The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

Product Information

Both Friedlander and Goldhagen have wrestled with this question; Evans pretends that it doesn’t exist. And the reader gets a clearer notion of how offensive traditionalists found the cultural and sexual experiments of Weimar than of the delight and freedom they brought to the urban young. Richard Evans has written two articles for History Review explaining how a modern, progressive country surrendered to a brutal and murderous dictatorship.

The Coming of the Third Reich by Sir Richard J. Evans The Coming of the Third Reich by Sir Richard J. Evans

The standard bibliography of works on the Nazi period stood at more than 37,000 entries in the year 2000, having increased from 'a mere 25,000' in 1995. With tremendous authority, skill and compassion, Evans re-creates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows; the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. We're used to other pens portraying 1939-45 as a titanic battle for survival between evenly matched forces, an equal struggle we almost lost.

Hitler dreamed of becoming an artist but his strict and architectural paintings were rejected as unfit by the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. But in the end, broadly speaking the political class is willing to sacrifice their morals for the sake of selfish careerism. Yet, in an almost Wagnerian way, you need to see the madness complete; you need to watch Berlin burning, a pyre of malevolent dreams. The Weimar Republic was not wanted by many, if at all any German and they did not want to defend it. His first two volumes, on the coming of the Third Reich and its seizure not only of power but of the German psyche, seem more immediately relevant seven decades on than another account of the subsequent battles and bestialities.

The Coming of the Third Reich - Penguin Books UK

the Nazis were jubilant at the failure of the Social Democrats and trade unions to respond to the Papen coup … Goebbels wrote in his diary … "They have missed their big chance.Of immense importance to general readers—and even some specialists—seeking to understand the origins of the Nazi regime. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. One by one these blows ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command. Evans is Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes - Goodreads The Coming of the Third Reich Quotes - Goodreads

One finally puts down this magnificent volume thirsty, on the one hand, for the next installment in the Nazi saga yet still haunted by the questions Evan poses and so masterfully grapples with. Evans has also taught at the University of Stirling, University of East Anglia and Birkbeck College, London.A gradual rebuilding of the Nazi party and a building up of it paramilitary wing was pursued after this even as the Hitler Personality Cult grew and grew and grew. Evans paints a heartbreaking scenario of the many opportunities (albeit with hindsight) whereby Hitler could have been stopped. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in.

The Coming of the Third Reich: Richard J. Evans

Some of those traditions arose during the reign of Otto von Bismarck, who, in unifying Germany, universalized military service and “saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state,” answerable to a strong leader alone. This volume runs up to Hitler's accession to power in 1933; the second will cover the prewar period of Nazi rule, while the last volume will deal with the apocalypse of Hitler's Germany between 1939 and 1945. This opening installment begins, briefly, during the reign of Bismarck and the unification of Germany. The Third Reich Trilogy is a series of three narrative history books by British historian Richard J. Antisemitism was no more widespread than in many other countries, representative institutions were thriving, political parties and elections an accepted part of constitutional practice.But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions. With the decreasing role of religion in public life tempering religious antisemitism, a combination of growing nationalism, the rise of eugenics, and resentment at the socio-economic success of the Jews led to the newer, and more virulent, racist antisemitism. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Ceaselessly inventive, in many ways at the cutting edge of social and welfare reform, Germany was the one country in Europe to rival the United States as a beacon for future growth and change.