The coming of the Third Reich
Publisher description: From one of the world's most distinguished historians, a magisterial new reckoning with Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin? There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time. A masterful synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans's history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as he shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. With many people angry and embittered by military defeat and economic ruin; a state undermined by a civil service, an army, and a law enforcement system deeply alienated from the democratic order introduced in 1918; beset by the growing extremism of voters prey to panic about the increasing popularity of communism; home to a tiny but quite successful Jewish community subject to widespread suspicion and resentment, Germany proved to be fertile ground in which Nazism's ideology of hatred could take root. The first book of what will ultimately be a complete three-volume history of Nazi Germany, The Coming of the Third Reich is a masterwork of the historian's art and the book by which all others on this subject will be judged
Print Book, English, 2004
1st American ed View all formats and editions
Penguin Press, New York, 2004
History
xi, 622 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 26 cm
9781594200045, 9780143034698, 1594200041, 0143034693
53186626
The legacy of the past
German peculiarities
Gospels of hate
The spirit of 1914
Descent into chaos
The failure of democracy
The weaknesses of Weimar
The great inflation
Culture wars
The fit and the unfit
The rise of Nazism
Bohemian revolutionaries
The beer-hall Putsch
Rebuilding the movement
The roots of commitment
Towards the seizure of power
The great depression
The crisis of democracy
The victory of violence
Fateful decisions
Creating the Third Reich
The terror begins
Fire in the Reichstag
Democracy destroyed
Bringing Germany into line
Hitler's cultural revolution
Discordant notes
The purge of the arts
Against the un-German spirit
A revolution of destruction?