The Coming of the Third Reich (4 page)

III

The early twenty-first century is a particularly good moment for undertaking a project of this kind. Historical research on the Third Reich has gone through three major phases since 1945. In the first, from the end of the war to the middle of the 1960s, there was a heavy concentration on answering the questions addressed primarily in the present volume. Political scientists and historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher produced major works on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power.
³⁴
In the 1970s and 1980s the focus shifted to the history of the years 1933 to 1939 (the subject of the second volume of this study), aided by the return of vast quantities of captured documents from Allied custody to the German archives. In particular, Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen produced a series of path-breaking studies of the internal structures of the Third Reich, arguing against the prevailing view that it was a totalitarian system in which decisions made at the top, by Hitler, were implemented all the way down, and examining the complex of competing power centres whose rivalry, they argued, drove the regime on to adopt steadily more radical policies. Their work was complemented by a mass of new research into the history of everyday life under the Nazis, concentrating in particular on the years up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
³⁵
Since the 1990s research has entered a third phase, in which there has been a particular focus on the years 1939-45 (the subject of the third volume of this study). The discovery of new documents in the archives of the former Soviet bloc, the increasing public prominence given to the persecution and extermination of the Jews and others, from homosexuals to ‘asocials’, from slave labourers to the handicapped, by the Nazis, have all generated a large quantity of important new knowledge.
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The time seems right, therefore, to attempt a synthesis that brings the results of these three phases of research together, and to take advantage of the great quantity of new material, from the diaries of Joseph Goebbels and Victor Klemperer to the records of the meetings of the German cabinet and the appointments book of Heinrich Himmler, that has become available recently.

For any historian, a task such as this is a bold, if not rash or even foolhardy undertaking: doubly so for a historian who is not German. However, I have been thinking about the historical questions dealt with in this book for many years. My interest in German history was first seriously awakened by Fritz Fischer, whose visit to Oxford during my time there as an undergraduate was a moment of major intellectual significance. Later, in Hamburg researching for my doctorate, I was able to share a little of the extraordinary excitement generated by Fischer and his team, whose opening up of the question of continuity in modern German history created a real sense of ferment, even crusade, among the younger German historians whom he gathered around him. At that time, in the early 1970s, I was interested mainly in the origins of the Third Reich in the Weimar Republic and the Wilhelmine Empire; only later did I come to write about the ways in which Nazi Germany aroused heated controversy amongst modern German historians, and to do some archival research on the period 1933-45 myself, as part of a larger project on the death penalty in modern German history.
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Over these years I was lucky enough to be helped in many ways by a whole range of German friends and colleagues, notably Jürgen Kocka, Wolfgang Mommsen, Volker Ullrich and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Numerous, often lengthy stays in Germany generously funded by institutions such as the Alexander von Hum-boldt Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service helped educate me, I hope, into a better understanding of German history and culture than I set out with at the beginning of the 1970s. Few countries could have been more generous or more open to outsiders wishing to study their problematic and uncomfortable past. And the community of specialists on German history in Britain has been a constant support throughout; early on, during my time at Oxford, Tim Mason was a particular source of inspiration, and Anthony Nicholls guided my researches with a sure hand. Of course, none of this in the end can ever compensate for the fact that I am not a native German; but perhaps the distance that is inevitably the result of being a foreigner can also lend a certain detachment, or at least a difference of perspective, that may go some way to balancing out this obvious disadvantage.

Although I had written about the origins, consequences and historiography of the Third Reich, researched part of its history in the archives, and taught a slowly evolving, document-based course on it to undergraduates over a period of more than twenty years, it was not until the 1990s that I was prompted to devote my attention to it full-time. I shall always be grateful, therefore, to Anthony Julius for asking me to act as an expert witness in the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, and to the whole defence team, and most especially leading counsel Richard Rampton QC and my research assistants Nik Wachsmann and Thomas Skelton-Robinson, for many hours of fruitful and provocative discussion on many aspects of the history of the Third Reich that surfaced during the case.
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It was a privilege to be involved in a case whose importance turned out to be greater than any of us expected. Apart from this, one of the major surprises of the work we did on the case was the discovery that many aspects of the subjects we were dealing with were still surprisingly ill-documented.
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Another, just as important, was that there was no really wide-ranging, detailed overall account of the broader historical context of Nazi policies towards the Jews in the general history of the Third Reich itself, despite the existence of many excellent accounts of those policies in a narrower framework. This sense of the growing fragmentation of knowledge on Nazi Germany was strengthened when I was asked soon afterwards to sit on the British government’s Spoliation Advisory Panel, considering claims for the restitution of cultural objects alienated unjustly from their original owners in the years from 1933 to 1945. Here was another area where answering specialized questions sometimes depended on historical knowledge of the wider context, yet there was no general history of Nazi Germany to which I could direct the other members of the panel to help them in this regard. At the same time, my direct confrontation with these important legal and moral dimensions of the Nazi experience through working in these two very different contexts convinced me more than ever of the need for a history of the Third Reich that did not take moral or legal judgment as its frame of reference.

These, then, are some of the reasons why I have written this book. They may help to explain some of its distinctive features. To begin with, in a history such as this, directed to a wide readership, it is important to avoid technical terms. Since this is a book for English-language readers, I have translated German terms into the English equivalent in almost every instance. Retaining the German is a form of mystification, even romanticization, which ought to be avoided. There are only three exceptions. The first is Reich, which, as Chapter 1 explains, had particular, untranslateable resonances in German far beyond its English equivalent of ‘empire’, with its associated term
Reichstag
, referring to the German national parliament. This is a word which ought to be familiar to every English-speaking reader, and it would be artificial to speak, for example, of the ‘Third Empire’ instead of the ’Third Reich’ or the ‘Parliament fire’ instead of the ’Reichstag fire‘. The title Kaiser has also been retained in preference to the rough English equivalent of ’Emperor’ because it, too, awakened specific and powerful historical memories. Some other German words or terms associated with the Third Reich have also gained currency in English, but in so doing they have become divorced from their original meaning:
Gauleiter
for instance just means a Nazi tyrant, so to give it a more precise meaning I have translated it everywhere as ‘Regional Leader’. Similarly, Hitler is referred to throughout not as
Führer
but as the English equivalent of the term, ‘Leader’. And although everyone is familiar with the title of Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
, few probably know that it means
My Struggle
unless they know German.

One of the purposes of translation is to allow English-speaking readers to gain a feeling for what these things actually meant; they were not mere titles or words, but carried a heavy ideological baggage with them. Some German words have no exact English equivalent, and I have chosen to be inconsistent in my translation, rendering
national
variously as ‘national’ or ‘nationalist’ (it has the flavour of both) and a similarly complex term,
Volk
, as ‘people’ or ‘race’, according to the context. The translations are not always mine, but where I have taken them from existing English-language versions I have always checked them against the originals and in some cases altered them accordingly. Specialist readers who know German will probably find all this rather irritating; they are advised to read the German edition of this book, which is published simultaneously under the title
Das Dritte Reich,
I:
Aufstieg
, by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.

In a similar way, bearing in mind that this is not a specialist academic monograph, I have tried to limit the endnotes as far as possible. They are designed mainly to enable readers to check the statements made in the text; they are not intended to provide full bibliographical references to the topics under consideration, nor do they, with very few exceptions, include discussion of detailed subjects of secondary interest. I have tried, however, to point the interested reader to relevant further reading where he or she would like to pursue a topic in greater depth than has been possible in this book. Where there is an English translation of a German book, I have tried to cite it in this edition in preference to the German original. To keep the notes within bounds, only information necessary to locating the source has been provided, namely, author, title and subtitle, place and date of publication. Modern publishing is a global business, with the major players based in a number of different countries, so only the principal place of publication has been given.

One of the most difficult problems in writing about Nazi Germany is posed by the permeation of the language of the time by Nazi terminology, as Victor Klemperer long ago noted in his classic study of what he called
Lingua tertii Imperii,
the language of the Third Reich.
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Some historians distance themselves from it by putting all Nazi terms into inverted commas, or adding some disapproving epithet: thus the ‘Third Reich’ or even the ‘so-called “Third Reich”’. In a book such as this, however, to adopt either of these procedures would seriously compromise readability. Although it should not be necessary to say this, it is as well that I note at this point that Nazi terminology employed in this book simply reflects its use at the time: it should not be construed as an acceptance, still less approval, of the term in question as a valid way of denoting what it refers to. Where the Nazi Party is concerned I have used the capital initial letter for Party, where other parties are referred to, I have not; similarly, the Church is the formal organization of Christians, a church is a building; Fascism denotes the Italian movement led by Mussolini, fascism the generic political phenomenon.

If all of this makes what follows clearer and more readable, it will have served its purpose. And if the book itself is, as I hope, easy to follow, then much of the credit must go to the friends and colleagues who kindly agreed to read the first draft at short notice, expunged many infelicities and rooted out errors, in particular, Chris Clark, Christine L. Corton, Bernhard Fulda, Sir Ian Kershaw, Kristin Semmens, Adam Tooze, Nik Wachsmann, Simon Winder and Emma Winter. Bernhard Fulda, Christian Goeschel and Max Horster checked through the notes and located original documents; Caitlin Murdock did the same for the stormtrooper autobiographies stored in the Hoover Institution. Bernhard Fulda, Liz Harvey and David Welch kindly supplied some key documents. I am greatly indebted to all of them for their help. Andrew Wylie has been a superb agent whose persuasive powers have ensured that this book has the best possible publishers; Simon Winder at Penguin has been a tower of strength in London, and it has been a pleasure to work closely with him on the book. In New York, Scott Moyers has buoyed me up with his enthusiasm and helped greatly with his shrewd comments on the typescript, and in Germany, Michael Neher has performed a miracle of organization in getting the German edition out so quickly. It was a pleasure to work once again with the translators themselves, Holger Fliessbach and Udo Rennert, and also with András Bereznáy, who drew the maps. I am also grateful to Chloe Campbell at Penguin who has put so much effort into helping with the picture research, obtaining permissions and tracking down originals for the illustrations, to Simon Taylor for his generous help in providing some of the pictures, to Elizabeth Stratford for her meticulous copy-editing of the final text, and to the production and design teams at both publishers for putting the book together.

Finally, my biggest debt, as always, is to my family, to Christine L. Corton for her practical support and her publishing expertise, and to her and to our sons Matthew and Nicholas, to whom these volumes are dedicated, for sustaining me during a project that deals with difficult and often terrible events of a kind that we have all been fortunate not to have experienced in our own lives.