The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Chapter 2 describes Hitler’s experiences during World War I and immediately afterward, when he became the seventh member of a fringe organization in Munich known as the German Workers’ Party.

Hitler’s pre-war experiences in Vienna had made him a fanatical German nationalist. He hated the fact that political borders separated Germany proper from the German-speaking peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. As a soldier in the trenches, he was a unique character, for he never drank, smoked, or talked about women, nor did he receive letters or presents from home. He appeared single-minded in his determination to fight for Germany. In combat, he earned the prestigious Iron Cross and rose to the rank of corporal. When the war ended, he was recovering from a gas attack that left him temporarily blinded. He “wept” at the news of Germany’s surrender (29).

After the war, Hitler and millions of Germans came to believe that they had been betrayed by politicians at home rather than vanquished on the battlefield. In Munich, which attracted thousands of disgruntled veterans and others who hated Germany’s new Weimar Republic, Hitler stumbled across the German Workers’ Party, whose members impressed him with ideas similar to his own. Hitler joined the party and steered it toward national socialism. The party adopted a formal program calling for pan-German unity. On April 1, 1920, its leaders changed the organization’s name to “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (“NSDAP” in German, or “Nazi”). Hitler personally selected the swastika as the party’s emblem. As the Nazi Party grew in numbers, its rowdiest street thugs formed a paramilitary group called the SA (Sturmabteilung), which shouted down rival speakers and terrorized other parties’ political meetings. By 1921, the Nazi Party already included many who would become infamous in later years: Hermann Goering, Ernst Roehm, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, and others. Hitler, however, had become the dictatorial party leader, its Fuehrer.

Chapter 3 explains the political situation in post-war Germany during a five-year period of turmoil that culminated in the Nazi’s ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923.

After World War I, Germany’s new Weimar Republic boasted a constitution as nominally democratic as any in the world. The Republic, however, received only lukewarm support from the old Prussian Army officer corps, whose ancient ideas and habits clashed with republican values. Meanwhile, many Germans resented what they viewed as the unduly harsh terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which forced Germany to pay reparations to the victorious Allies and assume full responsibility for the war. In 1921-22, Germany experienced hyper-inflation. Meanwhile, French forces occupied the Ruhr industrial region. The Weimar Republic became the “scapegoat” for these ills (62). Political radicals hoped to capitalize on the Republic’s weakness.

In Munich, General Erich Ludendorff, former leader of the Army High Command, lent his name and credibility to ultra-nationalist malcontents. Bavaria appeared poised for possible secession and a showdown with republican forces in Berlin over the future of the Weimar Republic. General Hans von Seeckt, Commander of the Army, threatened to crush the Bavarian revolt in its infancy. Fearing that the nationalists would lose their nerve and squander the moment, Hitler ordered his Nazis to seize the Buergerbraukeller, a Munich beer hall, and take hostages, including Bavarian State Commissioner Gustav von Kahr. Hitler meant to inaugurate his National Socialist Revolution. Kahr, however, could not be persuaded to join the Nazi revolt. Ludendorff and Hitler then led a march on the War Ministry, but the police blocked their way while soldiers surrounded the Nazi’s SA thugs. Shots were fired, and the Nazis scattered. Their leaders, including Hitler, were tried and convicted of treason. Hitler served only nine months in prison. The Beer Hall Putsch made him “a national figure” (78).

Chapter 4 departs from the book’s chronological narrative and offers an analysis of the Third Reich’s historical and ideological contexts.

While imprisoned in 1924, Hitler dictated much of Mein Kampf, an autobiographical screed that became Nazism’s sacred text. Mein Kampf amounts to a “blueprint of the Third Reich,” for Hitler explains exactly what he will do when he comes to power (81). In short, he plans to consolidate all German-speaking peoples into a new German empire united by race. Because he believed ethnic Germans represent the world’s “master race,” they must have Lebensraum (“living space”). Hitler promises to acquire Lebensraum at the expense of Germany’s Slavic neighbors to the east, who, along with the Jews, he saw as fit only for enslavement or expulsion.

Hitler’s obsession with race, coupled with his glorification of struggle, constitutes a perverse blend of Darwinism and sadism that has deep roots in the German past. From Martin Luther through Otto von Bismarck, German history presents one long scene of dominance and submission (Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church but not against the secular authorities). Hundreds of feudal lords ruled as petty tyrants. Meanwhile, Prussian militarists, backed by the aristocratic Junker class, helped smother liberalism in Bismarck’s Second Reich. These developments were nothing more than the political manifestation of a much broader and deeply authoritarian German worldview, represented in philosophy and culture by Hegel, Nietzsche, Wagner, and many others.

Two writers stand above all others as philosophers of Nazism and intellectual architects of the Third Reich, and neither, ironically, was German. The first, Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, was a Frenchman who, in the 1850s, published a four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which describes all history in racial terms and insists that the “jewel of the white race was the Aryan” (103). The second, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman, was a prolific-yet-erratic writer who became the “spiritual founder” of Nazi Germany (108). In Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), his most influential book, Chamberlain follows Gobineau in arguing that all history amounts to racial struggle. Chamberlain also asserts that only two “pure races” remain: Jews and Germans, and in the latter he identifies the world’s best hope. Even Jesus, Chamberlain insists, was most likely an Aryan and not a Jew.