The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  That summer of 1924 in the old fortress at Landsberg, high above the River Lech, Adolf Hitler, who was treated as an honored guest, with a room of his own and a splendid view, cleared out the visitors who flocked to pay him homage and bring him gifts, summoned the faithful Rudolf Hess, who had finally returned to Munich and received a sentence, and began to dictate to him chapter after chapter of a book.*

  * A year later General Freiherr Walther von Luettwitz, a reactionary officer of the old school, would show how loyal he was to the Republic in general and to Noske in particular when he led free-corps troops in the capture of Berlin in support of the Kapp putsch. Ebert, Noske and the other members of the government were forced to flee at five in the morning of March 13, 1920. General von Seeckt, Chief of Staff of the Army and nominally subordinate to Noske, the Minister of Defense, had refused to allow the Army to defend the Republic against Luettwitz and Kapp. “This night has shown the bankruptcy of all my policy,” Noske cried out. “My faith in the Officer Corps is shattered. You have all deserted me.” (Quoted by Wheeler-Bennett in The Nemesis of Power, p. 77.)

  * There were flaws, to be sure, and in the end some of them proved disastrous. The system of proportional representation and voting by list may have prevented the wasting of votes, but it also resulted in the multiplication of small splinter parties which eventually made a stable majority in the Reichstag impossible and led to frequent changes in government. In the national elections of 1930 some twenty-eight parties were listed.

  The Republic might have been given greater stability had some of the ideas of Professor Hugo Preuss, the principal drafter of the constitution, not been rejected. He proposed at Weimar that Germany be made into a centralized state and that Prussia and the other single states be dissolved and transformed into provinces. But the Assembly turned his proposals down.

  Finally, Article 48 of the constitution conferred upon the President dictatorial powers during an emergency. The use made of this clause by Chancellors Bruening, von Papen and von Schleicher under President Hindenburg enabled them to govern without approval of the Reichstag and thus, even before the advent of Hitler, brought an end to democratic parliamentary government in Germany.

  * It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it from having planes or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was reduced to little more than a token force and forbidden to build submarines or vessels over 10,000 tons.

  * The “Black Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were stationed on the eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent days of 1920–23. The illicit organization became notorious for its revival of the horrors of the medieval Femegerichte—secret courts—which dealt arbitrary death sentences against Germans who revealed the activities of the “Black Reichswehr” to the Allied Control Commission. Several of these brutal murders reached the courts. At one trial the German Defense Minister, Otto Gessler, who had succeeded Noske, denied any knowledge of the organization and insisted that it did not exist. But when one of his questioners protested against such innocence Gessler cried, “He who speaks of the ‘Black Reichswehr’ commits an act of high treason!”

  * Some years later, in approving Streicher’s appointment as Nazi leader for Franconia over the opposition of many party comrades, Hitler declared, “Perhaps there are one or two who don’t like the shape of Comrade Streicher’s nose. But when he lay beside me that day on the pavement by the Feldherrnhalle, I vowed to myself never to forsake him so long as he did not forsake me.” (Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, p. 157.)

  * Before the arrival of Hess, Emil Maurice, an ex-convict, a watchmaker and the first commander of the Nazi “strong-arm” squads, took some preliminary dictation.

  4

  THE MIND OF HITLER AND THE ROOTS OF THE THIRD REICH

  HITLER WANTED TO CALL his book “Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice,” but Max Amann, the hard-headed manager of the Nazi publishing business, who was to bring it out, rebelled against such a ponderous—and unsalable—title and shortened it to My Struggle (Mein Kampf). Amann was sorely disappointed in the contents. He had hoped, first, for a racy personal story in which Hitler would recount his rise from an unknown “worker” in Vienna to world renown. As we have seen, there was little autobiography in the book. The Nazi business manager had also counted on an inside story of the Beer Hall Putsch, the drama and double-dealing of which, he was sure, would make good reading. But Hitler was too shrewd at this point, when the party fortunes were at their lowest ebb, to rake over old coals.* There is scarcely a word of the unsuccessful putsch in Mein Kampf.

  The first volume was published in the autumn of 1925. A work of some four hundred pages, it was priced at twelve marks (three dollars), about twice the price of most books brought out in Germany at that time. It did not by any means become an immediate best seller. Amann boasted that it sold 23,000 copies the first year and that sales continued upward—a claim that was received with skepticism in anti-Nazi circles.

  Thanks to the Allied seizure in 1945 of the royalty statements of the Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing firm, the facts about the actual sale of Mein Kampf can now be disclosed. In 1925 the book sold 9,473 copies, and thereafter for three years the sales decreased annually. They slumped to 6,913 in 1926, to 5,607 in 1927 and to a mere 3,015 in 1928, counting both volumes. They were up a little—to 7,664—in 1929, rose with the fortunes of the Nazi Party in 1930, when an inexpensive one-volume edition at eight marks appeared, to 54,086, dropped slightly to 50,808 the following year and jumped to 90, 351 in 1932.

  Hitler’s royalties—his chief source of income from 1925 on—were considerable when averaged over those first seven years. But they were nothing compared to those received in 1933, the year he became Chancellor. In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire.* Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory—and certainly politic—to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly every school child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940, the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi bible had been sold in Germany.1

  Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit—in private—that they were never able to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest. The blueprint of the Third Reich and, what is more, of the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in all its appalling crudity at great length and in detail between the covers of this revealing book.

  As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twenties in Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little afterward and altered nothing in his thinking, † When he left Austria for Germany in 1913 at the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning passion for German nationalism, a hatred for democracy, Marxism and the Jews and a certainty that Providence had chosen the Aryans, especially the Germans, to be the master race.

  In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the sun greate
r than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader—himself—with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day become “lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and, second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important is that it was embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany.

  Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world power and then go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in the first volume, written mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning to it at greater length in Volume Two, which was finished in 1926.

  In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a “dismembered and shattered Germany … a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that “… if I were a Frenchman … I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau.” Therefore, there must be “a final active reckoning with France … a last decisive struggle … only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”2

  Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia.

  In the first volume of Mein Kampf Hitler discoursed at length on this problem of Lebensraum—living space—a subject which obsessed him to his dying breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking colonies in Africa. “Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, “but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.” What if the present possessors object? “Then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take.”3

  Acquisition of new soil, Hitler continued, in explaining the blindness of German prewar foreign policy, “was possible only in the East … If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.”4

  As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitler returned to the subject in the second one.

  Only an adequate large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence … Without consideration of “traditions” and prejudices [the National Socialist movement] must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil … The National Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics … We must hold unflinchingly to our aim … to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled …5

  How much land are the German people entitled to? The bourgeoisie, says Hitler scornfully, “which does not possess a single creative political idea for the future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914 German frontiers.

  The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime. Quite aside from the fact that the Reich’s frontiers in 1914 were anything but logical. For in reality they were neither complete in the sense of embracing the people of German nationality nor sensible with regard to geomilitary expediency. They were not the result of a considered political action, but momentary frontiers in a political struggle that was by no means concluded … With equal right and in many cases with more right, some other sample year of German history could be picked out, and the restoration of the conditions at that time declared to be the aim in foreign affairs.6

  Hitler’s “sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when the Germans were driving the Slavs back in the East. The push eastward must be resumed. “Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent.”7 And all of them within the borders of the new and expanded Reich.

  Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so many Germans. What other peoples?

  And so we National Socialists … take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East.

  If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.*8

  Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the Jews. “The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.

  Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the western part of Poland, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?

  On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in Mein Kampf are less concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no “democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against “interest slavery.”

  What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

  The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development … The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization … The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state’s approaching decline … Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people’s life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economi
c life with it … Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means …9

  Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, “no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.” Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to “economic chambers,” “chambers of estates” and a “central economic parliament” which “would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.