Rise and Fall Ch. 4: The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich
In the fourth chapter summary of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", we step back to look at Hitler's authorship of Mein Kampf, as well as his historical and intellectual influences.
We’re now into week three 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 4, but first some housekeeping, starting with this week’s reading:
Week 3 Reading (Feb 2-8, 2025)
Chapter 5: The Road to Power: 1925-31
Chapter 6: The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33
A reminder that the full reading list as well as reading options (online, audio, and dead tree) can all be found in this post.
Last week, I posted our first podcast on the American understanding of Hitler, shared a couple archival finds from Shirer’s papers, and, in the interest of good debate, gave you a contrarian take on Shirer’s book from an imminent historian.
On Friday, I then published a recap of Chapter 3: Rise and Fall Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch. To wrap up our second week, here is a discussion of chapter 4.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man of a certain age in possession of a few ideas, must want to write a book.
Writing a book does a few key things for a man. It brings financial security. It raises his profile. And it allows him to share his thoughts with the world.
For William Shirer, his first major book Berlin Diary, which was published during World War II, confirmed his reputation as a radio news broadcaster and established him as an important thought leader about the war.
Then, almost two decades later, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich did something more. It took Shirer to the next level, guaranteeing his financial security for the rest of his life and cementing his place as one of the most famous journalists in American history: the man who covered the Nazis from Berlin AND wrote the best known history of their rise and fall. His books—and this one book in particular—made the man.
In the case of Adolf Hitler, the book was Mein Kampf.
Everyone in Germany knew who Hitler was after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and his trial for treason the following year. But it was the publication of the two volumes of Mein Kampf that put his ideas out there for the whole world and gave him a little extra money (although it only became a true bestseller after he became chancellor in 1933).
Everyone has heard of Mein Kampf, and yet unlike almost any other famous book you’ve heard of, it is extremely difficult to find. I had never seen it in a bookstore until I was in Germany in 2017 and found copies of the critical edition published by the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History. I can’t count the number of bookstores I have visited in the United States, and yet I have never in all my time browsing their shelves ever seen a single copy of Mein Kampf.
It is strange. Mein Kampf is this talismanic text. We know it is evil and yet we never see it and most of us have never read a single line from it.
The truth is: it is a long, plodding, boring book. Most of those who bought it in Germany in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s didn’t even read the whole thing. And yet…and yet…it provided a blueprint for what Hitler chose to do once he was in power.
It is truly unlike any other book.
In this chapter, William Shirer takes a step back from the history of Hitler, the Nazi movement, and Germany in order to delve into the intellectual history of Hitler and the Nazi movement more broadly. He describes the ideas found in Mein Kampf, looks at some of the historical roots of those ideas, and then some key thinkers (mostly German, but not all) who were popular among the Nazis.
It is far from Shirer’s most successful chapter. As intellectual history, it is slipshod and impressionistic. Shirer is essentially connecting what he knows about the German past and the reading habits of German national socialists with what actually happened during the Nazi era. In that sense, the chapter is better read as a collection of what an educated observer at the time might have been exposed to. It’s not wrong necessarily, but there are a good number of simplistic takes in there, and it is far from complete.
In the first section on Mein Kampf, Shirer articulates a desire that more people had actually read Hitler’s ponderous tome:
Had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933, and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. 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.
Shirer notes that “the blueprint” of Nazi Germany and all that it became was set down “in appalling crudity at great length” between the covers of Mein Kampf.
The first volume contains Hitler’s (highly selective and not always honest) autobiography and the second volume his political ideas (also highly selective and not terribly honest). In the key second volume, he argues that the state is a racial organization.
In the case of the German people, their state must include all Germans (remember they were spread across many countries), and the German Volk, or people, should seek mastery over the earth. As superior Aryans, they were bound to survive and dominate other people groups. From them, the Germans would take Lebensraum (“living space”). And they would be led not by a king or emperor but by a “leader,” the Führer (“leader” in German). Politically, it was neither democratic nor aristocratic.
In the section on the historical roots of Hitler’s thought, Shirer focuses on Martin Luther (who gave Germans a vituperative antisemitism and extreme deference to temporal authority) and the Peace of Westphalia (which was “disastrous” to the future of Germany, dooming it to a backward situation with hundreds of separate domains), and then finally the militaristic Prussian state with its Junkers and their Army.
In the section on Nazism’s intellectual roots, Shirer quickly winds his way through over a century of thinkers, including Fichte, Hegel, von Treitschke, Nietzsche, Wagner, Gobineau, and H.S. Chamberlain. In each case, he draws out some interesting ideas and very directly and crudely connects them with Nazi thought. It’s not wrong per se, but it isn’t exactly how intellectual historians would go about teasing out the intellectual influences of a person or movement.
Maybe I’ll write more this dynamic later on. In the meantime, please spend some time with chapters 5 and 6. And, as always, let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Happy reading!
Here is a long comment from Richard Evans on the problems inherent in the Sonderweg approach taken by William Shirer and other historians:
"It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discovered that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority. Moreover, while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances, a fact that historians who generalized about the 'German character' or 'the German mind' all too often forgot."
Slipshod? Or merely journalistic?