78 pages • 2-hour read
The Coming of the Third Reich
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Key Figures
Richard J. Evans (The Author)
Born in London on September 29, 1947 and coming from a family of Welsh ancestry, Richard J. Evans is a historian of late 19th and early 20th century Germany. He received his MA and DPhil degrees in History from Oxford University. His doctoral thesis was on the history of early German feminist movements, which became the basis of his first book, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894—1933, which was published in 1976. Other major works by Evans include The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia (1977), Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870—1945 (1987), Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War (1990), In Defence of History (1997), Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (2001), and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815—1914 (2016).
Evans taught history at the University of East Anglia, the University of London, and Cambridge University and was President of Wolfson College at Oxford. After retiring from teaching in 2017, Evans still serves as the President of Gresham College, an institution that offers free public lectures from academics. Evans has received a large number of prizes for his writing over the years, most notably the Wolfson History Prize in 1988, the Civic Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg in 1993, and the British Academy Leverhulme Prize and Medal in 2015. Also, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. Famously, Evans also testified as an expert witness in an English libel case, Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt, against the author David Irving. As a result of the case, Irving was found to be a Holocaust denier.
Specializing in social history, Evans’s approach to history was inspired by the Annales school, a movement in historical scholarship established by French historians in 1929 and named for a scholarly journal, Annals of Economic and Social History. The historians of the Annales school promoted a form of history that would focus on social, economic, and environmental history over traditional political and diplomatic history. They also preferred “history from below,” deriving sources from sources such as rural regions and communities and average people, rather than focusing on leaders and major cities.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary. He struggled in school, had failed ambitions to become an artist, and spent years aimlessly drifting. But World War I changed everything for him. He served as a soldier and came out of the war with a deep belief that Germany had been betrayed from within, a conspiracy theory that primarily blamed Jews for the country’s defeat.
After the war, he joined the Nazi Party and quickly rose through the ranks because of his ability to deliver fiery speeches and rally support. He tried (and failed) to overthrow the government in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, but instead of giving up, he shifted tactics, turning the Nazi Party into a legitimate political movement. By 1933, after years of exploiting economic instability and public discontent, he was appointed Chancellor of Germany. From there, he wasted no time dismantling democracy, using laws like the Enabling Act to consolidate power.
Once in control, Hitler led Germany into militarization, territorial expansion, and eventually World War II. His racist ideology was at the core of Nazi policies, leading to the Holocaust—the genocide of six million Jews, along with millions of others.
As the war turned against Germany, Hitler retreated into his bunker in Berlin, where he died by suicide in April 1945. His death marked the collapse of Nazi Germany, but the damage he inflicted was beyond catastrophic. In The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans explores how Hitler’s rise wasn’t inevitable—it happened because of a mix of political failures, economic crises, and social tensions that made his extreme ideology appealing to certain groups at the right time.
Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, in Schönhausen, Prussia, and is basically the reason Germany exists as a unified country. He was a master strategist and politician, using diplomacy, war, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering to bring all the German states together under Prussian leadership.
He first became important in the 1860s as Prussia’s Minister President, and over the next decade, he led a series of wars—the Danish War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)—that ultimately resulted in Germany becoming an empire in 1871, with the Prussian king crowned as Kaiser Wilhelm I. Bismarck became Germany’s first Chancellor and spent the next two decades balancing power in Europe to keep the country stable.
Even though he ruled in an authoritarian way, he introduced some surprisingly progressive policies, like the world’s first welfare system (which included things like health insurance and pensions). But he also cracked down hard on political enemies—he targeted the Catholic Church in Kulturkampf and passed Anti-Socialist Laws to weaken leftist movements.
In 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Bismarck to resign, thinking he could run Germany on his own. Even after he was gone, Bismarck’s legacy stuck around—many Germans idealized his strong leadership and longed for a return to that kind of rule, especially as the Weimar Republic struggled. In The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans talks about how this nostalgia for a “strong leader” helped pave the way for authoritarianism, something the Nazis took full advantage of.
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