Rise and Fall Ch. 1: Birth of the Third Reich
We wrap up the first week of our reading group of William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" with a recap of the first chapter.
One of the hardest decisions to make when you tell a long story is where to start. The beginning, of course, is the natural starting point. Although he was speaking about the fiction of drama, Aristotle makes it sound way too easy in the Poetics: “A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity.”
There’s always so much pre-history and context that matters to understand any supposed beginning.
When it comes to the story of the Third Reich, the beginning certainly seems simple. The Nazis took power in 1933. So the year 1933 makes perfect sense as a starting point.
Shirer begins his narrative on January 28 of that year, two days before their rise to power:
On the very eve of the Third Reich a feverish tension gripped Berlin.
Two days before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, President Paul von Hindenburg dismissed General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor, faced as he was with political gridlock and personal bad health
Over those two days, Hitler was nervous and yet “supremely confident that his hour had struck.” Then, on January 30, Hindenburg summoned Hitler and named him Chancellor of the German Reich. That night, tens of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers marched through the streets of Berlin in a massive torchlight parade.
Hitler, who was elated at the shift in political winds, was, as Shirer asserts, “a person of undoubted, if evil, genius,” who was impossible to separate from the history of the regime.
Shirer sums up the history of Nazi Germany in one hell of a sentence towards the end of this introductory section:
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."
This introduction, which focuses around the Machtergreifung (“seizure of power”), lasts only three and a half pages. And then—since a story does require a backstory, events require context, and the origin itself has causes—Shirer then moves back in time from January 1933 to Hitler’s birth in 1889. He turns to Hitler’s biography to provide the necessary context for the history of Nazi Germany.
Shirer only returns to January 30, 1933, six chapters later, on page 187.
The rest of chapter 1 thus has nothing to do with its title (“The Birth of the Third Reich”) and everything to do with its chancellor. We learn that Hitler was born in Austria, just on the other side of the border from Germany. He grew up obsessed that there should be no border between the two German-speaking countries.
Here Shirer avoids plunging into a useful but potentially lengthy excursion on the history of the German-speaking lands. Why did Germany not develop into a nation earlier (like France and England)? Why was Austria not part of a Großdeutschland (“Greater Germany”)? What happened half a century earlier to unify the country as Kleindeutschland (“Smaller Germany”)? Who did the three wars of German unification come about, especially the one between Germany and Austria?
Getting into these questions would have shed light on the political and social issues behind Hitler’s views, since Hitler was particularly disappointed with the multi-ethnic nature of the Hapbsurg empire, which he considered decadent and doomed to fall. But it would have made the book even longer than it already is. Shirer decides instead to focus exclusively on the person of Adolf Hitler.
We learn that Hitler’s father, who was a bastard, grew up with the name Alois Shicklgruber. He was only belatedly recognized by his father as Alois Hitler thirteen years before Adolf’s birth. So Shirer indulges in an odd bit of speculation on whether Hitler could have ever become the leader of Germany with the last name of Shicklgruber. After all, ‘Heil Shicklgruber!’ doesn’t quite roll of the tongue in the same way as ‘Heil Hitler!’ (And if you roll the ‘r’ with a southern German accent, it somehow sounds even more absurd.)
Adolf Hitler’s domineering father Alois was a civil servant, who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. In opposition to his father, Adolf thought about the priesthood, but ultimately decided he wanted to be a painter instead. He was not a good student and resented his teachers for the rest of his life for giving him bad marks. He did love one teacher, though: Dr. Leopold Poetsch, a fanatical German nationalist who taught Hitler love history (or at least the fanatical German nationalist version).
In 1909, Hitler moved from Linz to Vienna, where he lived the bohemian life. And yet, despite the company he kept, in many ways he seems to have been the ideal young man. He had no vices: he didn’t smoke or drink or chase girls. Instead, he used his free time to read voraciously (even if was literature of the anti-Semitic and German nationalist variety). He worked odd jobs, mostly as a house painter it seems. (Although, as Shirer points out, we cannot trust all that Hitler writes in Mein Kampf about his backstory.)
He was often hungry. As Shirer observes, Hitler “had the petty bourgeoisie’s gnawing fear of sliding back into the ranks of the proletariat,” a fear that he developed the ability to expertly exploit later on.
In Vienna, Hitler began to follow politics closely. He didn’t like the Social Democrats because he was a German nationalist. In the multi-ethnic empire, the Social Democrats were willing to welcome Slavic comrades. But he respected that they knew how to create a mass movement, could effectively wield propaganda, and knew the value of terror.
Hitler did like the Pan-German Nationalist Party (because of their German nationalism), but he concluded that they didn’t adequately appreciate what was called the “social problem.” Because they didn’t seek to address the material concerns of the lower classes, they could never generate mass support. (Enterprising readers may begin to see how the nationalism and socialism might come together into a new political party later on…)
When it came to the third main political party in Austria, the Christian Social Party, Hitler begrudgingly respected the genius of its leader Dr. Karl Lueger, a brilliant orator and longtime mayor of Vienna.
A zealous Catholic, Lueger sought to capture the institutions of society, including the university, for the Catholic Church. He would not permit the leftist Social Democrats or Jews in the municipal administration. If Hitler agreed with him on these points, he did like that Lueger forbade pan-Germans from serving with him. One of the lessons he learned from Lueger was that to succeed politically you cannot oppose the church or other institutions of society.
In 1913, Hitler left Vienna to escape military service. Unlike our chickenhawks today, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to serve himself. He just didn’t want to serve with Jews, Slavs, and other minorities. When World War I rolled around, he was more than happy to enlist…in Germany.
A quick note on Shirer’s own life: In January 1933, Shirer had recently been fired by Colonel McCormick, the right-wing publisher of the Chicago Tribune. He and his Austrian wife Tess would soon leave Vienna for the cheaper and sunnier environs of Barcelona. He would only arrive in Berlin a year later in 1934. And so he did not observe any of these first moments of the Nazi regime in person, nor did he report on them, having lost his job as the Chicago Tribune’s premier foreign correspondent in Europe.
Because of his German language skills and personal connections, he was particularly attuned to the news in Germany. And throughout 1933, he was surprised at the apathy of friends and acquaintances—mostly Americans and British—towards the political rumblings in Berlin.