Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 1989 to 1998 he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Since 1998 he has been Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving libel trial. His books include The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson Literary Award for History), In Hitler’s Shadow, Rituals of Retribution (winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History), In Defence of History (which has so far been translated into eight languages), Telling Lies About Hitler and The Coming of the Third Reich (shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize).
THE BEGINNING
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For Matthew and Nicholas
List of Illustrations
Hitler speaking at the Mayday celebrations on the Tempelhof field in Berlin, 1935.
Brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm seated at his desk in 1933.
Heinrich Himmler at the police shooting range in Berlin-Wannsee in 1934.
Hitler taking the salute at a march-past of the Order Police during the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1937.
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS Security Service.
Prisoners of the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Leni Riefenstahl at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1934, during filming of Triumph of the Will.
Advertisement for the ‘People’s Receiver’ radio set.
Actor Emil Jannings and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at the Salzburg Festival in 1938.
Ernst Barlach’s Magdeburg War Memorial 1929.
Arno Breker’s ‘Readiness’, shown at the Great German Art Exhibition in 1938.
Albert Speer’s German pavilion at the Paris World Exposition in 1937.
Front cover of the booklet accompanying the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition.
Monsignor Caccia Dominioni, the Papal Maestro di Camera, about to take Herman Göring into an audience with Pope Pius XI on 12 April 1933.
Placard urging parents to take their children out of Church-run education.
Children in a primary school class in 1939.
Education Minister Bernhard Rust, photographed on 3 August 1935.
Poster from the 1936 campaign to make all young Germans join Hitler Youth.
Hitler Youth camp in Nuremberg, 8 August 1934.
A motorway bridge in the 1930s.
Fritz Todt rewards workers on the West Wall fortifications.
Advertisement by the Daimler-Benz automobile company, 1936.
A young German couple in a Volkswagen beetle, the ‘Strength Through Joy Car’.
Cartoon in Simplicissimus, 11 March 1934, designed to advertise Germany’s defensive weakness.
A family eating the obligatory Sunday stew, as shown in a school reading primer in 1939.
The hall at Hermann Göring’s hunting-lodge, Carinhall.
The ideal of peasant family life: ‘Harvest’, by Alexander Flügel, shown at the Great German Art exhibition in 1938.
Coalminers at Penzberg, in Bavaria, rendering the Hitler salute.
A poster of 1935 shows a healthy German bearing the burden of keeping the mentally ill in institutions.
Propaganda illustration from 1933, urging Germans to have more children.
Parading of a couple accused of ‘race defilement’.
Racial research in a Gypsy camp in 1933.
‘Jews enter the place at their own peril!’ Banner over the road leading to Rottach-Egern, on Lake Tegern, in Bavaria, in 1935.
The morning after the pogrom of the ‘Reich Night of Broken Glass’, 10 November 1938.
Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess with Martin Bormann, in Berlin, 1935.
The aftermath of the Saarland plebiscite, 1935: children give the Nazi salute beneath a canopy of swastikas.
Rhinelanders greet the German army as it enters the demilitarized zone on 7 March 1936.
Members of the Condor Legion at Gijo harbour, leaving Spain on their way to Germany, 3 June 1939.
A German soldier is welcomed in Vienna, 21 March 1938.
Vienesse Jews are forced to scrub pro-Austrian graffiti off the street, March 1938.
Stalin and Ribbentrop shake hands on the Nazi–Soviet Pact, 24 August 1939.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders but this has not been possible in all cases. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.
List of Maps
Nazi Party Regions in the Third Reich, 1935
Concentration Camps in August 1939
The Plebiscite of 12 November 1933
Radio Ownership in July 1938
‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibitions
Religious Affiliation in 1936
Nazi Elite Schools
The Decline of German Universities, 1930–39
The Motorway Network
The Fall in Unemployment, 1930–38
Major Exporters to the Third Reich
Reich Entailed Farms
Jewish Overseas Emigration, 1933–8
Jewish Emigration within Europe, 1933–8
Synagogues Destroyed on 9–10 November 1938
Jews in the Nazi Racial Census of 1939
Ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe, 1937
The Saarland Plebiscite and the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, 1935–6
The Annexation of Austria, 1938
Ethnic Groups in Czechoslovakia, 1920–37
The Dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, 1938–9
Prewar German Annexations
Preface
This book tells the story of the Third Reich, the regime created in Germany by Hitler and his National Socialists, from the moment when it completed its seizure of power in the summer of 1933 to the point when it plunged Europe into the Second World War at the beginning of September 1939. It follows an earlier volume, The Coming of the Third Reich, which told the story of the origins of Nazism, analysed the development of its ideas and recounted its rise to power during the years of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. A third volume, The Third Reich at War, will follow in due course, covering the period from September 1939 to May 1945 and exploring the legacy of Nazism in Europe and the world in the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present. The general approach of all three volumes is set out in the Preface to The Coming of the Third Reich and does not need to be repeated in detail here. Those who have already read that book can go straight to the beginning of the first chapter of this one; but some readers might like to be reminded of the central arguments of the earlier volume, and those who have not read it may wish to turn to the Prologue, which sketches the main lines of what happened before the end of June 1933, when the story told in the following pages begins.
The approach adopted in the present book is necessarily thematic, but within each chapter I have tried, as in the previous volume, to mix narrative, description and analysis and to chart the rapidly changing situation as it unfolded over time. The Third Reich was not a static or monolithic dictatorship; it was dynamic and fast-moving, consumed from the outset by visceral hatreds and ambitions. Dominating everything was the drive to war, a war that Hitler and the Nazis saw as leading to the German racial reordering of Central and Eastern Europe and the re-emergence of Germany as the dominant power on the European Continent and beyond that, the world. In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. 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 run through this book and bind its separate parts together. So too do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; 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 ways 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. A narrative thread is provided by the arrangement of the chapters, which move progressively closer to the war as the book moves along.
Inevitably, however, while separating out the many different aspects of the Third Reich into different themes makes it easier to present them coherently, it also comes at a price, since these aspects impinged on each other in a variety of different ways. Foreign policy had an impact on racial policy, racial policy had an impact on educational policy, propaganda went hand-in-hand with repression, and so on. So the treatment of a theme in a particular chapter is necessarily incomplete in itself, and the individual chapters should not be treated as comprehensive accounts of the topics with which they deal. Thus, for example, the removal of the Jews from the economy is dealt with in the chapter on the economy, rather than in the chapter on racial policy; Hitler’s formulation of his war aims in the so-called Hossbach memorandum in 1937 is covered in the section on rearmament rather than in the chapter on foreign policy; and the impact of the German takeover of Austria on antisemitism in the Third Reich is discussed in the final chapter, rather than in the section on antisemitism in 1938. I hope that these decisions about the structure of the book make sense, but their logic will only be clear to those who read the book consecutively, from start to finish.
In the preparation of the present work I have once more benefited from the incomparable resources of Cambridge University Library, the Wiener Library and the German Historical Institute London. The Staatsarchiv der Freien- und Hansestadt Hamburg and the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg kindly permitted consultation of the unpublished diaries of Luise Solmitz, and Bernhard Fulda generously supplied copies of key issues of German newspapers. The advice and support of many friends and colleagues has been crucial. My agent, Andrew Wylie, and his staff, particularly Christopher Oram and Michal Shavit, gave their time to the project in many ways. Stephanie Chan, Christopher Clark, Bernhard Fulda, Christian Goeschel, Victoria Harris, Robin Holloway, Max Horster, Valeska Huber, Sir Ian Kershaw, Scott Moyers, Jonathan Petropoulos, David Reynolds, Kristin Semmens, Adam Tooze, Nikolaus Wachsmann and Simon Winder read early drafts, saved me from many errors and made many useful suggestions: I am indebted to them for their help. Christian Goeschel also kindly checked the proofs of the Notes and Bibliography. Simon Winder and Scott Moyers have been exemplary editors, and their advice and enthusiasm have been essential throughout. Conversations with, or suggestions from, Norbert Frei, Gavin Stamp, Riccarda Tomani, David Welch and many others have been invaluable. David Watson was an exemplary copy-editor; Alison Hennessy took immense pains over the picture research; and it was extremely instructive to work with András Bereznáy on the maps. Christine L. Corton read the entire manuscript and beyond the application of her professional expertise, her practical support over the years has been indispensable to the whole project. Our sons Matthew and Nicholas, to whom this book, like its predecessor, is dedicated, have provided welcome relief from its grim subject-matter. I am grateful to them all.
