The Coming of the Third Reich

this book will cover the 18th-century Bismarckian Empire through the Nazi rise to power; it is interested in how they established their single-party system with seemingly little resistance from the German people

aimed primarily at general audiences, not so much specialists; such broad histories are comparatively rare

Shrier's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, while immensely popular with the general public, has been panned by academics for poorly documenting the conditions leading to the Third Reich; even in its own time, it was considered out of touch with scholarship on the subject

Bracher's The German Dictatorship covers the fall of the Weimar Republic in depth and the resulting Reich's foreign policy and culture in somewhat less depth; while it covers the ground left vague by Shrier, it is extremely academic, putting it out of reach of the casual reader

Kershaw's Hitler duology, though it bridges the latter two in terms of style and audience, is much narrower in scope than either

Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History emphasizes the violence at the heart of the Nazi worldview (whereas most academic works tend to abstract it away), but its focus on making moral judgments renders it unable to engage seriously with that ideology

Evans aims to combine these various approaches while reintroducing the voices of those who lived through these times into the narrative; in doing so, he hopes to convey to the reader that these developments were not inevitable

• I think this is an important point: if we accept, as Shrier (allegedly) does, that the rise of Nazi Germany was inevitable, then we will ourselves become unable to meaningfully discuss and halt nascent fascist movements

quoting Ian Kershaw: “For an outsider, a non-German who never experienced Nazism, it is perhaps too easy to criticise, to expect standards of behaviour which it was well-nigh impossible to attain in the circumstances.”

Friedrich Meinecke put forth the first real attempt (immediately after the war) to place the Third Reich in historical context; he argued that Germany had an obsession with world power beginning with Bismark and intensifying during WWI

he believed that militaristic industrial advancements had replaced cultural and moral instruction

Meinecke was honest enough to admit that he and his peers (the educated upper-middle class) had found something in Hitler's work that met the needs of the day

his ultimate conclusion was that the German nation-state had been uniquely flawed from its conception; he overfocused on the power politics and barely considered what he called the Nazis' “racial madness”

moreover, several brutal dictatorships had formed across Europe in the early 20th century; cultural and economic achievements did not immunize a nation against political barbarism

• look into: Dark Continent: Europe's 20th century

some have since argued that Germany's economic and cultural achievements were in fact key to the Nazis' triumph

Marxists have often claimed that the class conflict brought about by Germany's extensive capitalism had reached a breaking point, leading the capital holders to astroturf the Nazi Party into power

• look into: fn 21, 22

such a view is overly reductive, Evans argues, because it ignores the Nazi racial doctrines, the many capitalists trampled by the Nazis, and the fact that many Jews contributed substantially to Germany's capitalism; furthermore, why did Nazism fail to take root within other highly capitalist nations?

• I mostly agree, though I find his line about Jews' economic contributions flaccid, much like the “I have a black friend” defense; capitalism is uninterested in those crushed under its boots so long as line go up [sic], and fascism's whole shtick is successively narrowing the definition of “us” and expanding that of “them”

many non-Germans were concerned with this latter question, often concluding that Germans were somehow anti-democratic in nature; the Nazis themselves had similarly believed that the German character was naturally undemocratic and racially superior but had been separated from those values by the French Revolution

both are wrong, as the 1848 Revolution demonstrates; besides, this explanation, if true, would beg the question as to why such an authoritarian takeover hadn't happened sooner than 1933

me importantly, such an explanation makes the Nazi rise seem inevitable, when it was anything but; there was strong internal opposition to the Nazis, but it was overcome

another argument is that the German has no interest in politics, an idea that originated as an alibi for the German middle class; but 1930s Germany did not lack political commitment and belief

German historians objected to such sweeping generalizations of their nation's character, instead pointing to larger authoritarian currents in Europe as a whole (e.g. Italy, Russia)

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with the collapse of European imperial states after WWI and subsequent introduction of the masses to politics, the new nation-states quickly succumbed to totalitarianism at the hands of agitators

there is validity to the comparison between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (and it certainly benefited Western Cold War participants), but the two were formed under such vastly different circumstances that it's a better description than explanation

all of this is to say that Nazism is as generally European as it is uniquely German in its origin; our explanation will therefore begin where Meinecke's did in 1946: the formation of the German state under Bismarck in 1871

Evans doesn't claim to have a single answer, readily admitting that there are multiple complex answers

this series follows the three major arcs in scholarly study of Nazi Germany: the downfall of the Weimar Republic (40s–60s), the Nazi regime through the buildup to WWII (70s–80s), and the years of the war itself, with special attention to the Nazi persecution of Jews, homosexuals, the handicapped, “asocials”, etc. (90s–present)

“Few countries could have been more generous or more open to outsiders wishing to study their problematic and uncomfortable past.”

• yes, we could learn a thing or two from this

Evans notes that he was involved in Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd as an expert witness, so that's something to look into maybe (along with the context and writings)

for this audience, Evans has opted to translate all German words into English equivalents except for Reich, Reichstag, and Kaiser; this is to remove some of the ideological baggage from terms like Führer and Mein Kampf, as well as to disambiguate those like Volk and national

there will also be Nazi terminology used throughout without disapproving epithets or scare quotes; this is obviously not to imply approval but instead to preserve readability and reflect the terms' usage at that time