Hitler before the war
Review of The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a nation by Richard J. Evans
In 1979, the father of a German friend said to me: “if Hitler hadn’t gotten us into the war, he would have been a great man in our history.” Since then, I have been searching for a book on how the Nazis governed Germany, particularly during 1933-39. Hitler’s rise and Germany’s fall have been covered, the domestic political front much less so. How well, I wondered, did they manage the economy? What role did anti-Semitism play? Was war inevitable? With Evans’ magisterial masterwork, I have at last found many answers.
The Nazis gained power through an unusual conjuncture of factors, including the Great Depression, the disorder of Weimar, the threat of Bolshevism, and a sense of national shame after World War I. Once Hitler gained the chancellorship as the largest faction in Parliamentary government, they moved quickly to seize dictatorial power as a matter of security and public order – the excuse was the burning of the Reichstag, the cause of which remains disputed.
The Nazi approach to government was messianic – Hitler unerringly represented the “objective will” of the people, a collective entity that went beyond the concerns and rights of the individual. His responsibility was to history and race, the mythical Aryans. His word was law that superseded all other law.
In accordance with Dual State theory, Evans informs us, the Nazi system was based “normative law” (bound by rules, laws, conventions as embodied in institutions) and then the “prerogative state”, an extra-legal system whose legitimacy derives from the authority of a leader. Nazi ideology was the basis for interpreting legal sources. There were the police and then the Gestapo, which operated with total impunity outside of the law, supposedly in accordance with Hitler’s orders and, beyond that, his intentions.
Goebbels gradually took over all organs of opinion formation, both in terms of coordinating around a message and operationally, that is, purging perceived dissenters and placing them all under administrative and financial control. All other community or national organizations, including universities, were eventually subsumed into the Nazi state, that is, if they didn’t cease to exist. For example, Hitler Youth demanded a huge amount of time and energy in exercise, competitions, and propaganda, much of it resented; it was consciously designed to take the place of religious youth organizations. Even Nazi organizations were held to a tight standard of control – in the Night of the Longknives, the leadership of the SA’s brownshirts and stormtroopers was decapitated (sometimes literally) because of its rowdy independence and the supposed ambitions of its leader, Ernst Röhm.
Hitler was seen in religious terms (“savior” “instrument of providence”, etc.), somehow above party and politics. He was even portrayed as “completing what Luther had begun,” with ongoing hostility towards the Catholic church. However, the attempts by conservative nationalists to meld Nazism and Protestantism failed. In effect, any criticism of the regime by religious authorities was discouraged, disciplined, then punished, often with transfer into the concentration camps that were springing up all over Germany or death. Moreover, there were many Nazis who were outright atheists, while others would have preferred a paganism based on Hitler as well as Odin and Wotan. Finally, the predominant metaphor was battle, its appeal referencing fears, prejudice, and grievance, all of which focused around anti-Semitism.
That being said, Evans is at pains to point out that Nazi ideology ultimately saw itself as fulfilling a mandate from nature, a “fully modern” kind of Romantic science, rather than some mystical faith. According to this logic, nations were like beasts fighting in the jungle; the fittest would dominate the others by right (translated as might). To build a strong nation required genetic superiority, which meant the pursuit of “racial hygiene” (or purity), in particular by the dominant Aryans. Hence, their eugenics policies, forcible sterilization, and the destruction, incarceration, or expulsion of undesirable minorities and “asocial types”. Notably, these ideas were “in the air” at the time and under debate in all industrial societies, though it was only in Germany that they were systematically and violently applied.
Hitler came to power promising to eliminate unemployment (of over 30%) via massive productive investment similar to Keynesianism. Germany was also supposed to become a self-sufficient autarky. While national economic actors nominally operated independently – National Socialism wasn’t communism, after all – in reality the entire Nazi economic program was subordinated to preparation for war, first in cartels and later yoked into a national Four-Year Plan. Because this required the importation of raw materials and industrial technologies, this programmatic mix flatly contradicted the Nazi push to autarky. It also diverted resources away from consumers, who were asked continually to sacrifice for the sake of the nation’s security; though unemployment eased, the standard of living actually deteriorated, a huge cause of disillusionment. Nazi finances became so severely stressed that imperialistic expansion – the conquest of other nations for Lebensraum – was viewed from the beginning as a necessity, as an integral and inevitable part of Hitler’s plan.
Another pillar of the Nazi economic regime was exclusion. First, the expropriation of Jewish businesses and property (dubbed “Aryanization”) opened some opportunities for disenfranchised citizens, as embodied in the Nuremberg Laws. (While this placated small businessmen who could not compete with the large corporations that the Four-Year Plan necessarily favored, in the end the regime failed them.) Anti-Semitic violence gradually increased, forcing Jews into total exclusion from German society, then into emigration and finally into concentration camps. Women were also supposed to leave the work force, instead managing the home and reproducing little Aryans.
In spite of all this, most German males felt they could pursue their careers in safety, with the possibility of advancement and betterment, which they had felt impossible under the Weimar Republic. This was a political triumph.
Hitler of course is the principal figure of the book. Evans portrays him as erratic yet extremely hard working, fanatically involved in quirky details, and decisive in his implacable drive to war. (Hitler himself designed the appearance of what would become the VW Bug, which Ferdinand Porsche would later engineer.) Nonetheless, in many areas, he lacked consistent follow through, which resulted in contradictory policies as acolytes battled for bureaucratic supremacy, impossible demands were made, and simple chaos. According to Evans, Nazi Germany was far from a seamless, well functioning machine. For example, many farmers refused to meet grain production targets because if they did, they could not produce enough cows and pigs for other obligations under the Four-Year Plan. These instances are not exceptions, but the rule that would later hinder how the war was waged.
Hitler’s diplomacy – to gain territory without war while rearming – was by far the most dynamic of the period. Britain and France were reluctant to fight in direct military engagement, so they attempted to placate him, eventually facing humiliation and shocked by his lies. In this way, they allowed the retaking of the Rhineland (the industrial heart of Germany), Anschluss with Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, all while Germany tested its arms and fighting methods in the Spanish civil war and brutally mistreated the Jews within their territories. Together, these triumphs fed Hitler’s megalomania and sense of personal infallibility, sweeping aside all critics and advice. He became convinced he would dominate the world. It was ominous in every sense. The book ends with the partition of Poland by agreement with Stalin, which led directly to Britain’s declaration of war. As Evans emphasizes, the German people feared war.
I must say that Evans’ conclusions and tone are in accord with everything I know about the Germany that I lived in and studied. This book is the work of a master historian, perhaps the best current specialist in Nazi Germany. It never gets lost in detail or proofs, but is a popular academic account that reads with exceptional clarity at the undergraduate level. Its organization is thematic rather than a chronological narrative, which leads to some inevitable repetition, but the message is clear: the Nazis were bent on war from the beginning and used brutality and race hatred in pursuance of their goals with Hitler’s full knowledge and participation.
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