And then the Nazi party got serious about legally taking control of the country. They continued to streamline their propaganda and their messaging and started to seize more of the voting electorate. They made enormous electoral gains in 1930, although never enjoying a majority. The party then gained even more seats and became the dominant party along with the communists, both of whom wanted to destroy the parliament. It was the normalizing of political extremism that made the republic crumble. The Nazi party became the rainbow coalition of political discontent. As the Nazis gained more momentum, they refined their messaging and soared with popularity which included their deeply anti-semetic position which had become maybe even more fortified by the early 1930s. A peerless work, the first of a projected three volumes. Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime. 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."

Reich to ruin | History books | The Guardian From Reich to ruin | History books | The Guardian

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. This pedestrian work is by far the weakest volume in Richard Evan's otherwise excellent trilogy on the Reich. I am giving it a two star rating because Evans in his Preface has the gall to assure the reader that it is superior to William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." Evans writes: "Shirer's book was universally panned by historians. ... Shirer's book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first -century reader." This is hubris indeed on the part of Evans whose book in fact makes no contribution to our understanding of the horrific Third Reich. This proves true, again. There's a sense of deja vu in reading this book on the Third Reich. It feels so familiar, though the particulars don't exactly match. There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the worlds most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans's history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as it shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian's art and the book by which all others on the subject will be judged. Evans has presented his case well. However, he fails to account for the extraordinary evil of the Nazi Regime which made it fundamentally different in nature from those that existed in Italy, Spain and Hungary.

They started as little more than a gang of extremists and thugs, yet in a few years the Nazis had turned Germany into a one-party state and led one of Europe's most advanced nations into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair.

The Coming of the Third Reich | History Today The Coming of the Third Reich | History Today

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. Much better than the second book in the series, an expert, bone-rattling survey of the years prior to the Enabling Act. Excellent coverage of the Weimar's economic problems during the years of Versailles, the Young Plan and the hyperinflationary era. The preface is also noteworthy, explaining Evans's plan and answering (what seemed to me an important question) why these books are necessary despite epics like Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Kerhsaw's biography Hitler. Evan's book is quite excellent, and covers every aspect of the Nazi's rise in extreme detail. This is most often a strength, but sometimes a weakness if he begins a topic you may find uninteresting. For me, this was the final chapter or so, which primarily covered Goebels propaganda department and its power over German society. I did enjoy the detail on political intrigue during this period, however.The Third Reich Trilogy is a series of three narrative history books by British historian Richard J. Evans, covering the rise and collapse of Nazi Germany in detail, with a focus on the internal politics and the decision-making process. [1] The three volumes of the trilogy – The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich In Power, and The Third Reich at War – were published between 2003 and 2008. The books are illustrated with maps created by András Bereznay. [2] [3] [4] With the political parties suppressed and all chances of any discordant voices eliminated, the Nazis finally let loose their racial campaigns and massacres and systematic eradication of Jews, Socialists and Communists from all social, political and economic positions in the entire country. Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich is an enormous work of synthesis—knowledgable and reliable.”— Mark Mazower, New York Times Book Review A] first-rate narrative history that informs and educates and may inspire readers to delve even deeper into the subject.”— Booklist

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

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. My reading experience might have been salvaged by particularly graceful writing. The best I can say on that topic is that this was easier to read than Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History. Okay, that’s not entirely justified. I should say that Evans is a mostly-unobtrusive writer. This is the kind of book that could’ve been written by anyone. Well, almost. I was annoyed with Evans’ tic of interjecting clauses into every other sentence. After his 1,000th use of “indeed” to break up a sentence, I started to wonder if he had some kind of bet going with his publisher. This was also the time when the Weimar Republic was experiencing strong political difficulties and the theories of Social Darwinism, Nationalism and Eugenics were gaining in popularity. Hitler grew up reading some of the early propagandists of these theories and they deeply influenced him. Driven by these impulses Hitler joined the Bavarian army to fight for Germany in the First World War. During the war he was injured and taken to a remote hospital to recuperate. Hitler too like the rest of Germany had gone into the war with assured victory and future glories of his nation in mind. The French, one columnist noted, called a million million a trillion, while ‘for us on the other hand, a trillion is equal to a million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000), and we must only hope to God that we don’t get into these or even higher numerical values with our everyday currency, merely because of the overcrowding of the lunatic asylums that it would cause.”I, for one, have many times puzzled over the moral and philosophical quandaries presented by the existence and early “success” of the Nazis in 20th century Germany. The Germans that produced Brecht and Kant, Goethe and Hesse, Beethoven and Bach also produced and developed Hitler and the Nazis and Buchenwald and Auschwitz. I’d hoped that a well-written and well-documented history, such as this book, would help me to better understand questions that are, after all, more metaphysical, ontological, and moral--than historical. These are both controversial matters and I find it disturbing that Evans, who provides numerous footnotes, fails to do so here. I wanted to read this for a variety of reasons, but the main reason was that I wanted to get a clearer picture of how a Western democracy - 1920s Germany in this instance - could devolve into a violent terroristic regime like the Nazis. I'm worried about some of the parallels I'm seeing today, I get eery feelings that what happened in Germany, the circumstances that allowed for democracy to devolve into violent terroristic regime, is being replicated in today's circumstances facing contemporary Western democracies. The possibility of contemporary democracies falling into more radical governments fueled by hate, anger, and the politics of exclusion is possible in any country, imo. In fact it is already happening, the question is how far we will fall. 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. Pan-Germanism was a central theme of Nazi ideology, and this ideal was present throughout Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other areas with a German presence before the Nazi's conception. Anti-Semitism was also a central tenant, and this ideal was popular even amongst the more mainstream political parties in the Weimar Republic, as it was a popular sentiment among many average German's suffering under economic hardship during the turbulent 1920's and 30's.

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with.”― Abraham Brumberg, The Nation Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany explores how the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression paved the way for Nazi rule. All this was possible, of course, because of the weakness of the state and the emasculation of the ruling class. We have our problems, and we do have an emasculated ruling class, but organized violence is not permitted or desired, much less political assassinations. The closest analog in America is not today, but the widespread leftist violence of the 1970s, something we are still very far from. Nor is there now unseemly violence in Congress, as there was in Weimar (and in the run-ups to both the Spanish Civil War and the American Civil War). Sure, maybe we’ll get there. But there’s precious little evidence of that, and much more evidence of Huxley-ite enervation of the masses and the elites by entertainment and drugs of various types, not the political awakening of a hard core and their turn to violence. Within two months,’ Papen confidently told a worried conservative acquaintance, ‘we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.’172”

And, perhaps, my hope for answers to those metaphysical questions have been confused in my own mind by my hope to better know the chronology of the events as well as facts as they are able to be known. This is a result of a confusion between the metaphysical and the physical. Enter the rise of Hitler who came to prominence not because he was an eloquent speaker, he was a masterful propagandist. The Nazi party was still on the fringe but started to consolidate into an ethos that consisted of anti-establishment, anti-republic, anti-democratic, anti-semetic, anti-marxists, and anti-communist. They were the party of protest. They were also a contortionist party, crafting rhetoric to meet and galvanize its audience. It ultimately was a party that stood for very little principle other than achieving power. They were a party of deep nihilism. They even borrowed socialist rhetoric and at one point called themselves nationalist socialists. And in a way they were a brand of socialism although a highly ethnically pure and ultra-nationalist version of socialism that was very different from Marxism and communism then and now. Of course there are many reasons for the rise of the Nazis and how this could have happened in a developed, educated, Western democracy. The ridiculous crippling vengeful victory terms set out by the Allies was a major factor, helping lead to multiple economic The Third Reich Trilogy (review)". BlueRectangle. Archived from the original on 2013-01-07 . Retrieved 2011-10-24. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2015-06-18 17:30:55.444436 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1151810 City New York Donor