# The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51opIrpMzjL._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[William L. Shirer]] - Full Title: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - Category: #books ## Highlights - It is quite remarkable how little those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew of what was going on behind the façade of the Third Reich. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders. ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=99)) - Most historians have waited fifty years or a hundred, or more, before attempting to write an account of a country, an empire, an era. But was this not principally because it took that long for the pertinent documents to come to light and furnish them with the authentic material they needed? And though perspective was gained, was not something lost because the authors necessarily lacked a personal acquaintance with the life and the atmosphere of the times and with the historical figures about which they wrote? ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=111)) - In the case of the Third Reich, and it is a unique case, almost all of the documentary material became available at its fall, and it has been enriched by the testimony of all the surviving leaders, military and civilian, in some instances before their death by execution. With such incomparable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. ([Location 115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=115)) - Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=132)) - In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet. ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=136)) - Shortly before noon on Monday, January 30, 1933, Hitler drove over to the Chancellery for an interview with Hindenburg that was to prove fateful for himself, for Germany and for the rest of the world. ([Location 170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=170)) - Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 A.M. Scribbling in his diary before retiring, he wrote: “It is almost like a dream… a fairy tale… The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!”8 ([Location 197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=197)) - The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the “Thousand-Year Reich.” It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=200)) - “It is one of the great examples,” as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent German historian, said, “of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life.” ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=213)) - There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German. Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous “Heils”? “Heil Schicklgruber!”? Not only was “Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional “Hello.” “Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=262)) - He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls “spiritual and physical terror.” ([Location 627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=627)) - I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty… ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=632)) - I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=636)) - Though Hitler was to forget it when he came to power in Germany, one of the lessons of his Vienna years which he stresses at great length in Mein Kampf is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches. “Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination,” he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.”51 ([Location 650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=650)) - It was then that the Nazi movement, alone among the nationalist and conservative parties, gained a great mass following and, having achieved this, won over” the support of the Army, the President of the Republic and the associations of big business—three “long-established institutions” of great power, which led to the chancellorship of Germany. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=687)) - The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=693)) - He buried himself in anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at the time. Then he took to the streets to observe the “phenomenon” more closely. “Wherever I went,” he says, “I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity… Later I often grew sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.” ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=721)) - As Rudolf Olden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism may have been his tortured sexual envy. Though he was in his early twenties, so far as is known he had no relations of any kind with women during his sojourn in Vienna. ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=736)) - In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=744)) - Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of the “stab in the back” which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph. ([Location 870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=870)) - One had to live in Germany between the wars to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people. The facts which exposed its deceit lay all around. The Germans of the Right would not face them. The culprits, they never ceased to bellow, were the “November criminals”—an expression which Hitler hammered into the consciousness of the people. ([Location 882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=882)) - It was not responsible for the German collapse. The blame for that rested on the old order, which had held the power.* But millions of Germans refused to concede this. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=887)) - And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics.”6 As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world. ([Location 897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=897)) - This man was Anton Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be said to have been the actual founder of National Socialism. A sickly, bespectacled man, lacking a formal education, with an independent but narrow and confused mind, a poor writer and a worse speaker, Drexler was then employed in the Munich railroad shops. ([Location 980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=980)) - Drexler’s principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist. ([Location 997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=997)) - Adolf Hitler was then and there enrolled as the seventh member of the committee of the German Workers’ Party. ([Location 1029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1029)) - Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism. ([Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1042)) - The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political party. ([Location 1061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1061)) - In the course of his speech Hitler had enunciated for the first time the twenty-five points of the program of the German Workers’ Party. ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1093)) - The very first point in the program demanded the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany. ([Location 1102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1102)) - There were, finally, two points of the program which Hitler would carry out as soon as he became Chancellor. Point 2 demanded the abrogation of the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. The last point, number 25, insisted on “the creation of a strong central power of the State.” This, like Points 1 and 2 demanding the union of all Germans in the Reich and the abolition of the peace treaties, was put into the program at Hitler’s insistence and it showed how even then, when his party was hardly known outside Munich, he was casting his eyes on further horizons even at the risk of losing popular support in his own bailiwick. ([Location 1117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1117)) - No one could say he had not given ample warning, in writing, from the very beginning. ([Location 1127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1127)) - The first signs of his peculiar genius began to appear and make themselves felt. What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak. ([Location 1130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1130)) - The hooked cross—the hakenkreuz—of the swastika, borrowed though it was from more ancient times, was to become a mighty and frightening symbol of the Nazi Party and ultimately of Nazi Germany. ([Location 1155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1155)) - Hitler reveled in his unique creation. “A symbol it really is!” he exclaims in Mein Kampf. “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.”20 ([Location 1168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1168)) - Then and there, in July 1921, was established the “leadership principle” which was to be the law first of the Nazi Party and then of the Third Reich. The “Fuehrer” had arrived on the German scene. ([Location 1215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1215)) - They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany’s defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. It doomed the Republic from the start. ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1423)) - The failure of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic, as time would tell. ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1589)) - The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.” ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1591)) - Down in Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, antidemocratic, antirepublican tide. He began to ride it. He was greatly aided by the course of events, two in particular: the fall of the mark and the French occupation of the Ruhr. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1606)) - The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted? Was this not a fraud upon the people? And was not the democratic Republic, which had surrendered to the enemy and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for the disaster? ([Location 1617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1617)) - the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr. Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. ([Location 1630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1630)) - Such times were heaven-sent for Adolf Hitler. ([Location 1638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07XD76H41&location=1638))