Booknotes: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

  

“History is not there for you to like or dislike, it is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better, because then you are less likely to repeat it. History is not yours to erase or destroy.”- U.S. Army Ret. Lt. Col. Allen West.

Nonfiction: History, Politics, War

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

If I were to recommend only one book on Nazi Germany this would be it. This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published in 1959 and was written by foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, and then spent five and a half years sifting through massive documentation. There are 32 pages of citations, a 10-page bibliography, and an index. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind. Official casualty sources estimate World War II battle deaths at nearly 15 million military personnel and civilian deaths at over 38 million.

Shirer reveals Hitler as intelligent and determined, but also delusional and a pathological sociopath. How did a man like that become a world leader?  On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party. Under Hitler, the Nazi Party grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany as a totalitarian state from 1933 to 1945.

It is all here – Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920’s, the appeasement of the European powers during the 1930’s, the ruthlessness of the Hitler-Stalin pact and then the war itself with, for a time, Britain and Churchill standing alone. Enveloping all this are the hatreds of Hitler and the Nazi party - their hatred of the Jews; the Slavic and Russian peoples; democratic values (what we would now call human rights); and their hatred of the Versailles Treaty. Versailles was never the humiliation it was made out to be. As Shirer points out this “stab in the back” myth was also propagated by the Weimar Republic as well which unwittingly set up Hitler and the Nazis for success.

“And the German people? … some 90% voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power.”

Hitler knew how to rally German nationalistic fervor and dubious impulses of most of the German people. Shirer uses many of Hitler’s speeches and the people’s reaction to them to illustrate how the German people adored their beloved leader. I was struck by how a people could swallow his words so whole-heartedly – words that are so diametrically opposed to the best values of the Western World. The speeches are filled with hatred for Jews and ridicule for the leaders of the Western World. Hitler’s reply to President Roosevelt in 1939 before the war – though successfully manipulative – is haunting in retrospect.

Hitler consolidated his political ambitions with the full cooperation of German military power. Hitler demanded personal fealty from staff and purged any party or military members who he perceived as challengers. Eventually the Nazi salute took the place of the military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

Hitler also worked with wealthy German industrialists to create “labor serfdom” to support the rich at the expense of the workers. Hitler’s “Charter of Labor” (20 Jan 1934), states that: “The employer became the ‘leader of the enterprise’, the employees the ‘following.’” Hitler decided early in his regime “not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates.”

“Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining, and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor.”

Hitler also consolidated his political aims with the educational system through compulsory participation in the Hitler Youth. There were specific organizations for each age group. Teens were required to work for six months either on a farm or in a factory. When parents of teen girls complained their young daughters were returning home pregnant, they were told it was for the “good of the Reich” and they should be “proud” of their Aryan grandchild since the child would “build up the master race.”

At age 10, children were required to swear to the oath of allegiance:

“In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”

In “The New Order” according to Hitler: Jews and Slavic people were Untermenschen – subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except for some of the Slavs because they were needed to toil in the fields and mines as slaves of their German masters.

Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions were tortured and tormented in concentration camps, and millions more still, of whom there were 4 ½ million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains treated with the utmost disrespect.

Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known!

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich.

If you want to understand how World War II and the Holocaust could have ever possibly happened, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is the definitive book on Nazi Germany.  It is a classic work well worth the effort to read and contemplate. Shirer presents a clear picture of the rise of Hitler, his philosophy, the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party, and the Nazification of Germany. He describes accurately life in the Third Reich, from the gradual increase of a totalitarian state to the escalation to war - on both Western and Eastern Fronts – to the loss of momentum, and, finally, the inevitable destruction of the Nazi regime.

Which leaves us with the question: Can a Hitler-type leader come to power again?

*NOTE: I watched these movies after reading this book and recommend as extremely worthwhile viewing. Both are excellent award-winning movies: