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 is instead to preserve readability and reflect the terms' usage at that time

• Otto von Bismarck was as mixed a character as the forces leading to the Nazi rise to power, and so is a fitting point to begin discussions of the latter
• only fifty years lay between Bismark's founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the electoral victories of the Nazis in 1930–32

  • let that sink in; fifty years is the interval from the Korean War to the War on Terror
• Bismarck was known as the wild man of German conservatism; of aristocratic origin (and highly Prussian), he despised liberalism, socialism, parliamentarism, and egalitarianism

  • as a British author, it would seem that Evans uses “liberalism” in its original meaning rather than the way an American might use it
• somehow that disdain for equality did not harm his reputation; he was even inspirational to liberals during and after WWI, a time when Germans acutely felt the absence of such a strong leader
• contrary to later legends, however, Bismark was a political pragmatist rather than a reckless gambler
• in the millennium preceding him, Central Europe consisted of various autonomous states (sometimes just castles on modest estates), all collected under the banner of the Holy Roman Reich of the German Nation
• founded by Charlemagne in 800 and dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, this was the “thousand-year Reich” the Nazis aspired to re-create
• by Napoleon's arrival, the Reich was already falling apart; there was no meaningful central authority, and some member states like Austria and Prussia behaved as though the Reich did not exist
• with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Reich was succeeded by the German Confederation with roughly the same borders, including the German and Czech-speaking parts of Austria; Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich established a police system across the region that successfully held back liberal revolutionary sentiment
• in the 1840s, a new generation of liberal thinkers sought to quash the many tyrannies plaguing Germany by doing away with the member states and establishing a single German polity built upon fundamental rights and freedoms; when revolution sparked in Paris in 1848 and spread across Europe, they tried exactly that
• the liberal revolutionaries quickly organized elections in the Confederation (including Austria) and assembled a national parliament in Frankfurt, where they voted through a German constitution along classic liberal lines
• unfortunately, they could not gain control over the armies of Austria and Prussia, the two leading member states; once their monarchs and generals regrouped in autumn of 1848, they managed to forcibly dissolve the Frankfurt Parliament by the next spring, ending the revolution and re-establishing the Confederation
• this was not, as some have framed it, a hard turn into unavoidable aggressive nationalist dictatorship; trial by jury in open court, equality before the law, freedom of business enterprise, abolition of the most objectionable forms of state censorship, the right of assembly, and so on were in place through nearly all of Germany by the 1860s
• several states had even instituted representative assemblies with some control over legislation and state taxes, though the concessions stopped short of national unification or full parliamentary sovereignty
• in 1862 the liberal assembly in Prussia blocked taxes until the army was brought under legislative control
• this seriously threatened Prussian military funding, so the Prussian king appointed Otto von Bismarck to handle the crisis
• the liberals had by this time realized there could be no German unification involving Austria, which would have required the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy, but they believed Germany was still ripe for unification given Italy's a few years prior
• Bismarck, like other European leaders of his time, was willing to use revolutionary or even radical means to achieve fundamentally conservative ends
• after their frustration in 1848, he realized many liberals would sacrifice some of their liberal principles in exchange for national unity
• Bismarck allied with the Austrians to seize the disputed Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, then engineered a war between Austria and Prussia over their administration, which the Prussians handily won; the German Confederation collapsed, and Bismarck established the North German Confederation (without Austria and its south German allies)
• with a nation-state imminent, the Prussian liberals immediately forgave Bismarck for his (openly anti-parliamentary) policy of raising taxes and funding the army without parliamentary approval; they then cheered on as he started a war with France, who feared the implications of a united Germany on their own position within European politics
• following the French defeat, the new German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles
• though a fulfillment of the liberals' desire for a unified nation-state, there were consequences for the future, not least of which the name of this entity
• the name conjured up memories of the thousand-year Holy Roman Reich, and some even called it the “Second Reich”; it was not coincidence that this one was proclaimed at Versailles when the last was destroyed by French aggression
• the Weimar Republic even continued to use the term German Reich, despite the latter's end in 1918
• and of course, the Nazis would later declare “one People, one Reich, one Leader”, referencing the desire to unite all German speakers throughout Europe
• in this Reich's early days, there were already those who felt it was only a partial realization of a real German Reich
• Bismarck's constitution was hardly a victory for the liberals of 1848; it stands as the only modern German constitution to lack a declaration of human rights and civic freedoms
• the new Reich was, much like its predecessor, formally a loose confederation of independent states; it was headed by the Kaiser (from the Holy Roman Reich and Latin Caesar) who had wide-ranging powers including those of war and peace; it also featured a nationally elected parliament, the Reichstag (another name derived from the Holy Roman Reich that would carry into Weimar) and several administrative institutions
• however, the constitution did not grant the Reichstag the power to elect or dismiss governments and their ministers, declare war or peace, or administer the army
• government ministers (such as the Reich Chancellor) were civil servants, not party politicians, and they were beholden to the Kaiser rather than the people or their representatives
• quoting Karl Marx: “[the Bismarckian Reich was] a bureaucratically constructed military despotism, dressed up with parliamentary forms, mixed in with an element of feudalism yet at the same time already influenced by the bourgeoisie.”

• Prussia's military might followed from a long historical tradition; the Prussian state had since the 17th century been organized along military lines
• Bismarck's appointment in 1862 was precisely to protect the military's autonomy from liberal interference
• the wars of 1866 and 1870–71 trampled established institutions, overthrew longstanding traditions, and redrew state boundaries; the resulting Reich was thus built upon state military power exercised to a degree uncommon in that period
• the army at this time was effectively a state within a state, accountable only to the Kaiser; officers received many privileges and expected deference from civilians, whose compulsory military service primed them with military standards of behavior
• those who stayed with the military for a period after their compulsory service ended were guaranteed the rights to state jobs upon leaving the army, so the majority of lower-level civil service jobs (postal workers, police, railway workers, etc) were filled by ex-soldiers
• over time the officer corps and the aristocracy grew more separate, but this did not make the army more democratic
• in 1904–7, the German army massacred thousands of Herero people in modern-day Namibia, taking the population from 80000 to 15000 by 1911
• in occupied areas of the empire, the army frequently acted like conquerors facing a hostile population
• the more flagrant examples of such led the Reichstag to pass a vote of no confidence in the government in 1913; while a toothless action, it highlights how polarized views of the army's societal role had become
• Bismarck did manage to restrain the army's drive for continued territorial expansion during his time as Chancellor; this was in contrast to the legend of him as the man who effortlessly solved political problems with force and blood
• that image was a construct of later times, fueled particularly by the public memory of his revolutionary wars and his ruthless pursuit of those he considered enemies of the Reich
• in the 1870s, Bismarck launched what the liberals called the “struggle for culture” (Kulturkampf); this was a series of laws and police actions meant to bring the Catholic Church under the control of the Prussian state
• these included requiring clergy be trained in state institutions and requiring state approval for all clerical appointments
• within a few years, 989 parishes were without incumbents, 225 priests had been jailed, all Catholic religious orders except those involved in nursing had been suppressed, two archbishops and three bishops had been removed from office, and the Bishop of Trier died shortly after his release from prison
• despite Catholics making up roughly 40% of the population, the liberals cheered on these moves, believing Catholicism such a threat to the nation
• the Catholics, now enemies of liberalism and modernity, formed the Center Party to defend themselves against this persecution; through this party, they were determined to prove their loyalty to the state
• meanwhile, Bismarck was also going after the socialists, who had been (unfairly) implicated in two assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I; the boringly-named Anti-Socialist Law banned socialist meetings, publications, and the socialist party and sanctioned mass arrests and capital punishment of socialists
• Germany's socialist movement at the time was very much focused on electoralism and working within the law; that very much changed over the following years
• the socialists continued to be elected to the Reichstag (as individuals) and eventually formed the Social Democratic Party (SPD) when the Anti-Socialist Law lapsed in 1890; by the eve of WWI, the SPD was the largest political organization anywhere in the world
• in the 1912 elections, they held the largest share of the Reichstag (despite the electoral system's bias toward conservative rural areas)
• as the liberals had strongly supported the Anti-Socialist Law, the SPD were immediately distrustful of any political supporters of capitalism; their demands and discipline struck terror in to the respectable upper and middle classes, forming a political divide that would later play a role in the Nazi rise to power
• that said, their real concern of a new banning order greatly softened their approach; their organizing apparatus provided a vital way of life for its members, something they were desperate to protect
• still, they were regarded as dangerous revolutionaries by the police, conservative judges, and prosecutors; by 1914, nearly all SPD speakers and newspaper editor had endured several prison terms for criticizing state officials
• see the last few sentences of p. 15, particularly the final one: “In their eyes, the law's purpose was to uphold the existing institutions of state and society, not to act as a neutral referee between opposing political groups.”

  • is this not a typical conservative view of the law?
• the liberals, meanwhile, had lost heavily in the Reichstag between the 1880s and 1890s and had even split
• in 1910, there were two mainstream liberal parties: the National Liberals and the Progressives, differentiated primarily by their stance on Bismarck's actions in the 1860s (the Progressives were not cool with it)
• there were also two conservative parties, both largely Protestant
• and the Catholic Center Party, who were nationalist and anti-modern but also pro-welfare and critical of colonialism in Africa
• the German political landscape before 1914 reflect Germany's deep social divisions (region, religion, social class)
• “In a situation where there was a strong executive not directly responsible to the legislature, this weakened the prospect of party-politics being able to play a determining role in the state.”

  • I thought at first that Evans was suggesting that the multi-party system was itself bad (given that he directly contrasts it with a two-party system in the preceding sentences), but that isn't the case; rather, he means that the parties were focused on fighting each other over a comparatively small slice of state power over wielding that slice to (try to) contain the independent executive

• voters of the time were very politically active and confident in the electoral system, thanks to universal male suffrage, mostly secret ballots, and strict rules of electoral propriety
• the 1912 Reichstag election saw turnout of 85% of eligible voters, impressive given the frequency of run-off elections
• nearly every newspaper in Imperial Germany was tied to one or another of the political parties, and political alignment often governed a person's choice of leisure activities
• with the turn of the 20th century, talk turned to Germany's place in Europe and the world; Bismarck's Reich was on many fronts incomplete
• it held substantial cultural and ethnic minorities (Danes, French speakers, Sorbs, and lots of Poles), which the state had been aggressively working to Germanize; very few Germans believed these minorities were entitled to the same respect as the majority population
• while Bismarck didn't particularly care about overseas colonies, later Chancellors saw Germany as second-class compared to globe-spanning imperial powers like Britain and France
• construction began on a massive battle fleet with the intention of challenging Britain in the North Sea for territorial concessions
• the loudest (and most erratic) voice in Germany's colonial push was that of Kaiser Wilhelm II

  • oh balls, this guy sounds like a proto-Trump: bombastic, self-important, mercurial, and tactless, with ministers working to counter his influence; yikes
• anyway, Wilhelm's demeanor made people pine more for Bismarck
• nationalism, imperialism, and militarism were all the rage across Europe at this time (hey, don't those things sound familiar?), but Germany held them in a unique concentration
• Imperial Germany has since been painted as socially backwards, civically deficient, and antiquated; but to its contemporaries, Germany was a wealthy, advanced industrial powerhouse
• still, it faced internal tensions aplenty, particularly the stress of being dragged into modernity and rapid industrialization; these tensions would see release in increasing nationalism, racism, and antisemitism, all of which would remain alive and well into the 20th century

• in 1889 Hermann Ahlwardt, caught embezzling from the school at which he was headmaster, decided to blame the Jews for his misfortunes
• the German Jewish community at the time was highly acculturated; acculturation is distinct from assimilation in that the latter entails a complete loss of cultural identity, whereas the former involves the maintenance of two identities

  • it's beginning to make sense to me why Jews are so often targeted; we tend to discuss the successes of, say, American Jews as Jewish stories rather than American ones
• with German unification in 1871 and the replacement of religious marriages with civil ones, intermarriages between Jews and Christians began to increase rapidly; conversions to Christianity also rose; all of this is to say that the German Jewish community was no longer an enclosed religious group
• still, Jews accounted for only around 1% of the population as a whole
• excluded from Reich institutions such as civil service, many either emigrated from the country or concentrated into particular districts within larger cities, where they still made up only a single-digit minority percentage
• German Jews often found places in business and professions, particularly banking, retail, medicine, law, journalism, and so on
• like other minority ethnic groups in Germany, they formed their own representative institutions; unlike most of the other groups, they were economically successful and joined established political parties rather than forming their own
• most Jews identified strongly with German nationalism and so gravitated toward the liberal parties
• for the most part, they came to represent what was progressive and modern about German culture and society; that made them easy targets for those (like Ahlwardt) who felt pushed aside by the rapid modernization and industrialization taking place
• only two years after its formation, the Reich began suffering from an economic depression sweeping the world at the time (which started in the US—because of course it did); Catholic and conservative journalists were quick to point fingers at Jewish financiers, a claim that was easy to swallow for those yearning for an idyllic simpler past
• Adolf Stöcker founded the Christian Social Party in an attempt to win back the working class from the SPD; this party would fight elections in the 1880s on an explicitly antisemitic platform
• Max Libermann von Sonnenberg helped organize a national petition in 1880 calling for the removal of Jews from public positions
• Ernst Enrici was so vehement in his rhetoric that it led to riots in Neustettin and the burning of the local synagogue
• Ahlwardt joined this movement in the late 1880s with a book blaming his misfortunes on the machinations of Jewish money lenders and claiming the Jews were all-powerful in German society
• his “evidence” for his claims turned out to have been completely fabricated by him and landed him a four-month prison sentence
• immediately upon his release, he laid out even more bonkers claims (that a Jewish arms manufacturer had intentionally supplied the army with faulty rifles to further a Franco-Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German military) and received a five-month prison sentence
• this one he never served, as he had landed a seat in the Reichstag after vigorously campaigning in rural Brandenburg by scapegoating Jews (who were far-off and obscure to his constitutents)
• antisemitism was clearly a successful campaign strategy among rural voters; Otto Böckel was elected in a similar manner
• this was seen by a threat to the electoral hegemony of the Conservative Party, who added antisemitic points to their party program in 1893
• Theodor Fritsch tried and failed to collect the strands of political antisemitism and target them to the urban lower-middle class, thanks in part to egotism of those like Böckel

  • how about that, it turns out racist dickwads don't form cohesive alliances—who knew?
• Fritch still published a load of popular antisemitic literature and later made it to the Reichstag as a Nazi Party member
• the independent (single-issue?) antisemites were largely displaced by the early 1900s, as the mainstream parties (in this case the Conservative, Center, and Christian Social) adopted antisemitic rhetoric into their own platforms
• Ahlwardt's language was violent enough to alienate even other antisemites; after spending some time in the US, he returned to Germany with a new enemy—the Freemasons (ooOOoOOooOoOOoooooh); he landed in prison again in 1909 (for blackmail) and finally died in a 1914 traffic accident

• Ahlwardt, while extreme, was somewhat representative of the new antisemitism emerging in Europe at the time
• antisemitism had traditionally focused on the non-Christian religion of the Jews and the New Testament blaming them for Christ's death

  • I think this is the “blood libel” nonsense
• given the sheer hegemony of Christianity, Jews were obvious targets in times of crisis such as the Black Death
• given the aforementioned dissolution of Jewishness as a distinct religious identity, however, a new frame was necessary to continue scapegoating them; hence was Jewishness to become seen as a racial identity instead
• this shift is typically credited to Wilhelm Marr's 1873 pamphlet The Victory of Jewdom over Germandom Viewed from a Non-confessional Standpoint
• this notion of Jewishness as a race first and foremost was borrowed from the French racist Count Joseph de Gobineau
• the essence of Marr's Testament was that Jews had triumphed over Germans in a racial struggle for control of the nation, thus explaining the economic suffering of honest German artisans and businessmen
• Marr coined the term “antisemitism” (neat!) and founded the League of Antisemites in 1879
• Marr's descent into antisemitic madness largely began with a series of personal frustrations; his Jewish second wife supported him financially until her death, and his brief third marriage to a half-Jewish woman led to further financial embarrassment; naturally, he concluded that racial mixing was the problem
• while not politically successful himself (he found the antisemitic parties too conservative), he was the vanguard of the new racial antisemitism
• Eugen Dühring equated capitalism with the Jews and argued that socialism's chief goal should be the removal of Jewish influence; he was influential enough within the socialist movement that Friedrich Engels was prompted to write Anti-Dühring to counter it
• Heinrich von Treitschke popularized the phrase “the Jews are our misfortune”, which would be echoed by future antisemites including the Nazis; fellow academics publicly disowned his ideas
• that is to say, these men were not marginal, but their ideas were still considered bunk among respectable people, including working-class people
• in the deeply rural east, there were still medieval accusations that local Jews were committing ritual murder, but these were (obviously) never substantiated in court
• small businessmen, shopkeepers, artisans, and peasant farmers were the most inclined to support overt (traditional) antisemitism
• the antisemitic parties of the time remained on the political fringes and disappeared shortly into the new century…mostly because their ideas were adopted by the Conservative and Center Parties
• for the Conservatives, antisemitism helped them appeal further to their rural Protestant constituents
• for the Catholic Center, the Jews symbolized everything the Church rejected (liberalism, socialism, modernity)
• with the “Jewish question” on the political agenda, the Jews were surrounded by reminders of their secondary status within German society
• German antisemitism at the time was still low-level compared to that of other European countries (the Dreyfus affair in France, Tsarist Black Hundreds in Russia)
• the antisemites also normalized a demagogic style of politics, enabling their fringe ideas to be considered seriously in parliamentary sessions (the “excessive influence” exerted by Jews, the “subversiveness” of the “Jewish spirit”, etc.)
• this was the beginning of the ingredients of Nazism
• Julius Langbehn's 1890 book Rembrandt as Educator called for the restoration of a hierarchical society led by a “secret Kaiser” who would restore Germany to its former glory; the book was also extremely antisemitic and quite popular
• Richard Wagner had already been something of a cultural antisemite since the 1850s, but his second wife Cosima helped push him into the full-on racism
• after his death, his widow formed a rabidly antisemitic circle of followers who worked to interpret his operas as pitting Nordic heroes against Jewish villains
• members included Ludwig Schemann and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain
• Schemann spoke to various antisemitic groups and founded a number of unsuccessful racist organization; his primary contribution was popularizing Gobineau's term “Aryan” among German racists
• Chamberlain published The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1900, in which he described history as a cosmic battle between the Germanic and Jewish races (the only two racial groups that were still pure [citation needed]); the book also tried hard to prove that Jesus was not Jewish but in fact Germanic
• most importantly, Chamberlain's work fused antisemitism and racism with Social Darwinism, which sought to apply Darwin's idea of “survival of the fittest” to human races; this offered a veneer of scientific credibility to their totally bunk ideas

• the 1890s saw the development of a tougher selectionist variant of Social Darwinism
• anthropologist Ludwig Woltmann argued in 1900 that the Aryan/Germanic race was the height of human evolution and therefore deserved to dominate the earth
• many felt that the Germans needed more “living space” (Lebensraum), not physical space but social space; this space would have to be acquired by forcefully taking it from others

  • i.e., ultranationalism
• they pined for the restoration of a rural ideal that German settlers could lord over their Slavic “inferiors”

  • and there's the palingenesis
• this conception of international politics was common among Germany's political elite by the start of WWI
• in order to succeed in the war necessary to secure this Lebensraum, the race needed some…tweaks

  • but wait, I thought they were the peak of human evolution already?
• a greater emphasis was put on negative selection; rather than improving quality of life through improved health care, sanitation, housing, etc., proponents focused instead on culling the weak
• Alfred Ploetz argued that the “inferior” should be sent to the front lines in the event of a war to eliminate the unfit first
• many of these writers and their ideas were incompatible in one way or another with the Nazis, but they were united by their interest in eugenics
• Rüdin and Ploetz founded the Racial Hygiene Society in 1905 to propagate their views; it quickly became influential in the medical and welfare professions
• where Gobineau thought the eugenic ideal was embodied in the aristocracy, the German thinkers instead believed hereditary traits were independent of social class
• by WWI eugenic ideas permeated medicine, social work, criminology, and law; calls were made to forcibly sterilize the “hereditarily tained” such as prostitutes, alcoholics, petty thieves, vagrants, etc.
• with the German discovery of bacilli that caused cholera and tuberculosis, antisemites were able to translate the new language of hygiene into the idea of “racial hygiene” and general medicalization of society
• despite their wide presence, these ideas had limited effect on government policies prior to 1914
• a few principles underpinned the overall ideology of racial hygiene: heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behavior; society, led by the state, should manage the population to increase national efficiency; it was possible to scientifically rank people based on their value to the nation; this population management technique required an entirely secular approach to morality
• “low quality” (minderwertig) became a stock term used by social workers and medical professionals for many kinds of social deviant before WWI
• obviously such pervasive devaluing language set the stage for control, abuse, and extermination of the valueless by the state
• eugenic ideas didn't quite fit yet within the political spectrum; being a “scientific” approach, no established religion would support it (eliminating the Protestant Conservatives and Catholic Center), and the SPD weren't exactly on board either
• antisemitism and racial hygiene were two components of a larger rebellion against what many viewed as bourgeois complacency, when Germany's spiritual and political development seemed to have halted
• Nietzsche came to be a particular inspiration for this movement, despite the complexities of his work
• prior to 1914, his call for the individual to be freed from the conventional moral restrictions of the time was generally interpreted to be a call for personal emancipation; feminist activist Helene Stöcker interpreted his writings as advocating a proto sexual revolution
• Nietzsche vigorously opposed antisemitism, was deeply critical of vulgar worship of power, not particularly a fan of conservatism, and anchored his “will to power” and “superman” concepts in the realm of ideas rather than politics or actions
• the power of his prose, however, made it easy to bastardize for the service of eugenics and extreme nationalism
• some read Nietzsche as yearning for a great German leader unfettered by Christian moral constraints; others claimed he wanted a knightly brotherhood ruling the state while women did nothing but breed the elite of the future
• this “band of brothers” ideal was pushed to even further anti-democratic extremes, and advocates began to found pseudo-monastic conspiratorial organizations to that end
• one such group was the Germanic Order, which reclaimed runes and sun worship as essential signs of Germanness and adopted the Indian swastika as an “Aryan” symbol
• all of these ideas stood in contrast to bourgeois virtues and liberal principles
• already the precursors of Nazi ideology (extreme nationalism, antisemitism, revolt against convention) were floating around

• antisemitism was blooming in German-speaking Austria as well
• the Habsburg monarchy had restructured itself into two halves (Austria and Hungary) after its defeat by Prussia in 1866; the two were bound together by the Emperor (Franz Josef) and his central administration in Vienna, which was staffed overwhelmingly by German speakers
• the 6 million Austrian Germans dealt with their expulsion from the German Confederation by identifying strongly with the Habsburgs and regarding themselves as the Empire's ruling group
• Georg Ritter von Schoenerer was dissatisfied with this arrangement, viewing the Hungarians and other nationalities as impediments to the racially superior Germans; he longed for a union with the German Reich
• this belief merged with an intense form of antisemitism, calling in 1885 for “the removal of Jewish influence from all sections of public life” before any of his other proposed reforms
• as a member of the Austrian Parliament, he was immune from prosecution for his extravagant condemnations of the Jews
• he founded a series of organizations, one of which (the Pan-German Association) managed to secure 21 seats in the Parliament in 1901
• (surprise!) it broke up shortly after due to petty infighting, but it still served as a prototype for similar organizations and proved that appealing to antisemitism was a successful electoral policy
• Karl Lueger of the right-wing Christian Social Party used it to gain the position of Mayor of Vienna in 1897
• Lueger's antisemitism was opportunistic, allowing him to justify dining with influential Jews in Vienna; Schoenerer's, however, was uncompromising and racial
• Schoenerer later spearhead an anti-Catholic movement, coined the greeting Heil!, and was referred to by followers as “the Leader” (Fuehrer); he also wanted to rename festivals and months to more Germanic titles and proposed a new calendar dating from the Battle of Noreia in 188 BC
• apparently he was a fount of catchy slogans, among them: “Religion's all the same, it's race that is to blame”
• for publicly toasting Wilhelm as “our glorious Emperor”, he was deprived of his noble title by Franz Josef and his immunity by Parliament
• following a four-month jail sentence, he immediately declared that he “longed for the day when a German army would march into Austria and destroy it”
• Schoenerer and his ilk occupied the fringes of Austrian politics, but his ideas and posturing would go on to influence the Nazis
• with shared history, language, and cultures, ideas could flow freely between Germany and Austria
• Schoenerer's downfall in Austrian politics was his Pan-Germanism, which was frowned upon by the Habsburgs; should the monarchy fall, however, said Pan-Germanism would have a better chance of taking root (fOrEsHADowINg)

As I continue to read about the early days of the Third Reich, I become increasingly aware of how little attention American public education gives to this period of European history. None of my history courses mentioned Imperial or Weimar Germany. Either they never discussed Lenin's October Revolution, or the coverage was extremely facile. Really, the Soviet Union was only ever mentioned in passing as The Bad Guys (TM) of the Cold War. And, most relevant to this book, the rise of Nazi Germany was described simply as a thing that happened—there was the Depression, then Hitler, and boom, concentration camps and World War II. That's it.

In society at large, we tend to view fascism only as the product of a unique, singular historical context. Because that image is used all too often as the cultural shorthand for pure evil, calling a person or movement fascist immediately sounds hyperbolic and unfair. As Ian Danskin observed, when you say “fascist”, you're talking about Indiana Jones villains. Couple that with the educational neglect of its actual history, and it becomes painfully obvious how much we have kneecapped our ability to meaningfully discuss modern fascism. We know neither its warning signs nor the language to describe it when it appears. By understanding the context that led to widespread acceptance of a fascist government, I hope to gain those missing tools.

It's a complex issue, and Evans doesn't pretend otherwise. In the preface, which is as detailed as any of the chapters which follow, he outlines the successes and shortcomings of existing scholarship on the Third Reich. He ultimately concludes that no single answer suffices to completely explain it. Many factors contributed to its emergence, so our study must be similarly multifaceted.

• The Third Reich in Power (Evans), the second volume in the series
• The Third Reich at War (Evans), the third volume in the series
• The Death of Democracy (Hett), another examination of the Weimar Republic's fall
• Danubia, a history of the Habsburg family