I gave up this book about 1/4 through (the "rise part", basically). It was just way too long and detailed.
Such details lost me and prevented me to understand the most significant events among all the twists and turns. On the other hand, it definitely contains some very interesting annecdotes, some of which contains very symptomatic and important insights about this time period. I have highlighted them on my kindle, and quote them hereafter.
Birth of the Nazi Party
On Hitler working for the German Army once WWI was over, and how antisemistim and authoritarianism was rewarded there:
One day, according to his own story, he intervened during a lecture in which someone had said a good word for the Jews. His anti-Semitic harangue apparently so pleased his superior officers that he was soon posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.
On the paramilitary organization (know as the SA, for Sturmabteilung, meaning "Storm Trooper") that Hilter built around the Nazi party, which was originally meant as sort of security guards for the Nazi party. Not for long...
These uniformed rowdies, not content to keep order at Nazi meetings, soon took to breaking up those of the other parties.
On Hitler's mysterious sources of income once he had quit the Army to dedicate himself to the party:
“If any member asks him how he lives and what was his former profession, he always becomes angry and excited. Up to now no answer has been supplied to these questions. So his conscience cannot be clean, especially as his excessive intercourse with ladies, to whom he often describes himself as ‘King of Munich,’ costs a great deal of money.”
Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch
On the practical "application" of the Treaty of Versailles by the German Army:
The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of the peace treaty before the ink on it was scarcely dry.
On the extreme right-wing bias of the German court system under the Republic of Weimar:
Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing extremists.
On the Weimar Republic declaring a state of emergency due to political instability, and Bavaria refusing to comply with the orders of the Republic:
Kahr refused to recognize that President Ebert’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Germany had any application in Bavaria. He declined to carry out any orders from Berlin. When the national government demanded the suppression of Hitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, because of its vitriolic attacks on the Republic in general and on Seeckt, Stresemann and Gessler in particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.
On Hitler's trial for treason, following his failed coup d'état, and how it became a springboard for spreading Hitler's ideology:
Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length.
The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich
On Mein Kampf, written in Hitler's subsequent jailtime:
Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. It was almost obligatory — and certainly politic — to present a copy to a bride and groom at their wedding, and nearly every school child received one on graduation from whatever school. By 1940, the year after World War II broke out, six million copies of the Nazi bible had been sold in Germany.
For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest.
On German culture's available inspirations for Nazi ideology:
(Note: This is a controversial aspect of the book)
Hegel foresees such a State for Germany when she has recovered her God-given genius. He predicts that “Germany’s hour” will come and that its mission will be to regenerate the world. As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand.
On some German intellectuals taking a liking in Hitler:
[Houston Steward] Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler — and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire—the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies!—Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. “You have mighty things to do,” he wrote Hitler on the following day, “… My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope—I confess—was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from him; for these two things—personality and influence—belong together … May God protect you!”
On Hitler's interpretation of some Nietzsche texts:
Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler. A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.
On the recovery of the German economy:
While Hitler was in prison a financial wizard by the name of Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, and he had succeeded.
The Road to Power: 1925-31
On the rise of the Nazi party:
But on this day [(September 14, 1930)] the vote of the N.S.D.A.P. rose to 6,409,600, entitling the party to 107 seats in the Reichstag and propelling it from the ninth and smallest party in Parliament to the second largest.
On Hitler trying to find the balance to masquerade as a workers' party while pulling most of its funding from wealthy industrialists:
So was an almost comical zigzag in Nazi politics. Once in the fall of 1930 Strasser, Feder and Frick introduced a bill in the Reichstag on behalf of the Nazi Party calling for a ceiling of 4 per cent on all interest rates, the expropriation of the holdings of “the bank and stock exchange magnates” and of all “Eastern Jews” without compensation, and the nationalization of the big banks. Hitler was horrified; this was not only Bolshevism, it was financial suicide for the party. He peremptorily ordered the party to withdraw the measure. Thereupon the Communists reintroduced it, word for word. Hitler bade his party vote against it.
The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33
Hitler's foreshadowing words in 1931:
If the party once falls to pieces I’ll put an end to it all in three minutes with a pistol shot.
On the unstopped rise of the Nazi party:
The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries — in France, in England, in the United States — had proved to be the backbone of democracy.
The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34
On the necessity of propaganda and the brutal state:
The Fuehrer was declaiming that “the National Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course” and that “it will be victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated.” In Nazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated” — to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism.
On the end of the last few Nazi believers that their party was actually a workers' one:
Schmitt was the most orthodox of businessmen, director general of Allianz, Germany’s largest insurance company, and he lost no time in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists who had been naïve enough to take their party program seriously.
On Hitler stalling the rest of the world (and the German people) by proudly celebrating the exact contrary of what his plans were:
On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world.
From now on Nazi Germany intended to rearm itself in defiance of any disarmament agreement and of Versailles. This was a calculated risk — also the first of many — and Blomberg’s secret directive to the Army and Navy, which came to light at Nuremberg, reveals not only that Hitler gambled with the possibility of sanctions but that Germany’s position would have been hopeless had they been applied.
One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of “honor”—a word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps.
On the propaganda machine:
No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time. This was inevitable, of course, the moment the Nazi leaders decided that the arts, literature, the press, radio and the films must serve exclusively the propaganda purposes of the new regime and its outlandish philosophy.
In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings — Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.
No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons.
After six years of Nazification the number of university students dropped by more than one half—from 127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554. Academic standards fell dizzily. By 1937 there was not only a shortage of young men in the sciences and engineering but a decline in their qualifications.
Great teachers such as Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or retired. Those who remained, many of them, were bitten by the Nazi aberrations and attempted to apply them to pure science. They began to teach what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics.
Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, especially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb.
On the eventual disillusion of businessmen with the Nazi party:
Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned.
On Nazi justice:
The lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.
The First Steps: 1934-37
On the British government being fooled by Hitler's lies to the point of allowing him to build a navy:
For it was obvious to the most simple mind in Berlin that by agreeing to Germany’s building a navy a third as large as the British, the London government was giving Hitler free rein to build up a navy as fast as was physically possible — one that would tax the capacity of his shipyards and steel mills for at least ten years.
On Hitler's formal decision to wage war:
Thus as evening darkened Berlin on that autumn day of November 5, 1937—the meeting broke up at eight-fifteen—the die was cast. Hitler had communicated his irrevocable decision to go to war.
Now the Wehrmacht chiefs and the Foreign Minister were confronted with specific dates for actual aggression against two neighboring countries — an action which they were sure would bring on a European war. They must be ready by the following year, 1938, and at the latest by 1943–45. The realization stunned them. Not, so far as the Hossbach records show, because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’s proposals but for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for a big war; to provoke one now would risk disaster.
On the fall of the Army's opposition to Hitler as a warlord: all the men previously put in place by the Weimar Republic revealed not to be up to the task:
Blomberg, Fritsch and Neurath had been put in office by Hindenburg and the old-school conservatives to act as a brake upon Nazi excesses, and Schacht had joined them. But in the struggle for control of the foreign and economic policy and the military power of Germany they proved to be no match for Hitler. They had neither the moral strength nor the political shrewdness to stand up to him, let alone to triumph over him. Schacht quit. Neurath stepped aside. Blomberg, under pressure from his own brother generals, resigned. Fritsch, though he was framed in gangster fashion, accepted his dismissal without a gesture of defiance.
I stopped the book at this point. 🫣 Whether it was the sheer density of detail or my brain trying to shield me from the descent that follows (which we all know includes particularly dark events), I just couldn’t keep going. I knew I needed to step away and read something else.
Still, I hope this collection of excerpts is a valuable output from my time with the first 300 pages or so — a glimpse into the patterns, personalities, and pathologies that shaped this very dark era.