Rise and Fall Ch. 6: The Last Days of the Republic, 1931-33
To wrap up week three, we discuss the sixth chapter of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", in which Hitler maneuvers to seize power in the fading days of Weimar.
We’re now into week four of our reading group of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich!
If you have missed any chapter recaps or other topical posts, the full list can be found at the bottom of the post, but here is the most recent recap, which I posted yesterday:
To conclude last week’s reading, I wanted to provide a discussion of chapter 6, but first some housekeeping, starting with this week’s reading:
Week 4 Reading (Feb 10-16, 2025)
Chapter 7: The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34
Chapter 8: Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37
A reminder that the full reading list as well as reading options (online, audio, and dead tree) can all be found in this post.
Chapter 6 is my favorite chapter so far. Shirer really demonstrates the full range of his narrative power as he weaves together all the different strands of this rather complicated story to explain how Hitler was able to come to power in January 1933.
It’s a question that has haunted so many for so long. How did Adolf Hitler actually come to power? And why didn’t anyone stop him? The question obviously bothered Shirer. After covering the Nazis first hand, he nursed the question for a very long time and then set out to answer it himself.
As you’ll remember, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich begins in January 1933 and then jumps back to Hitler’s birth and upbringing. It brings in the German experience of World War I, its particular national history and intellectual currents, and then the development of the Nazi party from its origin all the way up to the point where it began to win a plurality of German voters in elections a little over a decade later.
There is obviously an enormous amount left out of this story about Hitler’s background, German history, and the details of the Weimar Republic. But—again—this book is already 1250 pages. It is impressive that Shirer can fit in as much as he does.
This chapter recounts the fall of Weimar’s last three chancellors in short succession: Center Party politician and academic Heinrich Brüning in June 1932, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer Franz von Papen in December 1932, and then finally General Kurt von Schleicher fifty-seven days later in January 1933.
As we begin this chapter in 1931, Germany is reeling from the Great Depression. The budding democratic structures of the Weimar Republic are barely functional. There are too many political parties. No contingent seems capable of bringing together a majority to govern. As a result, the chancellor had to rely on Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which gave him the right to govern by emergency decree.
And, at the same time, more than one political grouping wants to replace Weimar with something different. And yet…they all had different goals.
The economic and geopolitical difficulties of the 1920s and early 1930s cultivated a nostalgia in many Germans for an earlier time. Consequently, a large contingent, comprised of the conservatives, the Nationalists and the Army, want a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. This isn’t too unusual in European history. The Bourbons returned to power in France in 1815 after Waterloo. Brief moments of revolution, as in 1848, also led to the reestablishment of monarchical power (even if softened by some by constitutions and liberal norms).
The Communists knew they had missed their moment of revolution in 1918. Realistically, a Communist revolution in Germany was thus off the table. But on simple ideological principle, they weren’t that enamored of Weimar’s bourgeois political system either.
The liberals and social democrats supported Weimar, but they also knew something needed to change to address the chronic instability.
And then there was the radical Right—the National Socialists.
Like the Communists, they detested the bourgeois political system of Weimar, but then on many other issues they were more comfortable with the Nationalists and other conservatives. And yet, unlike their conservative fellow travelers, they did not want a restoration of the monarchy. And while they shared a certain German pride and corresponding antisemitism (against Jews and all others who weren’t truly German), the Nazis took their hatred to another level. They wanted an ethno-state of Germans ruled by a single Leader freed from the constraints and loyalties of the old aristocratic order.
Perhaps most importantly, they also had a gigantic paramilitary force that dwarfed the German Army. There were regular pitched battles in the streets, involving the Nazi S.A. and the far-left, which left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. There was a recurring concern that civil war might break out at any time. The overriding concern about political stability regularly motivated Hindenburg in key decisions he made as President.
In this political mess, traditional loyalties were scrambled. When Hitler chose to run against Hindenburg for German President in 1932, the Protestant Prussian from the north, who was a conservative and monarchist, attracted the votes of the socialists, trade unions, the Catholics of Bruening’s center party, and the remnant of the liberal, democratic middle-class parties. Hitler, for his part, a Catholic and Austrian former tramp with the backing of the National Socialist lower middle-class masses, found his greatest support among the upper-class Protestants of north Germany, including the conservative Junker agrarians and some monarchists.
Even in Shirer’s able hands, the details of the different schemes and political machinations are a bit hard to follow. Everyone was scheming behind everyone else’s back. I regularly found myself wanting more details on the people and plots. Certain reversals came across as surprising. But I take comfort in the fact that those in Germany at the time had a hard time keeping up as well. As Shirer puts it in describing Schleicher’s short tenure in power:
As the strife-ridden year of 1932 approached its end, Berlin was full of cabals, and of cabals within cabals.
There are at least three key conclusions we might draw from all this scheming.
One, the conservatives thought that they could control Hitler. They believed that he would provide useful support for their plans and they could jettison him after he had served their purpose. This was false.
Two, vain men of middling intelligence and abilities were in charge. And they were simply not up to the task.
Three, those who were supportive of the Weimar Republic made a series of bad judgments. Shirer is unsparing in his assessment of their inability to size up the real risk:
No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
At their peak in free and fair elections, the National Socialists only obtained 37 percent of the vote. But the majority who were opposed “were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.”
And so at the end of January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power. And even though all the signs were there (especially, if you bothered to read Mein Kampf), it is safe to say that almost no one expected what would come next.
This week, we begin to read about what the Nazis did to Germany in order to consolidate their power and begin carrying out their transformative vision for Germany and Germans.
