Rise and Fall Ch. 2: Birth of the Nazi Party
In our second chapter summary of our reading group of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", we see Hitler emerge as a power-hungry political genius in Munich.
We’re now into week two of our reading group of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich!
To conclude last week’s reading, I wanted to offer a short recap of chapter 2, but first some housekeeping, starting with this week’s reading:
Week 2 Reading (Jan 27-Feb 2, 2025)
Chapter 3: Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch
Chapter 4: The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich
A reminder that the full reading list as well as reading options (online, audio, and dead tree) can all be found in this post.
Over the weekend, I recorded a podcast episode The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture with my friend Matty. It’s a stab at trying to recreate the feeling of a reading group, since we can’t all gather together in my living room and discuss the reading over drinks.
Since the podcast is just a trial, please have a listen and drop a short note in the comments and let us know what you think!
Previous Chapter Recaps
As you’ll remember, chapter 1 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich started with a brief description of Hitler assuming power in January 1933. It made the tight connection betwen the Nazi regime and the person of Adolf Hitler, quickly jumping back in time to Hitler’s birth and childhood and moving up to World War I.
In this second chapter, “Birth of the Nazi Party,” Shirer briefly describes Hitler’s war service and then moves from 1918 up to 1921, detailing Hitler’s political engagement in German nationalist circles up through the creation of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers in the party.
For those who have read even a little about Hitler, these 23 pages will inevitably leave something out that seems essential. But Shirer does an excellent job of capturing the chaotic politics of the moment.
Germans by and large refused to acknowledge that their cherished army had lost World War I. The Kaiser had abdicated and all the monarchs of the different German regions with him. The German Empire was no more. For a brief moment, a radical revolution on the order of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed possible in Germany. Bavaria, the southern German region bordering Austria where Hitler chose to settle, was ruled by a quick series of socialist and communist groups, before a counterrevolution led by the German army and Freikorps paramilitary groups removed them. The Free State of Bavaria was then swept up into the liberal democratic Weimar Republic.
The Weimar constitution, as Shirer observes, looked great on paper. However, after the events of 1918-1919, the left was bitterly split between socialists and communists, while the right-wing of the Army, monarchists, and pan-German nationalists scarcely granted any legitimacy to the Weimar government.
What I think is difficult for modern American readers to truly grasp was the sheer instability of this political situation. Although we often speak of the instability created by hyperpartisanship, the loss of trust in our institutions, and even the erosion of some longstanding norms, we still have a very stable political system. Except for a few fringe groups, everyone basically accepts our current constitutional system. In Weimar Germany, that was not the case.
Shirer’s discussion of Hitler’s wartime service struck me as the most interesting passage. He was wounded twice and received both the the Iron Cross, Second Class and the much rarer Iron Cross, First Class.
Despite what some may say, Hitler was no coward. If anything, he was a bit over the top in his martial zeal. It seems other soldiers tired of the Austrian corporal who never grumbled, never took leave, never received a care package from home, and always going on about the invisible foes of the German people who were undermining them.
He was an intense fellow.
The decision to move to Munich and start a political career also strikes me as over the top, almost absurd. As Shirer puts it:
The prospects for a political career in Germany for this thirty-year-old Austrian without friends or funds, without a job, with no trade or profession or any previous record of regular employment, with no experience whatsoever in politics, were less than promising.
His self-confidence was really next level. And yet, he was correct. Even if he was the butt of a joke for so long, he ultimately triumphed, not just in forming a pan-German nationalist political organization, growing it, and taking full control of it, but also, eventually, in taking full control of Germany and doing away with the Weimar regime.
We’re still several chapters away from that full transition, but the weight of what he accomplished against all these odds already strikes me as remarkable. If you remove the content of his personal story (and certainly the end result), the structure of Hitler’s story could easily be one of those feel-good American success stories that structure our own self-understanding. With no context, the rise of essentially an immigrant to the heights of political power in the years after the hereditary monarchy was abolished seems to validate something about the egalitarian playing field of democracies.
Of course, the content of that story matters…
Another interesting part of this chapter was the description of Hitler, the master propagandist. I hadn’t realized that he designed the Nazi flag with the hakenkreuz/swastika, the armbands, and the Nazi standards. He wasn’t much of an artist, but his appreciation of aesthetics for the purposes of political propaganda was world class.
Contrasting the political instability of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s with the situation in the U.S. today, you write:
"Although we often speak of the instability created by hyperpartisanship, the loss of trust in our institutions, and even the erosion of some longstanding norms, we still have a very stable political system. Except for a few fringe groups, everyone basically accepts our current constitutional system. "
Almost all political opponents of Hitler and the National Socialists in 1920s Germany held tight to this same mistaken view until it was too late. Today, it's considered hyperbolic or worse (i.e., Trump derangement syndrome) to see parallels between Hitler/National Socialists and Trump/MAGA, but after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the recent blanket pardon of J6 rioters, the installation of a Christian Nationalist culture warrior as Pentagon chief (hope someone is keeping a close eye on the flows of surplus military materiel), the moves by Trump and his team to install loyalists at Homeland Security, DoJ, and the FBI, to strengthen the powers of the unitary executive, and to legislate by executive order, persistent challenges by the current administration to the constitutionality of the Impoundement Act, etc., we should all be careful not to make the same mistake. IOW, we should not take for granted the stability our current constitutional system given the determined efforts of Trump and the people around him to upend it.