The Coming of the Third Reich (79 page)

10
Starting with Martin Broszat’s
Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung
(Munich, 1969), another book which bears repeated rereading, and represented above all by Hans Mommsen’s brilliant essays, collected in his Der
Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze
(Reinbek, 1991)
and From Weimar
to
Auschwitz: Essays in German History
(Princeton, 1991).

11
This follows and carries further the technique already used in my earlier books
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830-1910
(Oxford, 1987) and
Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987
(Oxford, 1996).

12
Karl Marx,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(1852), in Lewis Feuer (ed.),
Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy
(New York, 1959), 360.

13
L. P. Hartley,
The Go-Between
(London, 1953), preface.

14
See Richard J. Evans, ‘History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness’,
History and Theory,
41 (2002) 277-96; and Henry Rousso,
The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France
(Philadelphia, 2002 [1998]).

15
Ian Kershaw,
Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945
(Oxford, 1983), vii.

16
Konrad Heiden,
Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus: Die Karriere einer Idee
(Berlin, 1932); idem,
Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie
(Zurich, 1936); Ernst Fraenkel,
The Dual State
(New York, 1941); Franz Neumann,
Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism
(New York, 1942).

17
Friedrich Meinecke,
Die deutsche Katastrophe
(Wiesbaden, 1946), available in a comically literal English translation by Sidney B. Fay,
The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections
(Cambridge, Mass., 1950). For a highly critical discussion, see Imanuel Geiss,‘Kritischer Rückblick auf Friedrich Meinecke’, in idem,
Studien über Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft
(Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 89-107. For a defence, see Wolfgang Wippermann, ‘Friedrich Meineckes “Die deutsche Katastrophe”: Ein versuch zur deutschen Vergangenheitsbewaltigung‘, in Michael Erbe (ed.
Friedrich Meinecke heute: Bericht über ein Gedenk-Colloquium zuseinem
25.
Todestag am 5. und 6.
April
1979
(Berlin, 1981), 101-21.

18
Thus the catalogue of questions posed at the outset of Karl Dietrich Bracher’s classic
Stufen
der
Machtergreifung,
volume I of Karl Dietrich Bracher
et
al., Die
nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitdren Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933/34
(Frankfurt am Main, 1974 [1960]), 17- 18.

19
Among many good discussions of the historiography of Nazism and the Third Reich, see especially the brief survey by Jane Caplan, ‘The Historiography of National Socialism‘, in Michael Bentley (ed.),
Companion
to
Historiography
(London, 1997), 545-90, and the longer study by Ian Kershaw,
The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
(4th edn., London, 2000 [1985]).

20
Mark Mazower,
Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
(London, 1998).

21
For a good survey of Marxist interpretations, placed in their contemporary political context, see Pierre Ayçoberry,
The Nazi Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism
(1922-1975) (New York, 1981 [1979]).

22
For East German work, see the discussion in Andreas Dorpalen,
German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach
(Detroit, 1988). There is a representative selection, with a judicious commentary, in Georg G. Iggers (ed.),
Marxist Historiography in Transformation: New Orientations in Recent East
German History (Oxford, 1992). One of the finest and subtlest of Marxist historians of the Third Reich was Tim Mason: see in particular his
Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class : Essays by Tim Mason
(ed. Jane Caplan, Cambridge, 1995) and
Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’
(ed. Jane Caplan, Providence, RI, 1993 [1977]).

23
Shirer,
The Rise and Fall;
Alan J. P. Taylor,
The Course of German History
(London, 1945); Edmond Vermeil,
Germany in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1956).

24
Ayçoberry,
The Nazi Question,
3-15.

25
Rohan d‘Olier Butler,
The Roots
of
National Socialism 1783-1933
(London, 1941), is the classic example of such wartime propaganda; another was Fossey J. C. Hearnshaw,
Germany the Aggressor throughout the Ages
(London, 1940). For an intelligent contemporary response, see Harold Laski,
The Germans - are they Human?
(London, 1941).

26
For a general discussion of these issues, see Richard J. Evans,
Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich
(London, 1987), esp. 1-54. There is an excellent brief collection of documents, with commentary, in John C. G. Rohl (ed.),
From Bismarck to Hitler: The Problem of Continuity in German History
(London, 1970). When I was an undergraduate, I was introduced to these controversies by the handy compendium of excerpts in John L. Snell (ed.),
The Nazi Revolution - Germany’s Guilt or Germany’s Fate?
(Boston, 1959).

27
This applies even to the relatively sophisticated writings of Germans exiled by the Third Reich, such as Hans Kohn, especially
The Mind of Germany:
The
Education of a Nation
(London, 1961), and Peter Viereck,
Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler
(New York, 1941).

28
Keith Bullivant, ‘Thomas Mann and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in idem (ed.),
Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic
(Manchester, 1977), 14-38; Taylor,
The Course,
92-3.

29
Gerhard Ritter, ’The Historical Foundations of the Rise of National-Socialism‘, in Maurice Beaumont et
al., The Third Reich: A Study Published under the Auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the Assistance of UNESCO
(New York, 1955), 381-416; idem,
Europa und die deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über
die
geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsgedankens
(Munich, 1948); Christoph Cornelissen,
Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert
(Düsseldorf, 2001); Ritter’s arguments can be dated back to 1937, when they were framed in rather less negative terms (ibid., 524-30). For a variety of other views, see Hans Kohn (ed.),
German History: Some New German Views
(Boston, 1954). An early, but only partially successful attempt by a German historian to break the mould was Ludwig Dehio,
Germany and World Politics
(London, 19 5 [1955]), which still emphasized the primacy of international factors.

30
See, among many other treatments of the topic, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die
totalitäre Erfahrung
(Munich, 1987) and Leonard Shapiro,
Totalitarianism
(London, 1972). The classic, much-criticized exposition of the basic theory is by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski,
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
(New York, 1963), the pioneering philosophical text by Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York, 1958).

31
Eckard Jesse (ed.),
Totalitarismus im
20.
Jahrhundert
(Baden-Baden, 1996) and Alfons Söllner (ed.),
Totalitarismus: Eine Ideengeschichte
des 20.
Jahrhunderts
(Berlin, 1997).

32
See in particular the fruitful comparisons in IanKershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.),
Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison
(Cambridge, 1997), and the useful and well-informed discussion in Kershaw,
The Nazi Dictatorship,
20-46.

33
Jürgen Steinle, ‘Hitler als “Betriebsunfall in der Geschichte”‘,
Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 45
(1994), 288-302, for an analysis of this argument.

34
Karl Dietrich Bracher,
Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie
(3rd edn., Villingen, 1960 [1955]); idem,
et al.,
Die
nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung.

35
Broszat,
Der Staat Hitlers;
idem, et al. (eds.),
Bayern in der NS-Zeit
(6 vols., Munich, 1977-83); Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany;
see also the useful commentary on the development of research in the latest German edition of Norbert Frei’s brief history,
Der Führerstaat: Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933 bis 1945
(Munich, 2001 [1987]), 282-304. Recent attempts to delegitimize Broszat’s work on the grounds that, like other German historians of his generation, he had belonged to the Hitler Youth in adolescence, and with many others had been enrolled as a member of the Nazi Party (though without his knowledge), fail to convince not least because they fail to address what he actually wrote as a historian (Nicolas Berg,
Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung
(Cologne, 2003), esp. 613-15).

36
Amongst many studies and collections, see, for example, Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.),
Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany
(Princeton, 2001); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann,
The Racial State: Germany 1933- 1945
(Cambridge, 1991); Henry Friedlander,
The Origins of Nazi Genocide:
From
Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1995); Wolfgang Ayass,
‘Asoziale’ im Nationalsozialismus
(Stuttgart, 1995); Peter Longerich,
Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung
(Munich, 1998); Ulrich Herbert,
Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich
(Cambridge, 1997 [1985]).

37
Richard J. Evans,
In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past
(New York, 1989); idem,
Rituals.

38
Richard J. Evans,
Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial
(London, 2002).

39
Peter Longerich, Der
ungeschriebene Befehl: Hitler und der Weg zur ‘Endlösung’
(Munich, 2001), 9-20.

40
Victor Klemperer,
LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen
(Leipzig, 1985 [1946]).

Chapter I
THE LEGACY OF THE PAST

1
Continuities between the Bismarckian Reich and the coming of the Third Reich form the central thesis of Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte,
III:
Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849-1914
(Munich, 1995), and Heinrich August Winkler,
Der lange Weg nach Westen,
I:
Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik
(Munich, 2000).

2
Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Bismarck und das neue Deutschland’, in idem,
Preussen und Deutschland‘im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
(Munich, 1918), 510-31, quoted and translated in Edgar Feuchtwanger,
Bismarck
(London, 2002), 7.

3
Elizabeth Knowles (ed.),
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
(5th edn., Oxford, 1999), 116.

4
Quoted without attribution in Alan J. P. Taylor,
Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman
(London, 1955), 115.

5
For a good brief overview of this and the following period, see David Blackbourn,
The Fontana History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century
(London, 1997); more detail in James J. Sheehan,
German History 1770-1866
(Oxford, 1989); more still in Thomas Nipperdey,
Germany from Napoleon to
Bismarck (Princeton, 1986 [1983]), and even more in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche
Gesellschaftsgeschichte,
II:
Von der Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ 1815-1845/49
(Munich, 1987).