The Coming of the Third Reich

The film industry proved the easiest to control since “it consisted of a small number of large businesses, inevitably perhaps in view of the substantial cost of making and distributing a movie” (406). Goebbels took control of the film industry through the Reich Film Chamber, Jews lost jobs and contracts in the industry, and anti-Nazi actors and directors were kept from receiving jobs. Many successful actors and directors like Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, and Peter Lorre left Germany for Hollywood.

Radio, which was the “most popular, and fastest growing means of mass communication” (406), was likewise put under Goebbels’ control. All Jewish and left-wing employees and journalists were fired or even arrested on false charges of corruption. Newspapers were less centralized than radio or film and thus harder to control. Goebbels used the police to ban and shut down even right-wing newspapers unfriendly to regime and put pressure on publishers and journalist trade unions.

Pacifist, Communist, and anarchist journalists and writers were arrested. Even writers who had the means to flee Germany like the playwright and poet Erich Mühsam struggled to adapt to life in exile; Mühsam died by suicide by 1939. Other writers left Germany. Conservative writers nonetheless “distanced themselves from the regime in one way or another” and writers who supported the Nazi government “were relatively rare” (411). Evans argues that under Hitler “there was scarcely a writer of any talent or reputation left in Germany” (412).

Similar exoduses and waves of persecution were experienced by artists and musicians in other fields. However, there was an additional hostility toward modernism, even though Goebbels was personally tolerant of modernist art. Instead, the Nazis believed art had to be “representational” and “had to spring […] from the soul of the people” (413-414). They replaced museum and art gallery curators with Nazis and took down modernist works while taking teaching positions from modernist artists. They purged Jewish artists, whether their styles were traditional or modernist.

2,000 people active in the arts left Germany after 1933 (416). This mostly destroyed German culture, as many prominent artists, writers, directors, and actors left Germany. This was even though the Nazi government tried to punish people who left by revoking their citizenship.

As with the arts, many academics and scientists left when the Nazis purged the universities of Jews and political dissidents. The most famous of these was Albert Einstein, who left for the United States in 1933. Scientists who stayed in Germany, like the scientist Max Planck, tried to continue their work and prevent further purges of their colleagues while “paying lip-service to the regime” (425). This hurt science in Germany, with even Nobel Prize winners losing their jobs, but Hitler was unconcerned.

University students often took the initiative, organizing protest against and denouncing certain professors deemed hostile to the regime. Because of this, leading university administrators were dismissed and replaced by “mediocre figures” (426) Still, the new Nazi-led university administrations cracked down on demands by student unions to be allowed to have a say in the appointments and dismissals of professors and to be allowed to independently destroy library books and books written by professors.

Attacks by brownshirts against Jewish antisemitism “expressed the antisemitic hatred, fury and violence that lay at the heart of Nazism at every level” (433). Descriptions of violence against Jews in the foreign press were dismissed as anti-German propaganda. Wanting to channel antisemitic sentiment among the rank and file, Hitler ordered a general boycott of Jewish businesses that would be justified by the foreign “smears” (434).

From the point of view of the Nazis, the purpose of the boycott was to take control of and rationalize antisemitic actions. Jews were added to Communists in the provisions of the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service, allowing for the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Other laws and decrees dismissed Jewish lawyers, imposed a 5% quota on Jewish students (437), and Jews from eastern Europe who had migrated to Germany lost their citizenship. Professionals were motivated to study their genealogies or take medical examines “to determine their supposed racial character” (438). In this, Hitler had been following proposals to bar Jews from most professional spheres since the 1890s, although he did try to limit restrictions against purging Jewish doctors and anything that might harm the economy. Some Jews “thought the antisemitic wave would soon pass” or “were in a state of shock and despair” (439). Thirty-seven thousand German Jews emigrated out of the country in 1933 alone (439).

The removal of the Jews “was the core of Hitler’s cultural revolution” (441) because they were blamed for all the political and cultural aspects of the modern world the Nazis disliked, even contradictory ones like conservatism, liberalism, and Communism. Many Jews would emigrate from Germany, with 37,000 leaving just in the year 1933 (441). Others remained, convinced that Hitler would have to moderate.

Evans argues that the rise of the Nazis came down to two factors. The first was the impact of the Great Depression, which polarized and radicalized the German people, hurt moderate political parties, and weakened trade unions, which had been a strong bulwark of the Weimar Republic. The second was the nature of the Nazi Party, which had a “charismatic figure” (447) in Adolf Hitler. Further, its vague platform—despite Nazi extremism— enabled the Nazis to appeal to different groups and draw on various “popular German beliefs and prejudices” (447). The fact the Nazis appeared ignorant and uncouth also assured voters and politicians that more moderate conservatives would be able to keep them in line. The Nazis also benefited from the fact that Germans wanted a “protest vote” (448) against the dominant voices in the Weimar Republic.

Further, Evans points out that German voters and Nazi supporters were not motivated by a desire to return to a pre-modern age. Instead, they were reacting to the Nazis’ “vague yet powerful vision of a future” without political and party divisions and a “resurgent national will” (449) supported by new communications technology like film and the radio. Ideas like German nationalism, eugenic and racial theories, antisemitism, and other concepts “came together in Germany in a uniquely poisonous mixture” made “more potent” by the fact Germany was the strongest and “most advanced” (451) nation in Europe.

Still, Hitler did not come to power through an election, but through “a backstairs political intrigue” (451). All of Hitler’s actions after the Bavarian beer-hall putsch were designed to be at least ostensibly legal. This approach worked to assure both Nazi supporters and critics. Even so, “at every point in the process, the Nazis violated the law” (453).

Evans describes how some viewed the rise of the Nazis as “the Nazi Revolution,” yet it “was not really a revolution at all” (456). Unlike modern revolutions that overthrew a government and replaced it with a new political system, the Nazis had “no fully worked-out model of the society they said they wanted to revolutionize” (457). Instead, the Nazi Party saw itself in continuity with the German past, even though it was a romanticized vision of the past.