Romantic. He begins his detailed account of "The Coming of the Third Reich" by dismissing the notions of a unique German Character and/or a Thousand-Year Mythos of German Exceptionalism, despite the fact that many Germans and especially German hsitorians have subscribed to such ideas.Specifically, he writes:-- "It was this atmosphere [following WW1] of national trauma, political extremism, violent conflict, and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born."-- "Extreme violence against the left had been legiinized, if not encouraged, by the moderate Social Democrats; but this in no way exempted them from being a target themselves ..."-- "Politics, to reverse a famous dictum ... became war pursued by other means."-- "... the anti-semitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politcs that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum."-- "A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of .. investments in the United States, brough widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. Small businesses and workshops were particularly badly hit. In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying thier livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to belive the claims of ... conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame."-- "For the diaffected and the unsuccessful, thsoe who felt pushed aside by the Juggernaut of industrialization and yearned for a simpler, more ordered, more secure, more heirarchical society such as they imagined had existed in the not-too-distant past, the Jews symbolized cultural, financial and social modernity."Can you see where these quotations are leading? Substitute one scapegoat for another, switch all references to Jews to `Liberals' or `Secular Humanists' and you'll notice that the same conditions of overheated Reaction that unhinged Germany in the early 1920s have become prevalent in the USA in the current decade. In fact, one of the best reasons for studying the Coming of Nazism in Germany is to evaluate whether rabid rightwing agitation in the USA really does replicate the conditions that allowed Hitler to claim a mandate. As the novelist Sinclair Lewis realized in the 1930s, observing the rise of Nazism, it's not enough to just shrug one's shoulders and declare that "It Can't Happen Here."Let's be clear that Dr Evans does not address the milieu of extremism in the USA at the turn of the 21st Century. His work is a soberly detailed recounting of political and cultural developments in Germany from the Unification of 1871 to the accession to power of Hitler in 1933. Evans's prose is clear, dry, and cogent; this text might remind some older TV watchers of the `mantra' of a certain LAPD dectective: "Just the facts, Ma'm!" No single fact, or current of facts, explained the rise of ideological tyrannies in Europe -- not only in Germany, but catastrophically also in Russia, Italy, and Spain -- during the First World War and the decades thereafter. The reader of Professor Evan's book will need a capacious, orderly memory to store and evaluate all the threads of contingency and causation that comprise his account. But the effort will be worthwhile; this book is the most coherent and plausible `overview' of the birth of Nazism I've encountered. It's the first volume of a trilogy, by the way. I look forward, after a breather, to reading the continuation, the second volume, dealing with the actual operation of the Third Reich in Power, from 1933 to 1941.

A very detailed description of how the Nazis took power, all factors which made it possible. I was particularly interested in the elections and the political mindset of the Germans at their first shot of democracy after The Great War and the civil war that followed. It debunks the myth that the Germans elected Hitler (and should thus be held accountable for the war and the Holocaust). I have read it three times and keep coming back for reference.

On with the second book in the trilogy.

この本が提示している暴力の実態はとても恐ろしい。はじめに共産党が、次に社会民主党が、強制収容所に放り込まれる。半年で行政組織のナチ化が完成する。誰がどこで準備したのか。

Great history book.

An excellent account of Germany that led o Nazi party's emergence and eventually to the power seat of the German Reich