Rise and Fall Ch. 5: The Road to Power: 1925-31
In the fifth chapter of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", we return to the protagonist and chart his movements in the years after the Beer Hall Putsch as he tries to build political power.
We have now reached the end of week three of our reading group of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
ICYMI: While we have all been reading this past week, I…
posted our second podcast on the appeal of dictators (and techno-monarchs), where we began to gingerly wade into the debate about Nazi Germany and the US today, and
delved into Shirer’s decision to embrace the Sonderweg explanation of Germany history.
Please check them out if you haven’t already.
Also, if you missed some chapter recaps, please give them a read. Here’s the most recent recap post, but the full list can be found at the bottom of the post:
In our discussions of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the actual life of William Shirer has kind of faded into the background the past couple weeks. That’s largely for two reasons. One, there is a lot of background and scene-setting in the first four chapters of this story of Nazi Germany. Chapter 1 dives back all the way into the 1880s to give Adolf Hitler’s origin story, and chapter 4 gives a potted history of Germany politics, culture, and intellectual life. And two, Shirer did not move to Europe until 1925, after he graduated from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
As we move back into the chronological narrative starting in 1925, it is worth mentioning that Shirer is now living in Europe and following these events much more closely than he would have been in the United States. At the very end of his summer in Paris after graduation, he managed to snag a job at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Despite the cantankerous, far-right politics of its owner, the newspaper was a thriving institution of letters. James Thurber, who later wrote for The New Yorker, was Shirer’s colleague and close friend. Waverley Root, a famous journalist, was also there. Shirer was close with Grant Wood, the painter of American Gothic and a fellow Iowan. Occasional contributors to the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune included Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Kay Boyle, Elliot Paul, and Vincent Sheean. F. Scott Fitzgerald would sometimes show up drunk to the newsroom and boss people around.
Within a couple years, Shirer had moved up in the institution to become a roving foreign correspondent, one of the most coveted positions. He was regularly in other European cities and even in India to cover Gandhi’s independence movement or in Afghanistan for a coronation. Then in 1929, he moved to Vienna. As we proceed in The Rise and Fall, Shirer increasingly inserts personal observations into his historical narrative.
He was not the first nor the last to escape small town America to live in Europe. And his own observations should always be read through that lens:
My own acquaintance with Germany began in those days. I was stationed in Paris and occasionally in London at that time, and fascinating though those capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped from the incredible smugness ad emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era, they paled a little when one came to Berlin and Munich. A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively … [Germans] were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshiping lot, and they were filled with an enormous zest for living to the full and in complete freedom. The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried. Most Germans one met—politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors, students, businessmen, labor leaders—struck you as being democratic, liberal, even pacifist.
Shirer escaped Prohibition and the conservative mores of his Iowa upbringing to enter into that liberated world in the late 1920s. So the social and political shifts that ended up occurring in the 1930s were shocking to him not just because of the internal changes within German society, but also because 1920s Europe had been a refuge for him from a close-minded and stifling America.
In the 1920s, Hitler was a bit of a laughing stock in German politics. His attempt at a coup had fizzled out and he had scurried back to his home, where he was arrested. He then served time in prison. He was banned from speaking in public on a couple occasions. He didn’t have a real political party around him.
Of course, none of that stopped him.
This chapter feels a bit more compressed than many of the others. To cover seven years in a single chapter just feels rather quick. But of course, what the Nazis do with power from 1933 to 1939, and then what happens in World War II are both much more interesting and demand more detail.
In this chapter, Shirer focuses on how Hitler built a party apparatus and managed the internal disagreements of the Nazi party, in addition to how he cultivated industrialists and the very tricky topic of the Army.
The key thing that I took from the chapter was that there really were socialists within the Nazi party, but, in Shirer’s telling, they were always put in their place because Hitler required the financial support of the industrialists. In the next few chapters, it is a theme that becomes more prominent. When push comes to shove, the support of big business trumps the demands of the workers, simply because the money and support are needed to move things forward.
The other key dynamic that Shirer traces is the relationship between the Nazi party, with its enormous paramilitary force, and the Army, which traditionally supported the conservative Right (i.e., the monarchy and the church) over the radical Right like the Nazis.
There is also a brief narration of Hitler’s love affair with his niece Geli Raubal and her death. I am not terribly interested in the potentially titillating details there. There is a whole cottage industry of psychological profiles of Hitler, with varying amounts of explanatory power, that I don’t find terribly enlightening. But I think at least one or two big picture conclusions are largely warranted: Hitler never really had someone who loved him or that he truly loved. And he channeled his passion and rage into his political project. That much seems true.
In his discussion of Goebbel’s building out of the Nazi party, Shirer devotes less than a paragraph to the Horst Wessel Lied, the anthem of the Nazi Party from 1930 to 1945, which also became a second national anthem for Nazi Germany. It is believed that the song was created as a counterweight to the Internationale.
The song is illustrative of the aesthetic power of Nazi propaganda. Wessel, who was killed in one of the regular street fights between far-left and far-right in the last years of Weimar, was elevated into a martyr for the Nazi cause.
Both the tune and the lyrics are now illegal in Germany and Austria. The video below, which has English subtitles, makes a series of appeals: for a sense of order, for protection against chaos, for a power that can end a period of “bondage.” If you haven’t ever watched it before, it is worth watching just to get a sense of its power as propaganda—made all the stronger by Wessel’s death.
Towards the end of chapter 5, Shirer provides short sketches of five men around Hitler, who would help him rise to power: Ernst Röhm, Gregor Strasser, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Wilhelm Frick, and brief mentions of lesser men. “In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors.”
In chapter 6, which I will discuss tomorrow, Shirer finally returns to 1933, where his narrative began, with the Machtergreifung, or “seizure of power.”