Rise and Fall Ch. 8: Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37
As we begin week five of our reading group, I discuss the eighth chapter of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" about the Nazification of Germany society in the 1930s
We’re now into week five of our reading group of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich!
My apologies this is coming out on Tuesday. I was out of town last week and then Monday was a holiday, so I’m starting a bit later this week. To conclude last week’s reading, I wanted to provide a discussion of chapter 8, but first some housekeeping, starting with this week’s reading:
Week 5 Reading (Feb 17-23, 2025)
Chapter 9: The First Steps: 1934-37
Chapter 10: Strange, Fateful Interlude: the Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht
A reminder that the full reading list as well as reading options (online, audio, and dead tree) can all be found in this post. If you have missed any chapter recaps or other topical posts, the full list can be found at the bottom of the post. If you’re struggling to keep up, don’t leave us! We’d still love for you to check in when you can as time permits.
In a work largely of traditional diplomatic and military history, this chapter is the closest that Shirer gets to social or cultural history.
It’s worth mentioning how the tides have shifted in academic history over the decades. In 1960, when Shirer published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his emphasis on the meetings and memoranda of political and military leaders would have been very much in the mainstream, even if the book marked itself out as a non-academic history in other ways.
However, in the decades after the book’s publication, the locus of academic history shifted first towards social history and then cultural history. There have been a large number of good works that try to understand what it was like for the average German who was not in Hitler’s entourage and in what ways they enabled or resisted the rise of the Nazis.
In chapter 8, Shirer takes us on a whirlwind tour through the institutions of Nazi Germany to demonstrate how each was affected: the Protestant church, the Catholic church, music, theater, art, the press, radio, films, education, extracurricular activities, agriculture, the military, labor, and the judicial system. The paragraph or two…or five that he devotes to each one provides some considerable ballast to the narrative. In a history so focused on the machinations within the Nazi party or the cabals trying to manipulate the Weimar Republic or then later the heads of state trying to win a war, this chapter provides a quick peek into what life was like in Nazi Germany and how Hitler, Goebbels, et. al. reorganized German society for their purposes.
Of course, it is far from a complete story. I found myself wanting more in each subsection of the chapter. How much were Germans able to get access to the writing of German writers who had fled abroad like Thomas Mann? If music fared best of the arts under the Nazis, did that mean that it also was a site of resistance to Nazi power in any way? If Hitler was the visionary leader who didn’t deign to drop into the details of things like how to manage the economy, what kind of guidance (or correction?) did he provide Dr. Schacht, if any?
But the chapter serves its purpose. Before we move on to the Anschluss with Austria, the Munich conference to grant the Sudetenland to Germany, or World War II itself, we get a sense of what was happening for all the Germans who would power the Nazi party and then the Nazi war machine.
The Protestant church was more open to the Nazis than the Catholic church. In its program, the Nazi party stood for “positive Christianity,” by which it meant whatever aspects of traditional Christianity could be reconciled with the racialism and racism of Nazi ideology. (Most historians have considered this to be a pragmatic and secularizing effort, but in his controversial book The Holy Reich, Richard Steigmann-Gall insisted on the genuine Christian aspects of Nazism’s positive Christianity.) Shirer uses the reverend Martin Niemoeller (the source of the famous quote “first they came for the Jews…”) as an example. At first he was excited by the national revival that Nazism brought about, but by the end he turned against the Nazis. The Confessing Church represented another pole of Protestant Christianity in opposition to the Nazis, but most German Protestants lay somewhere in between the positive Christianity of the Nazis and the Confessional Church of the anti-Nazis.
The Catholic Church, which had always had a fractious relationship with the German state, charted a different path. Almost immediately after Hitler’s arrival to power, they concluded a Concordat with Nazi Germany, but after protest against the sterilization law and other measures, a Nazi crack-down on Catholics ultimately led to a papal encyclical positioning Catholics clearly in opposition to the Nazi goverment called “Mit brennender Sorge” (“With burning sorrow”). The papal archives from these years only recently opened up. So in the next years, there will undoubtedly be new books about the complicated Catholic-Nazi relationship.
On the cultural front, Shirer notes:
No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time.
According to Shirer, music fared best, as I already mentioned, because of its rich store (and presumably also the general lack of an opportunity for treasonous subtexts?). Similarly, the theater was excellent, “as long as it stuck to classical plays.” Art, on the other hand, came in for much greater intervention, especially since Hitler considered himself an artist. His prescriptions for “German art” were mocked and ignored, and the Exhibition of Degenerate Art, meant to educate people about bad art to be avoided, was hugely popular and had to be shut down.
When it came to the news, Joseph Goebbels oversaw the propaganda and censorship efforts of the Nazi state. Traditional papers of record closed or their standards were severely degraded. In one notable aside, Shirer the historian comments on the mistakes of Shirer the journalist as a result of their strategy of flooding the zone:
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state…It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda
In the section on education and the outdoor aspects of the Nazi movement, I thought it was interesting that Shirer noted there was some good for the Nazi outdoor programs, both because of the physical exercise it provided and also the mixing of different regions and classes.
There were certainly noticeable effects:
In the May days of 1940, when along the road between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrast between the German soldiers, bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth—tragic examples of the youth that England had neglected so irresponsibly in the years between the wars.
I also found the section about labor and the economy fascinating. As in other points in the narrative, Shirer makes it absolutely clear that “the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies.” Labor conscription and laws tying workers to their workplace were instituted fairly early on. They solved the problem of unemployment, but also introduced a new serfdom for German workers, reminiscent of medieval times. Interestingly, the Nazis also organized workers’ leisure time—”circuses,” as Shirer calls them. In the Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”), the Nazis provided all-embracing recreational activities through the party.
In the judicial system, the introduction of “People’s Courts” undermined the tradition of independent jurisprudence. The massive and arbitrary arrests, beatings and murders also contributed to an undermining of the rule of law. Most importantly, the law did not stand above all. Instead, the will of the Führer was the law in Nazi Germany—a modern twist on the divine right of Kings, but without any religious element.
The last section of the chapter deals with Hitler’s method of governance. He was “bored by the details,” Shirer notes. Without oversight, Hitler’s closest aides were able to profit immensely from their position. Hitler functioned like a mafia boss. He was all to happy to mediate conflicts among them and would even encourage quarrels among his subordinates so that they would never unite against him.
This coming week, we turn towards Hitler’s foreign policy in the 1930s.
Good luck with the reading!
Chapter Recaps
Topical Posts
Podcast ep. 1: The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture
The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
Podcast ep. 2: Why are Dictators (and Techno-monarchs) Appealing?
Podcast ep. 3: Interview with a 20th Century War Correspondent: Jon Randal
If You’ve Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is For You