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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 2, Chapters 5-8

Part 3, Chapters 9-13

Part 3, Chapters 14-17

Part 4, Chapters 18-22

Part 4, Chapters 23-26

Part 5, Chapters 27-29

Part 6, Chapter 30-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 5, Chapters 27-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “The Beginning of the End”

Chapter 27 Summary: “The New Order”

Chapter 27 describes the Nazi’s most horrific atrocities, including the “Final Solution”: the planned, industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.

Nazi plunder of conquered territories, which included the theft of everything from gold to works of art, constituted the “mildest part” of Hitler’s terrifying New Order (946). In occupied countries, Nazi thugs seized non-disabled men, women, and children for forced labor. British and American prisoners of war generally fared better than their Soviet counterparts, whom the Nazis were content to see starve to death. The SS Einsatzgruppen carried out mass executions in the East. Himmler personally ordered the murder of women and children by herding them into vans and killing them with poison gas.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives in such ways, but even this figure pales in comparison to the ghastly results of the death camps, where victims numbered in the millions. At Auschwitz, the demonic agents of the Holocaust herded as many as 2,000 naked victims at a time into chambers fitted with phony showerheads and then released Zyklon B, a crystallized prussic acid. Sometimes it took 15 minutes for the screaming to stop. One Nazi official estimated that the crematoria at Auschwitz burned as many as 16,000 bodies in a single day. The SS had a secret account at the Reichsbank, where it deposited gold fillings extracted from victims’ teeth. If anything in the history of Nazi barbarism could match the extermination camps for sheer horror, it would be the notorious medical experiments, which were gruesome beyond description.

On occasion, the Nazi’s victims resisted. In April and May 1943, thousands of Jews, nearly all of them unarmed, fought back against the Nazis in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. Some held out for weeks, and some died facing their enemy, but most were captured and shipped off to the extermination camp at Treblinka. On May 29, 1942, two Czech freedom fighters in Prague hurled a bomb at a car carrying Reinhard Heydrich, barbarous Chief of the Nazi Security Service and practical architect of the Holocaust. The bomb exploded, and Heydrich died of his injuries on June 4. The Nazis exacted revenge by murdering more than 1,000 innocent Czech men and women. On June 9, Nazi thugs surrounded the Czech town of Lidice, where they massacred every adult male, sent the adult women to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck, and shipped the children to a separate camp at Gneisenau. Lidice was never rebuilt.

Chapter 28 Summary: “The Fall of Mussolini”

On July 25, 1943, little more than two weeks after Allied forces had landed at Sicily, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel ordered Mussolini placed under arrest. Through sheer daring, Hitler’s forces rescued Mussolini and stabilized the Italian front, at least for the time being. Elsewhere, however, the war turned decisively against the Nazis. The Soviet Red Army prevailed at Kursk, Kharkiv, and Smolensk, driving Hitler’s army ever westward and threatening the Reich homeland. On the Atlantic, the British and American navies destroyed the German U-boats. In the skies over Germany, hundreds of British and American bombers brought terror day and night to cities such as Dortmund and Hamburg, leaving millions homeless. Goebbels feared the consequences and even began to discuss with Hitler the possibility of opening peace negotiations with either the Soviets or the British and Americans.

Chapter 29 Summary: “The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler”

In Chapter 29, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, occupies only six of sixty-eight total pages. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the plot against Hitler, which culminated in a failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944.

By 1944, the list of German anti-Hitlerites included veteran conspirators, such as Carl Goerdler, Ulrich von Hassell, Colonel Hans Oster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and General Ludwig Beck. It also included a group of aristocratic intellectuals known as the Kreisau Circle, whose members did little more than talk. Even talking, however, was dangerous business, for the Gestapo infiltrated the Kreisau Circle and dispatched its leading figures to concentration camps. After years of paralyzed inactivity, the genuine conspirators found an able and zealous ally in Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, a young lieutenant colonel and chief of staff in the General Army Office. In addition to courage, competence, and comparatively liberal political views, Stauffenberg brought to the conspiracy the advantage of close contact with Hitler, to whom Stauffenberg sometimes delivered in-person briefings. By the summer of 1944, Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had finalized their plan, code named “Valkyrie,” by which Stauffenberg himself would assassinate the Fuehrer.

On July 20, 1944, at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, Stauffenberg detonated a briefcase-bomb and then flew back to Berlin virtually unnoticed. From the moment the bomb exploded, however, everything unraveled. Hitler somehow survived. By the time Stauffenberg returned to the capital three hours later, the conspirators had taken no meaningful action. Government offices and radio stations remained under Nazi control. Goebbels moved quickly to quell the confusion by reporting that the Fuehrer had survived an assassination attempt. Wavering officers who had pledged themselves to the conspiracy now abandoned it. In the weeks and months following July 20, the SS and Gestapo subjected Germany to a new reign of terror. Nearly 5,000 Germans were executed as part of Hitler’s vengeance against any who would dare to oppose him.

Part 5, Chapters 27-29 Analysis

In Chapters 27-29, Shirer details the infamous Nazi terror, including the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the long-dormant conspirators finally spring to action. Each raises the question of complicity.

The Nazi’s New Order, explained at length in Chapter 27, defies both description and belief. In the East, “Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth” (946). The Nazis designed the “enslavement of millions of men and women in the conquered lands” as not merely “a wartime measure” but as a permanent condition meant to endure as long as the Reich itself (951). It is true that special SS detachments, filled with fanatical Nazis, carried out the worst acts of terror and murder. In the construction and operation of the Holocaust’s death camps, however, the Nazis had no shortage of collaborators. For instance, captured documents reveal “some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals” (971). In other words, there was profit in being a part of the Nazi death machine, and moral scruples may or may not have been a concern. This also may be heavy evidence that the general population was not necessarily opposed to the Nazi philosophies and deadly tactics, illustrating Shirer’s theme of The Complicity of The German Generals and The Strange Docility of the German People and strongly suggesting the complicity of the citizens as well. Some in the occupied lands fought back against the terror, but resistance came at a high cost. After the death of Heydrich, “a veritable hecatomb followed as the Germans took savage revenge” (991). Most of their victims, including the people of Lidice, had nothing to do with the Heydrich assassination. Regardless of the moral or political leanings of any individual, this retribution was a convincing and effective strategy.

Speaking of resistance, two things stand out about the German wartime conspiracies against Hitler. The first is the fact that many conspirators held unrealistic views about Germany’s place in the world. Shirer “marvels at these German resistance leaders who were so insistent on getting a favorable peace settlement from the West and so hesitant in getting rid of Hitler until they had got it” (1018). As for the leadership of the armed forces, the German generals “seem to have had no doubts whatsoever that the British and American armies would then join them in the war” against the Soviet Union (1033). This reflects the general attitude of ethical correctness that could be seen in civilian business leaders. They were all convinced that they were on the side of good despite the well-known crimes against humanity that the regime was inflicting on millions of people. The conspirators finally did act, so there is no question that the conspiracy was genuine. Their strange geopolitical calculations, however, fuel Shirer’s belief that the conspirators, who hoped to oust Hitler while at the same time capitalizing on his territorial aggression, must own a share of the blame for the horrors of both the Third Reich and World War II, further supporting the theme of The Complicity of The German Generals and The Strange Docility of the German People.

The second notable element of the anti-Hitler conspiracy is the wanton brutality exhibited during the Nazi’s swift and ruthless reprisals. In the wake of these reprisals, the “humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great” (1079), and Rommel, a hero of the North African campaign, died by suicide. Much like the people of Czechoslovakia in the wake of Heydrich’s assassination, Germany’s anti-Hitler conspirators, along with many of their relatives, friends, and acquaintances, suffered the wrath of the Nazis. Even as Shirer holds the German people partly accountable for Nazism, his narrative of the post-conspiracy reprisals shows what the conspirators themselves surely knew and felt all along: the fatal cost of potential failure.