The Coming of the Third Reich

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, religious discrimination, and death.

Richard J. Evans describes The Coming of the Third Reich as the first book in a planned trilogy of books detailing the Nazis’ rise to power—how they developed their government, what it was like to live under it, and the Nazis’ military policies and eventual defeat during World War II. The trilogy is meant for “people who know nothing about the subject” (xv). While many books have been written about Nazi Germany, there “have been […] surprisingly few attempts to write the history of the Third Reich on a large scale” (xvi).

Next, Evans discusses previous books that tried to provide comprehensive histories of Nazi Germany. William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) was written by a US diplomat who witnessed events firsthand, but scholars criticized it for not being outdated in terms of historical research and overly focused on diplomacy and politics. The German Dictatorship (1969) by Karl Dietrich Bracher “was strongest on the origins and growth of Nazism and its relation to German history” (xvii), but it was written for expert audiences. As the title suggests, Ian Kershaw’s two-volume work, Hitler (1998), focuses on Hitler himself and the policies he was obsessed with rather than generally examining the Third Reich. Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History (2000) was a “moral history” (xviii) that detailed Nazi atrocities but did not explore the cultural and political elements of Nazi rule in depth, tending to favor narrative over analysis. Evans wants to “combine the virtues” (xix) of these previous works.

Then, Evans describes his own goals. Believing that recent histories of Nazi Germany have focused more on institutions and broader trends, Evans wants to “put individuals back into the picture” (xix). Citing the Karl Marx quote, “People make their own history…but not under conditions of their own choosing” (xx), Evans also seeks to examine the historical and social contexts in which people lived during the Third Reich, but also show how the rise of the Third Reich was not “inevitable” and “things could easily have turned out very differently” (xx). While looking at the actions of individuals, Evans wants to avoid “the luxury of moral judgment” (xx), especially since he cannot know how he would have acted if he had lived in Germany during the Third Reich.

The importance of the history of the Third Reich is that it “has burned itself into the modern world’s consciousness as no other regime […] has managed to do” (xxi). Evans discusses several theories as to how the Third Reich happened. Friedrich Meinecke, who lived in Germany during the Third Reich, argued that Nazism was made possible by Germany’s focus on the military and “a narrowly technical education at the expense of broader moral and cultural instruction” (xxi). Meinecke questioned how a society as progressive as early 20th-century Germany could nonetheless fall under Nazi control with seemingly little resistance. However, Evans notes that there were other “brutal dictatorships” (xxiii) that came to power in European countries despite cultural achievements and social progress.

Another theory came from Marxists, who argued that Germany’s advanced capitalist society was dominated by powerful businesses that helped facilitate the rise of the Nazi Party to preserve their own power. However, this interpretation ignored the racism key to the Nazis’ view of the world, themselves, and the question of why Nazism did not emerge in other developed capitalist economies. Some historians argue that Germany had an inherent resistance to democracy and human rights. Evans rejects this, arguing that German history actually reveals “strong liberal and democratic traditions” (xxiv) and the Nazis faced significant resistance within Germany itself. A similar view was that German society was inherently apolitical, leaving Germans ill-prepared for democracy in the 20th century, but Evans counters that 1920s Germany was filled with intensely ideological political debates and conflicts.

German historians instead suggest that Nazism did not emerge because of anything specific to the German historical experience, but because of a general collapse in Europe’s political and social order after World War I, giving space to totalitarian regimes like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Evans argues that totalitarianism took very different forms in Germany and the Soviet Union, and, while there was a collapse in the old order in the early 20th century, it had different impacts in different countries.

According to Evans, the problem with any attempt to explain the origins of the Third Reich is that they present the rise of Adolf Hitler as a “foregone conclusion.” At the same time, the Third Reich “certainly did draw for its success on political and ideological traditions and developments that were specifically German in their nature” (xxviii).

Evans describes three major phases in how the Third Reich was studied by historians and political scientists. From 1945 through the 1960s, scholarship focused on questions of origins. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars generally turned their attention to the early years of the Nazi regime before World War II, analyzing the internal politics of Hitler’s regime and “everyday life” (xxix). As an example of this type of research, instead of Nazi Germany being completely under Hitler’s control, it presented the view that the Third Reich was built on “a complex of competing power centres” (xxix). More recently, research has shifted toward the World War II years, with a focus on the study of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. Evans seeks to offer “a synthesis that brings the results of these three phases of research together” (xxix).