The Coming of the Third Reich

Historian Richard Evans has written an impressive history of Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise to power in this first book in a trilogy about the history of the Third Reich. It is well written and thoroughly researched. Evans doesn’t just start with the rise of Hitler, but goes back to Bismark and the unification of Germany in 1871. Thus, setting the stage for the rise of Hitler.

He covers all aspects of Hitler’s rise to power: historically, politically, economically, and culturally. He weaves in civil society, unions, religio, and higher education and how each were affected.

Evans published this book in 2003, and it is still relevant especially at this particular moment in American history. The parallels to the rise of the Third show more Reich to the rise of Donald Trump and his administration is impossible to deny. I don’t think it is a reach to assume that Steven Miller, JD Vance, Charlie Kirk and every person who authored Project 2025 have read, re-read and committed this book to memory.

There are several reasons why the timing was right for someone like Hitler to come to power. The loss of the Great War and the stiff reparations the Treaty of Versailles placed on Germany, and the Great Depression that rocked the world causing sky-high inflation. Hitler was a charismatic personality and speaker who gave rousing patriotic speeches that were light on policy, and heavy being the Salvation of Germany.

Basically Hitler came to power using these strategies and tactics:
• Lean into racial prejudices and make “Them” (the Jews) the hated enemy. Revoke their citizenship.
• Have a powerful propaganda machine that will back up every lie and spin it so that Hitler and the Nazi party are always the Rightegous, Just, and Defenders of Germany and the Truth.
• Use a paramilitary group, The SA (Brownshirts), to provide security for Nazi leaders, enforce Nazi orders, and disrupt the activities of opposing political parties.
• Declare Emergencies to suspend Constitutional rights, and eventually make them permanent.
• Withhold Government funding to bring institutions (Universities, State Governments, etc.) to heel.
• Might Makes Right. Use force and the threat of force to instill fear and capitulation.

Do any of these things sound familiar? How about all of them? Charismatic figure giving speeches lacking policy, and focusing on cultural outrage and promises of retribution, sound familiar? Replace the Jews with Hispanics, Haitians, and Middle Easterners. Replace Goebbels with Fox News. Replace the SA with ICE. Trump has already declared emergency powers to impose tariffs, declared we are at war with Venezuela to deport undocumented Latinos and will continue to declare more emergencies to suspend even more constitutional rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of free assembly, restrictions on property rights and replacing State Governors he doesn’t like, all things Hitler did. Trump has also withheld and cancelled funding, to universities and threatened to sue law firms, and news outlets to gain leverage and bring them to heel. Trump’s core belief is Might Makes Right.

This book is an autopay of how a strong democracy died. Ours is currently mirroring this authoritarian takeover, but it isn't dead yet. show less

"The death of democracy in Germany was part of a much broader European pattern in the interwar years; but it also had very specific roots in German history and drew on ideas that were part of a very specific German tradition."

In this sweeping and arching chronicle of history, Richard J. Evans examines every nook and cranny of German society and culture from the looming spectre of the Bismarckian era to the fall of the Weimar Republic in delineating the causes of the rise of The Third Reich. Indeed, it also takes into account the turmoil, the overall attitude prevalent across the European continent when providing complicated answers to the perhaps most boggling and important questions of the 20th century: why did no one stop the Nazi show more Regime? Why did the German population engage in such silent acquiescence?

With a myriad of cultural anxieties, from the threat of Communism to the perceived collapse of the traditional family due to the First Wave Feminist movement to the perceived unfairness of the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles to modernism gaining traction across art, literature, and cinema to the 1929 hyperinflation to the Great Depression era, and most of all the 'stabbed-in-the-back' myth after Germany's defeat in the First World War, and conspiracy theories of Jewish domination, Evans never leaves a stone unturned with his lucid narrative-style, where every section is gripping. No reason can be attributed as the single cause of Nazi Germany's seizure of power. Rather, several historical incidents, a tensed political ambience, etc., etc., each of them helped form its inception and strengthen its hold on the already-feeble Weimar Republic. History, unsurprisingly, is also full of complications and contradictions. And interspersed here and there are excerpts from diaries of German citizens, which share a glimpse of both the panic and fanaticism circulating across the masses. The steadily worsening state in every area of German society, with the brandishing of racial hierarchy and distorted Social Darwinism, in the last chapters was a terrifying read. Absolutely accessible for people who has little to limited knowledge on one of the darkest periods in history, The Coming of the Third Reich is an undeniably definitive work. show less

OK, in one sense this is kind of reassuring, in that one of Evans’ central arguments is that Weimar democracy was never strong—it never had large parties fully committed to the democratic experiment; it never had a truly independent civil service or court system that was fully committed; it began haunted by the “betrayals” of WWI and with a whole lot of former soldiers committed to German militarism who thought that violence solved things. On the other, there are way too many other parallels to the current US for any comfort. Evans emphasizes the Nazis’ ability to create a movement sweeping the German people into the future, without concrete solutions to Germany’s actual problems but a promise of future greatness. Also, the show more Nazis’ use of violence created perceptions of public disorder that they then capitalized on, successfully blaming Communists for stormtroopers’ violence. There were already deep-seated vulnerabilities on which the Nazis were able to capitalize. Hitler came to power in significant part because of mistakes made by other people and parties; the Germans didn’t elect him Reich Chancellor—what Evans calls “political suicide rather than political murder.”

And yet. Here are some parallels to make you nervous: “Voters were not really looking for anything very concrete from the Nazi Party in 1930. They were, instead, protesting against the failure of the Weimar Republic. Many of them, too, particularly in rural areas, small towns, small workshops, culturally conservative families, may have been registering their alienation from the cultural and political modernity for which the Republic stood …. The vagueness of the Nazi programme, its symbolic mixture of old and new, its eclectic, often inconsistent character, to a large extent allowed people to read into it what they wanted to and edit out anything they might have found disturbing.” Also, a timely quote from one of Hitler’s opponents: “Referring to Hitler’s constantly reiterated assurances that he intended to come to power legally, Brüning said: ‘If one declares that, having come to power by legal means, one will then break the bounds of the law, that is not legality.’”

Goebbels, soon after coming to power, told newspapermen attending his first official press conference, “You are to know not only what is happening, but also the government’s view of it and how you can convey that to the people most effectively.” Goebbels also mocked “The stupidity of democracy. It will always remain one of democracy’s best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed.” The Nazis opposed academic freedom because, as Heidegger told academics, “this freedom was not genuine, because it is only negative.” It didn’t have anything to do with the mission of following the leader. When the Chairman of the Board of I.G. Farben, the Nobel-winning chemist Carl Bosch, met Hitler in 1933, he complained about the damage that dismissal of Jewish professors did to German science, Hitler told him that “Germany could go on for another hundred years without any physics or chemistry at all” and kicked him out. show less

A compellingly readable narrative history of the particular parts of German history 1918-1933 (with a very brief recap of the Bismarck era that created German conservatism) that led to the rise of the Nazi Party. It's hard for me to judge if there are notable omissions as someone with only a basic understanding of the period. Obviously there are lots of parts where you could want extra information but that's the nature of a summary work.

I did wonder if there could have been more on the inter-left struggles that so doomed any SPD/KPD collaboration - the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht are mentioned but not even the event that led to them. There's also little on where the upper class support and funding came from - there's mention of show more aristocratic connections and also one little note about how the richer funders were small and medium businessmen with the big businesses preferring other parties until Hitler's ascension but minimal details unfortunately.

What stands out most is his emphasising of the Nazis as coming from continuity and the utter failure of the SPD to ever take the very real threat of the far right (including pre-nazi nationalist parties and the inherited aristocracy) seriously.

I know this book doesn't even cover a lot of things the SDP did, or at least not in detail (for example the Ruhr uprising is mentioned and the SDP moving to crush it but it's only a few sentences), but there were still things that surprised me even as someone who was exposed to a lot of communist anger about social democrats. Friedrich Ebert comes across as a particularly unpleasant figure. His interventions in the days of 1918 allowed many of the worst parts of the second Reich to carry over - the embedded aristocratic reactionaries in the army and civil service, the dominance of the Junkers, and even the more bland administrative issues like the imperfect federal system. Then as president he immediately legitimised ruling by decree instead of through the Reichstag and dissolved 2 state legislatures, paving the way for a similar move by Von Papen 10 years later for SDP governed Prussia, because although they were ruled by his party the SDP he considered them too dangerously left wing!

The SDP in general constantly failed to see the threat from the right, or at least meaningfully act on it, even as the Reichstag became dominated by anti-weimar parties. Weimar was created as a compromise to at least partly satisfy the right and it didn't stop them hating it from the start. Outside of actions against the left the SDP had a completely useless fixation on "legality" even to the very end (Sidenote: apparently in the night of the long knives Von Papen was roughed up by the SA and he just futilely protested that it was illegal to do this to him as he was vice chancellor). By the 1932 elections they were the only party that had a genuine interest in the Weimar constitution. They were reduced to the pathetic state of mobilising their party machine to vote for Hindenburg, who hated the SDP and the Weimar Republic, in order to try and desperately prop up the constitution under an authoritarian right wing chancellor from the centre party who had barely any Reichstag support and also hated the SDP. Evans points to this as the point where the SDP essentially lost any influence over the situation, demoralising their organised base and handing the state to the far right. Their later refusal to countenance a general strike or organise their paramilitary to fight back on Hitler's ascension was abysmal but almost understandable because by that point they'd failed for so long fighting back would have led to a massacre.

Evans also emphasises the long mainstream right wing ideological roots of the Nazi party. To many of the voters it attracted (predominantly middle class - workers and the unemployed overall stuck to the SDP and communists to the very end) it didn't seem that different in message from the other conservative parties, just with a new vibrancy and style. Anti semitism was just normal from all parties except the SDP and KPD (and even there the occasional party journal would use anti Semitic caricatures). The idea of an all powerful dictator and the crushing of meaningful parliamentarianism and who would lead a German militaristic reawakening to create a new German empire - this was all common imagery on the right and throughout educated society. Of the 3 major parties that formed the "Weimar coalition" at its founding - the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Centre party, and the liberals of the democratic party - only the SDP held out to the end. The liberals quickly fell apart and declined into near irrelevance (except for 1 who became chancellor but was disliked by his party), the major part moving to the right. The centre party's Weimar supporting faction fell out of power by the time of the great depression under heavy pressure from the pope who much preferred an authoritarian far right state using the godless Reds as a bogeyman. Even if the Nazis hadn't existed in the form they did, by the 1930s there would have been some kind of authoritarian coup, most likely led by the army.

Evans focuses on the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the great depression as the key events that made it near impossible for the republic to survive. The first destroyed the possibility of the middle class bourgeoisie reconciling themselves to the republic as they blamed it for their losses and the massive instability - also connecting it to the effects of the Versailles treaty. The great depression created massive unemployment which destroyed government budgets again and destroyed the last Reichstag coalition because there was no agreement on how to deal with it, putting government power entirely in Hindenburg's hands as chancellors were appointed by him without reference to the Reichstag and required his powers to rule by decree. The succeeding cabinets then completely failed to address the problems.

There was a sense in which the non-nazi forces just ran out of road - if there'd been another year, maybe things could have stabilised economically. In the second elections of 1932 the Nazis lost seats and could have lost momentum. But by that point things had reached crisis point and there was just not enough active support for the state as-is. There's a sort of grim inevitability to the final months of events - in the end nobody was willing to fight and just gave in. The communists may have done but they catastrophically misjudged just how urgent it was to react immediately to Hitler and assumed they could lie low under a period of repression without being destroyed. The SDP never raised a finger and let their paramilitaries and union members be disarmed without a fight. Even to the last, their deputies unanimously voted to support a Nazi motion in parliament to avoid being deemed unpatriotic before they were kicked out for good. The German aristocratic far right vastly overestimated their own strength and just assumed they could control events through legality and were anyway mostly soon reconciled to the Nazis after their parties were forcibly dissolved.

Depressing, but enlightening. show less

I don’t usually make a habit of reading about WWII (either fiction or non-fiction). I’ve read some about it but my general view is that it’s a topic that has been done to death and then some, particularly in the historical fiction sphere it seems not a week goes by except there’s a new offering of some historical drama set in WWII. I tend to think the market is completely saturated and that other periods of history could benefit from some of the massive attention lavished on these six years in human history (even given their massive impact and importance).

However, this book came highly recommended to me and I realized my limited reading on WWII never dealt specifically with the central theme of this volume, namely how Weimar show more Germany fell and was replaced with the one party Nazi state. The recommendations are well deserved as this book is simultaneously sweeping in scope and deeply personal in its account of a country on the brink of a fascist takeover. The obviously immense amounts of research are balanced with first hand accounts from primary sources that show the human face of this turbulent time.

I’m planning on finishing the trilogy on the strength of this wonderfully written first volume. Whether or not I finish the remaining two books this is an excellent non-fiction title that hardly feels as dry or daunting as many history books. show less

Megnyugtató úgy gondolni a második világháborúra, mint egy eseményre, amit bizonyos démoni személyek robbantottak ki olyan körülmények között, amelyek soha nem ismétlődhetnek meg. Evans könyve pont azért nyomaszt és rémít, mert pontról pontra bemutatja, hogy ezek az események felfogható emberi indulatokból születtek, és közönséges emberi és politikai hibák következtében logikusan jutottak el a végkifejletig. Vagyis megismételhetőek. Pedig Evans nem hoz be forradalmian új szempontokat a történelembe, csak egyszerűen felsorolja és vonalba rendezi a bőséges tényanyagot – ettől olyan félelmetes az egész. Szigorúan e könyv kapcsán két dolgot emelnék ki.

Ha egy konzervatív párt show more elnézést tanúsít a szélsőséges mozgalmak iránt abban bízva, hogy az ő támogatásukkal megőrzi hatalmát, és egyben arra számít, hogy majd kontroll alatt tartja őket, jó eséllyel nemcsak önmagát veszejti el, hanem a demokráciát és a nemzetet is. Mégpedig azért, mert képtelen felfogni: a szélsőséges pártokat nem lehet politikai machinációkkal irányítgatni, ők egyszerűen nem azok szerint a játékszabályok szerint játszanak, mint a demokratikus pártok. Ahol a hagyományos párt hazudik és időt akar nyerni, ott a szélsőséges mozgalom brutális és átgázol.

Másrészt: a forradalmi dinamizmus, az agresszió ideig-óráig sikeressé tehet egy pártot, de hosszú távon kaotikus állapotokat szül. A folyamatos aktivitás szükségessége olyan helyzetet teremt, ahol a mozgalom kénytelen egyre nagyobb és nagyobb problémákat állítani maga elé, mert tagjai igénylik a folyamatos konfrontációt. Így a csoport függővé válik, és addig rohan neki az egyre masszívabb akadályoknak, amíg egyszer csak betörik a feje.

Evans könyvét hiba úgy olvasni, hogy csak a párhuzamokat keresünk benne a jelenkorral. Ugyanakkor fontos látni még idejében minden dolgok mögött azt, ami lehet belőlük, ha hagyjuk kiterebélyesedni őket. show less

Beautiful. This book is by far the most interesting and informative general survey of the rise of the Third Reich I've ever encountered. It avoids pedantic moralization and takes Nazi ideas seriously in such a way that the reader is able to judge for themselves the political ethos of Germany at the time.

Also, I would like to add that the prior review by gmicksmith is entirely insane (particularly given that, nearly two years later, nothing like what he's predicting panned out) and is, unfortunately, an example of a very common misuse of history (both on the left and the right). What happens is that people take the old adage "history repeats itself" far too literally and, building upon one or a few similarities, they look for the show more recurrence of a formally equivalent scenario. We don't usually see that at all. History is only cyclical in the sense that historic potentialities can be retrieved: we can take a second look at democracy after Greece and Rome and "do it again" in a sense, but when we found the American Republic, we should not be on the lookout for Julius Caesar himself nor even from someone, say President Obama, who will perform formally equivalent deeds. History isn't the execution of certain programmatic commands on a platform: we're not running the democracy operating system and Hitler, Bush, or Obama aren't all the same application running again under different names.

To say it again in a more traditional form: The study of history hooks you up with a consciousness of how different possibilities can work out: it is a repository of human possibilities. It is *not* a catalog of human actualities.

Indeed, I think this book has numerous examples of the bad use of history I'm bringing out. The mythologization of Bismarck and then the subsequent search for a strong uncompromising leader to "do what he did" detailed by Evans was problematic not only because it worked with a mythologized history but also because it treated history as a catalog of types or programs which can be found and executed in the present in the very same way they were executed in the past: it sees that A B C D happened in the past and it searches for A again in the certainty that B C and D will follow. That kind of certainty only makes sense if A (the historic individual) is treated as a thing which necessitates the series A B C D: sort of like the strong correlation between 'Water hitting boiling point' and 'water boils' or the necessary correlation between 'All As are Bs' 'All Bs are Cs' and 'All As are Cs', but historic individuals are complexes entirely unlike any of these simple examples. We can reason historically, and use historic example, but we don't get anything like the strong correlation of 'water at boiling point & water boiling' or the necessary deduction of the syllogism. Too much is going on in a thing like Hitler to treat him like 'Water reaching the boiling point' never mind to try and superimpose that logic on top of another complex thing like, say, Obama in order to predict similar results. History *does not* do that, sorry, and if there *are* basic laws of history, they don't look like that. show less