The Third Reich in Power by Richard Evans

On Wednesday I discussed the first volume in Richard Evans' trilogy on the Third Reich, which traced the coming of the Nazi regime from the post-1848 German confederation to the consolidation of Nazi control after Hitler's accession to the chancellorship in 1933. In the second volume, titled The Third Reich in Power, Evans covered the years of Nazi governance prior to the outbreak of war, from 1933 until 1939. The book is divided into thematic sections, covering topics such as "policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy." Within these areas, each in some way reflecting the Nazi expectation and preparation for international armed conflict, Evans seeks to reach a basic understanding of how and why the Nazi regime functioned as it did:

In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazis' headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that runs through this book and binds its separate parts together. So too do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onwards; the possibilities of opposition, resistance, dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the way in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.

Evans opens the book with a section titled "The Police State," and in particular the bloody episode that has come to be known as the "Night of the Long Knives." In a tactic not unlike Michael Corleone's murder of the heads of the Five Families, Hitler decided to purge the leaders of the Brownshirt SA, to eliminate potential rivals and consolidate his control over all forces of violence in the country. Hitler's lieutenants also took the opportunity to eliminate many of the conservative politicians who had survived previous actions against Social Democrats and Communists:

Striding up and down the room in a white tunic, white boots, and grey-blue trousers, Goring ordered the storming of the Vice-Chancellery. Entering with an armed SS unit, Gestapo agents gunned down Papen's secretary Herbert von Bose on the spot. The Vice-Chancellors' ideological guru Edgar Jung, arrested on 25 June, was also shot; his body was dumped unceremoniously in a ditch. Papen himself escaped death; he was too prominent a figure to be shot down in cold blood. The assassination of two of his closest associates had to be warning enough. Papen was confined to his home for the time being, under guar, while Hitler pondered what to do with him.

Other pillars of the conservative establishment did not fare so well.

This is, of course, just the beginning of Nazi repression, which would soon seek to ferret out anyone with the slightest connection to so-called enemies of the people. This included members of any party of the left, with hundreds of Communists tried and executed at virtual show trials. This period also sees the beginning of what Evans terms the "instruments of terror," most notably the growing sophistication of the Nazi system of camps for political prisoners:

By February 1936, Hitler had approved a reorientation of the whole system, in which Himmler's SS and Gestapo were charged not only with preventing any resurgence of resistance from former Communists and Social Democrats, but also - now that the workers' resistance had been effectively crushed - with purging the German race of undesirable elements. These consisted above all of habitual criminals, asocials and more generally deviants from the idea and practice of the normal healthy member of the German racial community. Jews, so far, did not form a separate category: the aim was to purge the German race, as Hitler and Himmler understood it, of undesirable and degenerate elements. Thus the composition of the camp population now began to change, and the numbers of inmates began to increase again.

This meant that when the time came to focus on Jews, Himmler's SS was well-practiced at the art of systematic elimination. Physical isolation of obvious undesirables was only one piece of Hitler's effort to purify the German people. But in order to accomplish many of his aims, Hitler recognized that he needed to harness the power of the masses, to build real, or seemingly real, public support for his actions. Here entered Joseph Goebbels:

On 25 March [1933], Goebbels defined the Ministry's task as the 'spiritual mobilization' of the German people in a permanent re-creation of the spirit of popular enthusiasm that had, so the Nazis claimed, galvanized the German people on the outbreak of war in 1914... Goebbels' Ministry, staffed by young, committed ideologues, sought not just to present the regime and its policies in a positive light, but to generate the impression that the entire German people enthusiastically endorsed everything it did. Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking. The regime put itself almost from the very start in a state of permanent plebiscitary consultation of the masses. It went to immense trouble to ensure that every aspect of this consultation delivered a resounding and virtually unanimous endorsement of its actions, its policies, and above all, its Leader. Even if it knew, as it must have done, that this endorsement was in reality far from genuine, the mere appearance of constantly renewed mass enthusiasm for the Third Reich and hysterical mass adulation of its Leader would surely have an effect in persuading many otherwise skeptical or neutral Germans to swim with the tide of popular opinion. It would also intimidate opponents of the regime into silence and inaction by persuading them that their aim of gaining the support of their fellow citizens was a hopelessly unrealistic one.

As Evans relates, the Nazi knack for manipulation knew no bounds, reaching into the visual arts, music, even religion. Above all else, the Nazis sought a unified, purified Germany, and that left no room for freedom of expression or freedom of faith. As Hitler became more confident in the strength of his position, he was able to expand his attacks into areas previously thought untouchable. Thus the origins of the famous poem "First they came...," in which Pastor Martin Niemoller reflects upon the fact that after the Nazis had targeted the Communists and the trade unionists and the Jews, they came after the church as well, seeking to Nazify religion itself and create a unified German church.

The Nazi reach extended deep into the economy as well, from the construction of the Autobahn to suppression of the employment of women outside the home to the ambitious goal of German economic self-sufficiency without the need for foreign imports, the Nazis even went so far as to set a "Four Year Plan" for coordinating the country's economic revitalization. Hitler himself got personally involved, encouraging and coordinating the creation of a small-car that could be owned with pride by every German family:

Although no production models came off the assembly-line during the Third Reich, the car stood the test of time: renamed the Volkswagen, or People's Car, after the war, and popularly known as the 'beetle' from the rounded shape Hitler gave it in his original design, it became one of the world's most popular passenger vehicles in the second half of the twentieth century.

Not content to plan just the German economy, the Nazis sought to develop a common German community, which would wipe away the various hostilities that had fractured the country during the Weimar years. While much was accomplished by the forced removal of so-called undesirable elements, a positive effort at building a shared German identity was also vigorously proclaimed. Yet Evans finds that for the most part, this was just more empty Nazi rhetoric. Aside from a few successes such as Strength Through Joy, which was effectively a state-run tourist bureau and travel agency for the masses, the reality was that very little had changed in the German social order:

Nazism did not try to turn the clock back, for all its talk of reinstating the hierarchies and values of a mythical Germanic past. As we have seen, the groups who hoped for a restoration of old social barriers and hierarchies were as disappointed as were those who looked to the Third Reich to carry out a radical redistribution of land and wealth.

In the final two sections, Evans tackles the two topics most dear to the Fuhrer's heart and intricately linked therein: racial purification and war. In his discussion of the Nazi racial agenda, Evans lays out the horrific progression that led from the sterilization of the mentally ill (or those so-classified, whether ill or not) and physically handicapped to the outright murder of these groups, the encouragement of marriage and reproduction by the appropriately pure German couples, the targeting of Gypsies and homosexuals for imprisonment and death, and finally the systematic evolution of the persecution of the Nazis' most reviled enemy:

One minority in German society, however, appeared to the Nazis as something entirely different: not a tiresome burden, but a vast threat, not merely idle, or inferior, or degenerate - although Nazi ideology held them to be all these things too - but actively subversive, engaged in a massive conspiracy to undermine and destroy everything German, a conspiracy moreover that was not just organized from within the country, but operated on a worldwide basis. This minority, no more than 1 per cent of the population, was the Jewish community in Germany.

What is perhaps most striking about Evans account of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, in the pre-years before it became purely a matter of wholesale murder, is what a gradual, organized and concerted effort was made. It was not merely a matter of the Nazis taking power and throwing the Jews into ghettos and concentration camps. It was two years before the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated, followed by several years in which the primary method of abuse was economic, as Jewish businesses were the subject of Aryanization. The slow, methodical nature of this pre-war oppression was such that by March 1938, just a few years before Jews would be shot en masse or shipped off to camps and gassed, " a new law on Jewish cultural associations deprived them of their previous status as public corporations with effect from the previous first of January, thus removing an important legal protection and opening them up to increased taxation." At the same time, the Nazi leadership commenced a series of "speeches, laws, decrees and police raids [that] signalled clearly to the Nazi Party rank and file that it was time to take violent action on the streets once more," culminating in the Kristallnacht in November 1938.

In the final chapters, Evans charts the march to war that has been looming behind every other policy and program pursued by the Nazi regime. Hitler and his lieutenants had to pursue a dual strategy, combining just the right about of aggression to achieve their ambitious ends without triggering war before sufficient rearmament had occurred. The Nazis were methodical as usual, gradually walking back various restrictions placed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles, allying themselves with Mussiolini and then Franco to break out of diplomatic and military isolation, and finally pursuing the now-familiar path through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and, as the book ends, Poland. Less familiar than the disappointments of international appeasement are the apprehensions felt by the German masses that war was looming, a war that many feared after the destruction of the First World War:

Social Democratic agents reported widespread anxiety about the consequences of the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, not least because it could not be justified as the rescue of a German minority from oppression despite the fact that Goebbel's propaganda claimed that the Czechs had been abusing the German minority in their midst... Among the middle classes, there was a widespread feeling that it did not really matter so long as war was avoided.

As it happens, Hitler's popularity was just further strengthened by the continual appeasement, giving the German people confidence that they had a leader who could do no wrong, a trust that was seemingly well-placed in the early months after war broke out. But as would soon be apparent, even Hitler had his limits, and the German people would suffer for it. Evans explores the war years in the third and final volume of his trilogy, which I will turn to on Tuesday.