The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

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In any case, this religious hatred soon transformed into cultural and economic hated against their affluence and culminated in racial hatred once the budding ideas of Eugenics provided fuel to the fire. Not untypical was the experience of the young Raimund Pretzel, child of a well-to-do senior civil servant, who remembered later that he and his schoolfriends played war games all the time from 1914 to 1918, followed battle reports with avid interest, and with his entire generation ‘experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that’, he added in the 1930s,‘has now become the underlying vision of Nazism. To answer these perplexing questions, Richard Evans takes us to the time of the Second Reich established by Bismarck and builds the story of the german nation and the foreign influences that moulded its thoughts and political structure in a well paced and minutely detailed history. At the risk of crudely reducing the Holocaust to comparative literature, it’s akin to removing Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol or Pip from Great Expectations. Hitler dreamed of becoming an artist but his strict and architectural paintings were rejected as unfit by the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna.

The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed

On the other hand, if your wife refuses to let guests into your study because your bookshelf is studded with swastika-stamped bindings, you might want to let this one pass.We must accelerate this process with cold ruthlessness, and in so doing we are rendering an incalculable service to a human race tormented by Jewry for millennia. The ridiculous crippling vengeful victory terms set out by the Allies was a major factor, helping lead to multiple economic crises for Germany in the 20s. The Treaty asked Germany to take full responsibility for the war and to make heavy annual reparation payments to the victorious allies.

The Coming of the Third Reich - Richard J. Evans - Google Books

In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. A latecomer on the scene, Germany had only been able to pick up the scraps and crumbs left over by European colonial powers that had enjoyed a head start on them. There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time. this gave Hitler an excuse to allege a Communist Plot against Germany and suspend basic rights and undertake a violent suppression of the Communist party, which was a much bigger party than the nazis in terms of parliamentary representatives.They started as little more than a gang of extremists and thugs, yet in a few years the Nazis had turned Germany into a one-party state and led one of Europe's most advanced nations into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair.

The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans BOOK REVIEW: The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans

But with the death of the old king, the new Kaiser Wilhelm II came into power, and his careful foreign policies fell into disfavor, the new Emperor seeking rapid expansion and colonization. The closest Evans comes to having a twist on this story is his subtly-indicated belief that Hitler was not central to the Third Reich’s arrival. At the Irving trial, he was amazed to discover that 'no general history of Nazi Germany' existed which he could recommend. But their lurid, bombastic, emotionally manipulative style of disinformation has proved very easy to digest, just like the tabloid papers in 20s Germany.

I realize, upon further consideration, that the biggest mark against The Coming of the Third Reich is that it’s just another in a long line of Nazi books I’ve read. Something could have been done with an outrageous new theory about them - suppose, for instance, that they had secretly agreed to form an oligarchy to run the Reich and the war, leaving Hitler to burble on a sofa in the background. There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany.

The Coming of the Third Reich - Google Books

Richard Evans has written two articles for History Review explaining how a modern, progressive country surrendered to a brutal and murderous dictatorship.The Nazis, indeed thought of themselves as undoing all the work of the French Revolution and rolling back the clock, in a political sense at least, much further to the early Middle Ages. He states he hopes that the newcomer will gain their understanding and the learned scholar will hopefully gain snippets of new information.