40: The Coming of the Third Reich: A "Revolution of Destruction"

What follows are excerpts from Richard J. Evans' book The Coming of the Third Reich:

The Nazi assault on the Jews in the first months of 1933 was the first step in a longer-term process of removing them from German society. By the summer of 1933 this process was well under way. It was the core of Hitler's cultural revolution, the key, in the Nazi mind, to the wider cultural transformation of Germany that was to purge the German spirit of "alien" influences such as communism, Marxism, socialism, liberalism, pacifism, conservatism, artistic experimentation, sexual freedom and much more besides. All of these influences were ascribed to by the Nazis to the malign influence of the Jews, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Excluding Jews from the economy, from the media, from state employment and from the professions was thus an essential part of the process of redeeming and purifying the German race, and preparing it to wreak its revenge on those who had humiliated it in 1918. When Hitler and Goebbels talked that summer of the "National Socialist Revolution," this was in the first place what they meant: a cultural and spiritual revolution in which all things "un-German" had been ruthlessly suppressed.

Yet the extraordinary speed with which this transformation had been achieved suggested at the same time powerful continuities with the recent past. Between 30 January and 14 July 1933, after all, the Nazis had translated Hitler's Chancellorship in a coalition government dominated by non-Nazi conservatives into a one-party state in which even the conservatives no longer had any separate representation. They had coordinated all social institutions, apart from the Churches and the army, in a vast and still inchoate structure run by themselves. They had purged huge swathes of culture and the arts, the universities and the educational system, and almost every other area of German society, of everyone who was opposed to them. They had begun their drive to push out the Jews onto the margins of society, or force them to emigrate. And they were starting to put in place the laws and policies that would determine the fate of Germany and its people, and more besides, over the coming years.

Some had imagined that the coalition installed on 30 January 1933 would fall apart like other coalitions before it, within a few months. Others had written off the Nazis as a transient phenomenon that would quickly disappear from the stage of world history together with the capitalist system that had put them in power. All of them had been proved wrong. The Third Reich had come into being by the summer of 1933, and it was clearly there to stay. How, then, did this revolution occur? Why did the Nazis meet with no effective opposition in their seizure of power?

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The coming of the Third Reich essentially happened in two phases. The first ended with Hitler's nomination as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. This was no "seizure of power." Indeed, the Nazis themselves did not use the term to describe the appointment, since it smacked of an illegal putsch. They were still careful at this stage to refer to an "assumption of power" and to call the coalition a "government of national renewal" or, more generally, a government of "national uprising," depending on whether they wished to stress the legitimacy of the cabinet's appointment by the President or the legitimacy of its supposed backing by the nation.

The Nazis knew that Hitler's appointment was the beginning of the process of conquering power, not the end. Nevertheless, had it not happened, the Nazi Party might well have continued to decline as the economy gradually recovered. Had [General Kurt von] Schleicher been less politically incompetent, he might have established a quasi-military regime, ruling through President Hindenburg's power of decree and then, when Hindenburg, who was in his late eighties, eventually died, ruling in his own right, possibly with a revised constitution still give a role of sorts to the Reichstag. By the second half of 1032, a military regime of some description was the only viable alternative to a Nazi dictatorship. The slide away from parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state ruling without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures had already begun under [Heinrich] Brüning. It had been massively and deliberately accelerated by [Franz von] Papen. After Papen, there was no going back.

A power vacuum had been created in Germany which the Reichstag and the parties had no chance of filling. Political power had seeped away from legitimate organs of the constitution onto the streets at one end, and into the small cabal of politicians and generals surrounding President Hindenburg at the other., leaving a vacuum in the vast area in between, where normal democratic politics take place. Hitler was put into office by a clique around the President; but they would not have felt it necessary to put him there without the violence and disorder generated by the activities of the Nazis and the Communists on the streets.

In such a situation, only force was likely to succeed. Only two institutions possessed it in sufficient measure. Only two institutions could operate it without arousing even more violent reactions on the part of the mass of the population: the army and the Nazi movement. A military dictatorship would most probably had crushed many civil freedoms in the years after 1933, launched a drive for rearmament, repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, annexed Austria and invaded Poland in order to recover Danzig and the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. It might well have used the recovery of German power to pursue further international aggression leading to a war with Britain and France, or the Soviet Union, or both. It would almost certainly have imposed severe restrictions on the Jews. But it is unlikely on balance that a military dictatorship in Germany would have launched the kind of genocidal program that found its culmination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

A military putsch could, as many feared, have led to violent resistance by the Nazis as well as the Communists. Restoring order would have caused massive bloodshed, leading perhaps to civil war. The army was as anxious to avoid this as the Nazis. Both parties knew that their prospects of success if they tried to seize power alone were dubious, to say the least. The logic of cooperation was therefore virtually inescapable; the only question was what form cooperation would eventually take.

All over Europe, conservative elites, armies, and radical, fascist or populist mass movements faced the same dilemma. They solved it in a variety of way, giving the edge to military force in some countries, like Spain, and to fascist movements in others, like Italy. In many countries in the 1920s and 1930s, democracies were being replaced by dictatorships. What happened in Germany in 1933 did not seem so exceptional in the light of what had already happened in countries such as Italy, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Yugoslavia or indeed in a rather different way in the Soviet Union.

Democracy was soon to be destroyed in other countries, too, such as Austria and Spain. In such countries, political violence, rioting and assassination had been common at various periods since the end of the First World War; in Austria, for instance, serious disturbances in Vienna had culminated in the burning down of the Palace of Justice in 1927; in Yugoslavia, Macedonian assassination squads were causing havoc in the political world; in Poland, a major war with the nascent Soviet Union had crippled the political system and the economy and opened the way to the military dictatorship of General Pilsudski.

Everywhere, too, the authoritarian right shared most if not all of the antisemitic beliefs and conspiracy theories that animated the Nazis. The Hungarian government of Admiral Miklos Horthy yielded little to the German far right in its hatred of Jews, fueled by the experience of the short-lived revolutionary regime led by the Jewish Communist Béla Kun in 1919. The Polish military regime of the 1930s was to impose severe restrictions on the country's large Jewish population. Seen in the European context of the time, neither the political violence of the 1920s and early 1930s, nor the collapse of parliamentary democracy, nor the destruction of civil liberties, would have appeared particularly unusual to a dispassionate observer. Nor was everything that subsequently happened in the history of the Third Reich made inevitable by Hitter's appointment as Chancellor. Chance and contingency were play their part here, too, as they had before.

Nevertheless, the consequences of the events of 30 January 1933 in Germany were more serious by far than the consequences of the collapse of democracy elsewhere in Europe. The security provisions of the Treaty of Versailles had done nothing to alter the fact that Germany was still Europe's most powerful, most advanced and most populous country. Nationalist dreams of of territorial aggrandizement and conquest were present in other authoritarian regimes like Poland and Hungary as well. But these, if realized, were only likely to be of regional significance. What happened in Germany was likely to have a far wider impact that what happened in a small country like Austria, or an impoverished land like Poland. Its significance, given Germany's size and power, had the potential to be worldwide. That is why the events in the first six and a half months of 1933 were so momentous.

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How and why did they occur? To begin with, no one would have thought it worth their while shoehorning Hitler into the Reich Chancellery had he not been the leader of Germany's largest political party. The Nazis, of course, never won a majority of the vote in a free election: 37.4 percent was all they could manage in their best performance, the Reichstag election of July 1932. Still, this was a high vote by any democratic standards, higher than many democratically elected governments in other countries have achieved since.

The roots of the Nazi's success lay in the failure of the German political system to produce a viable, nationwide conservative party uniting both Catholics and Protestants on the right; in the historic weakness of German liberalism; in the bitter resentments of almost all Germans over the loss of the war the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles; in the fear and disorientation provoked in many middle-class Germans by the social and cultural modernism of the Weimar years, and the hyperinflation of 1923. The lack of legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, which for most of its existence never enjoyed the support of a majority of the deputies in the Reichstag, added to these influences and encouraged nostalgia for the old Reich and the authoritarian leadership of a figure like Bismarck.

The myth of the "spirit of 1914" and the "front generation," particularly strong among those too young to have fought in the war, fueled a strong desire for national unity and an impatience with the multiplicity of parties and the endless compromises of political negotiations. The legacy of the war also included political violence on a massive and destructive scale and helped persuade many non-violent and respectable people to tolerate it to a degree that would be unthinkable in an effectively functioning parliamentary democracy.

A number of key factors, however, stand out from all the rest. The first is the effect of the Depression, which radicalized the electorate, destroyed or deeply damaged the more moderate parties and polarized the political between the "Marxist" parties and the "bourgeois" groups, all of which moved rapidly towards the far right. The ever-growing threat of Communism struck fear into the hearts of bourgeois voters and helped shift political Catholicism towards authoritarian politics and away from Democracy, just as it did in other parts of Europe. Business failures and financial disasters helped convince many captains of industry and leaders of agriculture that the power of the trade unions had be be curbed or even destroyed. The political effects of the Depression hugely magnified those of the previous catastrophe of the hyperinflation, and made the Republic seem as if it could deliver nothing but economic disaster.

Even without the Depression, Germany's first democracy seemed doomed; but the onset of one of history's worst economic slumps pushed it beyond the point of no return. Moreover, mass unemployment undermined Germany's once-strong labor movement, a sold guarantor of democracy as recently as 1920, when it had managed to defeat the right-wing Kapp putsch despite the toleration of the rebels by the army. Divided and demoralized, and robbed of its key weapon of the political mass strike, the German labor movement was caught between impotent support for the authoritarian regime of Heinrich Brüning on the one hand, and self-destructive hostility to "bourgeois democracy" on the other.

The second major factor was the Nazi movement itself. Its ideas evidently had a wide appeal to the electorate, or at least were not so outrageous as to put them off. Its dynamism promised a radical cure for the Republic's ills. Its leader Adolf Hitler was a charismatic figure who was able to drum up mass electoral support by the vehemence of his rhetorical denunciations of the unloved Republic, and to convert this into political office, finally, by making the right moves and the right time. Hitler's refusal to enter a coalition government in any other capacity but Reich Chancellor was proved right in the end. As deputy to the unpopular Papen or the equally unloved Schleicher, he would have lost heavily in reputation and surrendered a good deal of the charisma that came from being the Leader.

The Nazi Party was a party of protest, with not much of a positive program, and few practical solutions Germany's problems. But its extremist ideology, adapted and sometime veiled according to circumstance and the nature of the particular group of people to whom it was appealing, tapped into a sufficient number of preexisting popular German beliefs and prejudices to make it seem to many well worth supporting at the polls. For such people, desperate times called for desperate measures; for many more, particularly in the middle classes, the vulgar and uneducated character of the Nazis seemed sufficient guarantee that Hitler's coalition partners, well educated and well bred, would be able to hold him in check and curb the street violence that seemed such an unfortunate, but no doubt temporary, accompaniment to the movement's rise to prominence.

The substantial overlap between the Nazi's ideology and that of the conservatives, even, to a considerable extent, that of German liberals, was a third major factor in bring Hitler into the Reich Chancellery on 30 January 1933. The ideas that were current among almost all German political parties right of the Social Democrats in the early 1930s had a great deal in common with those of the Nazis/ These ideas certainly bore enough resemblance to the Nazis' for the bulk of the liberal and conservative parties' supporters in the Protestant electorate to desert them, at least temporarily, for what looked like a more effective alternative. Nor were Catholic voters and their representative, the Center Party, any more committed to democracy by this time either. Moreover, even a substantial number of Catholics and workers, or at least those who for whatever reason were not as closely bound into their respective cultural political milieu as the bulk of their fellows, turned to Nazism too.

Only be striking a chord with preexisting, often deep-seated social and political values could the Nazis rise to rapidly to become the largest party in Germany. At the same time, however, Nazi propaganda, for all its energy and sophistication, did not manage to win around people who were ideologically disinclined to vote for Hitler. Chronically underfunded for most of the time, and so unable to develop its full range of methods, excluded until 1933 from using the radio, and dependent on the voluntary work of often chaotic and disorganized groups of activists, Goebbels's propaganda offensive from 1930 to 1932 was only one of a number of influences driving people to vote for the Nazis at the polls. The Nazi propaganda effort, therefore, mainly won over people who were already inclined to identify with the values the Party claimed to represent, and who simply saw the Nazis as a more effective and more energetic vehicle than the bourgeois parties for putting them into effect.

The Nazis declared that they would scrape away foreign and alien encrustations on the German body politic, ridding the country of Communism, Marxism, "Jewish" liberalism, cultural Bolshevism, feminism, sexual libertinism, cosmopolitanism, the economic and power-political burdens imposed by Britain and France in 1919, "Western" democracy and much else. They would lay bare the true Germany. The conservatives who levered Hitler into power shared a good deal of this vision. They really did look back with nostalgia to the past, and yearn for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the Bismarckian Reich. But these were to be restored in a form purged of what they saw as the unwise concessions that had been made to democracy. In their vision of the future, everyone was to know their place, and the working classes especially were to be kept where they belonged, out of the political decision-making process altogether. Like other people at other times and in other places, the conservatives, as much as Hitler, manipulated and rearranged the past to suit their own present purposes. It was these congruities in vision that persuaded men like Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg that it would be worth legitimizing their rule by co-opting the mass movement of the Nazi Party into a coalition government whose aim was to erect an authoritarian state on the ruins of the Weimar Republic.

The death of democracy in Germany was part of a much broader European pattern in the interwar years; but it also had very specific roots in German history and drew ideas that were part of a very specific German tradition. German nationalism, the Pan-German vision of the completion of the completion through conquest in war of Bismarck's unfinished work of bring all Germans together in a single state, the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race and the threat posed to it by the Jews, the belief in eugenic planning and racial hygiene, the military ideal of a society clad in uniform, regimented, obedient and ready for battle -- all this and much more that came to fruition in 1933 drew on ideas that had been circulating in Germany since that last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Some of these ideas, in turn, had their roots in other countries or were shared by significant thinkers within them -- the racism of Gobineau, the anti-clericalism of Schönerer, the paganist fantasies of Lanz von Liebenfels, the pseudo-scientific population policies of Darwin's disciples in many countries, and much more. But they all came together in Germany in a uniquely poisonous mixture, rendered all the more potent by Germany's preeminent position as the most advanced and most powerful state on the European Continent. In the years following the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the rest of Europe, and the world, would learn just how poisonous the mixture could be.

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For all his electoral successes, there had never been any doubt that Hitler came into office as the result of a backstairs political intrigue. "The Germans" did not elect Hitler Reich Chancellor. Nor did they give their free and democratic approval to his creation of a one-party state. Yet some have argued that the Weimar Republic destroyed itself rather than being destroying by its enemies: a case of political suicide rather than political murder.

Of the weakness of the Republic's polity in the supreme crisis of 1930-33 there can be little doubt. The Republic's fatal lack of legitimacy caused people to look all too readily to other political solutions for Germany's ills. But these were not just of the Republic's own making. Crucial to the whole process was the way in which democracy's enemies exploited the democratic constitution and democratic political culture for their own ends. Joseph Goebbels was quite explicit about this when he publicly ridiculed:

"The stupidity of democracy. It will always remain one of democracy's best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed. The persecuted leaders of the NSDAP became parliamentary deputies and so acquired the use of parliamentary immunity, allowances and free travel tickets. They were thus protected from police interference, could allow themselves to say more than the ordinary citizen, and apart from that they also had the costs of their activity paid by their enemy. One can make superb capital from democratic stupidity. The members of the NSDAP grasped that right away and took enormous pleasure in it."

There was no denying the Nazis' supreme contempt for democratic institutions. But it is in the nature of democratic institutions that they presuppose at lease a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic politics. Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights. The Nazis knew this, and exploited the dilemma to the full in the second phase of the coming of the Third Reich, from February to July 1933.

Since the failure of his beer-hall putsch in November 1923, Hitler had always claimed he was going to come to power by legal means. Indeed, he had said as much on oath in court. After 1923, he new that a violent coup d'etat along the lines of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, or even the threatened "march on Rome" which had propelled Mussolini into Prime Ministerial office in Italy in 1922, would not work. At every point, therefore, Hitler and his associates sought a legalistic fig-leaf for their actions. All along, they avoided as far as possible giving their opponents the kind of opportunity that the Social Democrats had taken up in fighting Papen's Prussian coup of July 1932 through the courts. The Social Democrats had done this with a certain degree of legal success, though politically their court action had proved completely futile.

Avoiding this precedence was why, for instance, Hitler placed so much importance on the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act. It was why Goring enrolled the brownshirts and SS as auxiliary police in Prussia rather then simply letting them go on the rampage without so much as a pretense of legal cover for their actions. It was shy the Nazi leadership insisted on implementing its initial wave of policies through laws approved by the Reichstag or sanctioned by Presidential decrees. And the strategy of "legal revolution" worked. Hitler's constant reassurances that he would act legally helped persuade his coalition partners and his opponents alike that the Nazis could be dealt with by legal means.

Legal cover for the Nazis' actions allowed civil servants to draft the decrees and laws they demanded, even where, as with the Civil Service Act of 7 April 1933, they attacked the very principles of neutrality on which the civil service was based by requiring the dismissal of Jewish and politically unreliable bureaucrats from their positions. For civil servants, state employees and many others, the measures by which the Nazis seized power between the end of January and the end of July 1933 seemed irresistible because they appeared to carry the full force of the law.

Yet they did not. At every point in the process, the Nazis violated the law.

In the first place, they contradicted the spirit in which the laws had been passed. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, in particular, which gave the President the power to rule by decree in time of emergency, had never been intended to be the basis for any more than purely interim measures; the Nazis made it into the basis for a permanent state of emergency that was more fictive than real and lasted in a technical sense all they way up to 1945. Nor had Article 48 been intended to introduce measures as far-reaching as those passed on 28 February 1933. It was indeed unfortunate that President Ebert had made such liberal use and broad application of Article 48 earlier in the Republic's history, and doubly so that Reich Chancellors Brüning, Papen and Schleicher had relied on it so heavily in the crisis of the early 1930s. But even that paled into insignificance beside the drastic curtailment of civil liberties ordered on 28 February. Nor was the decree meant to be used by a Chancellor applying the President's rubber stamp. Hitler ensured in his negotiations with Hindenburg in January 1933 that it would be.

The Enabling Act was even more clearly a violation of the spirit of the constitution, as was the abolition of free elections that followed. Yet the likelihood of this happening was scarcely a secret, since the leading Nazis clearly proclaimed during the election campaign that the election of 5 March would be the last for many years to come.

The Nazis did not just violate the spirit of the Weimar constitution, they also transgressed against it in technical, legal sense too. The decree of 6 February 1933 gave Goring control over Prussia clearly broke the findings of the State Court in the lawsuit brought against Papen by the deposed Social Democratic minority government in Prussia. The Enabling Act was legally invalid because Goring, as President of the Reichstag, did not count the elected Communist deputies. Though the two-thirds majority did not require them to be counted, refusing to recognize their existence was an illegal act. Moreover, the Act's ratification by the Federal Council, the upper chamber of the legislature, representing the federated states, was irregular since the state governments had been overthrown by force and were therefore not properly constituted or represented.

These were more than technicalities. But they were far outdone by the massive, sustained, and wholly illegal violence perpetrated by Nazi stormtroopers on the streets that already began in mid-February, reached new levels of intensity after the Reichstag fire, and swept across the country in March, April, Many and June. The status of many of the perpetrators as auxiliary police in no way legalized the acts they committed. After all, putting someone into a policeman's uniform does not give him a license to commit murder, to ransack offices, to confiscate funds, or to arrest people, beat them up, torture them and imprison them in hastily erected concentration camps without trial.

There can be no doubt about the ultimate responsibility of Hitler and the Nazi leadership for these illegal acts. Hitler's contempt for the law and the Weimar constitution had been made clear on may occasions. "We enter the legal agencies and in that way will make our Party the determining factor," Hitler told the court at the 1930 army officers' trial in Leipzig. "However, once we possess the constitutional power, we will mold the state into the shape we hold to be suitable." It was important, he told the cabinet in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag fire, not to get too hung up on legal niceties in pursuing the supposed Communist perpetrators.

Hitler's whole rhetoric, his whole posture in the first months of 1933 amounted to a continual encouragement of acts of violence against the Nazis' opponents. His appeals for discipline almost invariably went hand-in-hand with more generalized rhetorical attacks on their opponents which rank-and-file stormtroopers took as license to continue the violence unabated. Massive, coordinated actions, like the occupation of the trade union offices on 2 May, persuaded ordinary brownshirts that they would not get into too much trouble if they acted on their own initiative on other occasions in the same spirit. And indeed they did not.

Most crucial of all was the fact that Hitler and the Nazis at every level were very much aware of the fact that they were breaking the law. Their contempt for the law, and for formal processes of justice, was palpable, and made plain on innumerable occasions. Might was right. Law was just an expression of power. What counted, in the words of one Nazi journalist, was not the "mendacious hypocrisy" of Germany's legal and penal systems, but "the law of power, that incorporates itself in the blood ties and military solidarity of one's own race. . . . There is neither law nor justice in itself. What had succeeded in asserting itself as 'law' in the struggle for power had to be protected, also for the sake of the victorious power."

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The illegal nature of the Nazi seizure of power in the first half of 1933, made it, in effect, into a revolutionary overthrow of the existing political system, and indeed the rhetoric of the "National Socialist Revolution" was designed not least as an implicit justification of illegal acts. But what kind of revolution was it?

The conservative administrator Hermann Rauschning, who began by working with the Nazis but by the late 1930s had become one of their fiercest and most persistent critics, described it as a "nihilist revolution," a "directionless revolution, a revolution merely for revolution's sake." It destroyed all social order, all freedom, all decency; it was a "revolution of destruction," nothing more. But in his passionate diatribe, Rauschning was doing little more than using "revolution" as a rhetorical bludgeon with which to beat the Nazis for their overturning of the order he prized. Other revolutions, whatever Rauschning may of have thought, delivered more than mere destruction. How then did the Nazi Revolution compare with them?

On the face of it, the Nazi Revolution was not really a revolution at all. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 swept away the existing order by force and replaced it with something that the revolutionaries regarded as entirely new. Typically trying to have it both ways, by contrast the Nazis both used the rhetoric of revolution and claimed that they had come to power legally and in accordance with the existing political constitution. They took few concrete steps to abolish the central institutions of the Weimar Republic or to replace them with something else -- the eventual abolition of the Presidential office is 1934 was a rarity in this respect. Instead, they preferred to let them atrophy, like the Reichstag, which barely met after 1933 and then only to hear speeches by Hitler, or the Reich cabinet which itself also eventually cease to meet.

On the other hand, what the conservative elites wanted -- the staging of a genuine counter-revolution with the aid of the National Socialists, culminating in a restoration of the Wilhelmine Reich, or something very much like it, with or without the person of the Kaiser on the throne -- failed to materialize as well. Whatever else happened in 1933, it was not a conservative restoration. The violence that was central to the seizure of power gave it a distinctly revolutionary flavor. The Nazi rhetoric of "revolution" was virtually unchallenged after June 1933. Does it have to be taken at face value, then?"

If there was a Nazi revolution, then what did the Nazis think it would be? Hitler himself seems to have thought of the Revolution as a changeover of personnel in positions of power and authority. In a speech to senior Nazi officials on 6 July 1933, he implied that the core of the Revolution lay in the elimination of political parties, democratic institutions and independent organizations. He seems to have regarded the conquest of power as the essence of the Nazi revolution, and to have used the two terms interchangeably. Fundamentally, therefore, while calling for a cultural and spiritual remaking of Germans in order to fit them to the new form of the Reich, he thought that this had to be done in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner. The cultural transformation of the individual German that formed the most revolutionary aspect of the Nazi's intentions could, by analogy, also be achieved by preserving or resurrecting what the Nazis thought of as the good aspects of the German culture of the past, and removing what they conceived of as alien intrusions.

All the great revolutions in history have rejected the past. For the Nazis and their supporters, the very term "Third Reich" constituted a powerful symbolic link to the imagined greatness of the past, embodied in the First Reich of Charlemagne and the Second of Bismarck. Thus, as Hitler said on 13 July 1934, the Nazi Revolution restored the natural development of German history that had been interrupted by the alien impositions of Weimar.

Nazism offered a synthesis of the revolutionary and the restorative. A complete overthrow the the social system was not what the Nazis had in mind. At the heart of the system that the Nazis created lay something else. For all their aggressively egalitarian rhetoric, the Nazis were relatively indifferent, in the end, to the inequalities of society. What mattered to them above all else was race, culture and ideology. In the coming years they would create a whole new set of institutions through which they could seek to remold the German psyche and rebuild the German character. After the purges of artistic and cultural life were complete, it was time for those German writers, musicians and intellectuals who remained to lend their talents with enthusiasm to the creation of a new German culture.

The Christianity of the established Churches, so far relatively immune from the hostile attentions of the Nazis, would not be protected for much longer. Now the Nazis would set about constructing a racial utopia, in which a pure-bred nation of heroes would prepare as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible for the ultimate test of German racial superiority: a war in which they would crush and destroy their enemies, and establish a new European order that would eventually come to dominate the world.

By the summer of 1933 the ground has been cleared for the construction of a dictatorship the like of which had never yet been seen. The Third Reich was born. In the next phase of its existence it was to rush headlong into a dynamic and increasingly intolerant maturity.

Source: Evans, R. J. (2004). The Coming of The Third Reich. New York: The Penguin Press.