The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

The early Nazis found comfort in the example of Weimar leader Paul von Hindenburg, who “had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies” they found more comfort in the brutal example of the Russian Revolution and the Leninist state, which threatened to spill over into Germany and drove many a middle-class man and woman far to the right. Others welled up from Social Darwinist thinkers who believed that the fittest should survive and the weakest be eliminated, thus improving racial stocks and building supermen. Yet, he notes, “Nazism, while far from being the unavoidable outcome of the course of German history, certainly did draw for it success on political and ideological traditions and developments that were specifically German in their nature.” Some of those traditions arose during the reign of Otto von Bismarck, who, in unifying Germany, universalized military service and “saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state,” answerable to a strong leader alone. In Defense of History, 1999, etc.) indeed, many of the material and cultural conditions for the rise of a regime that “would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and kill nearly six million in the process” were more pronounced in France and Russia than in Germany. A brilliant synthesis of German history, enumerating and elucidating the social, political, and cultural trends that made the rise of Nazism possible.īut by no means inevitable, writes Evans (History/Cambridge Univ.

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans