The Coming of the Third Reich

“[This book’s] central theme is how the Nazis managed to establish a one-party dictatorship in Germany within a very short space of time, and with seemingly little real resistance from the German people.”

This summarizes the main thesis of The Coming of the Third Reich. It sets up one of the key questions that will be addressed throughout the book, such as the relationship between the majority of Germans and the rise of the Nazi Party. Evans challenges the idea that the German public universally embraced Nazism, instead highlighting how fear, political instability, and strategic manipulation of legal structures allowed the Nazis to consolidate power without the need for widespread approval.

“Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.”

This passage illustrates important elements of how Richard Evans views history and the responsibility of historians towards immorality in the past. This includes issues of The Fragility of Democracy and the Non-Inevitability of Historical Change. Evans insists that historical actors were not simply following a predetermined path toward dictatorship, but rather made choices within contingent circumstances. By stressing this point, he warns against viewing democracy as inherently durable and highlights how its survival depends on the decisions and actions of those within it.

“The word ‘Reich’ conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God’s Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all German speakers in Central Europe—‘one People, one Reich, one Leader’, as the Nazi slogan was to put it.”

Germany had only been a politically unified nation-state since 1870. However, it had a powerful national identity from the beginning of Germany’s existence, one that would lead into Historical Nostalgia and the Rise of Authoritarianism.