Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in Power. NY: Penguin, 2005. 941 pp. Maps and Ill.
Period of Preparation
For me the most interesting years of the Nazi rule have always been the ones least covered. We have a pretty good idea in general terms how the Second World War progressed, but how exactly the Nazis ran Germany during the preceding half-dozen years is less well known. Yet it is precisely this period that, at least in embryonic terms, gives us some idea of what Germany would have looked like if they had actually won.
The difference between Germany on Feb. 1, 1933 and September 1, 1939 was really quite remarkable. Society had been reordered from top to bottom. And the changes that came later were to be even more remarkable.
Let us remember that when Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland, he had – to be sure – committed crimes that would land him in prison for the rest of his life, but even the Nuremberg Tribunal did not find Hitler’s top lieutenant deserving of the death penalty. Had he stayed in Berlin, he undoubtedly would have been implicated in crimes that would have called for execution. The point I wish to focus on is not on the question of his individual guilt, however, but on the calendar – up until May 1941, it was possible to be a top Nazi leader without being personally involved in crimes against humanity.
Even beginning in 1933, of course, there were many crimes directed against communists, social democrats, and others, particularly the Jews. Could National Socialism have worked without anti-Semitism? It may seem a strange question today, but it was one people in Western Europe and America seriously asked at the time. People who used to lament, “If Nazism could just get rid of its anti-Jewish element, it wouldn’t be so bad” were taken seriously. To which Hitler responded, in effect, there could be no National Socialism without anti-Semitism, declaring in Mein Kampf that the folkish state must treat race as the central focus of daily life. And Richard Evans agrees that anti-Semitism could not be removed from Nazism in practice because it was all-pervasive, “a principle governing private life as well as public.” (pg. 550)
In general, though, the question he addresses is a somewhat different one: Could Nazism have worked without wars of conquest? To this he gives an emphatic No! His title, after all, is not The Third Reich at Peace but The Third Reich in Power. The purpose of the book is to show how the whole thrust of the Nazi movement from the moment it came to power was to ready the nation, and that these years should be understood as nothing other than a period of feverish preparation for the coming war. This train had no other destination. The fabled economic recovery after 1933 was entirely based on plans for conquest.
The overarching idea that ties all these chapters together is that from the beginning, Hitler was planning his aggression. The exact date for its outbreak may have been uncertain (though definitely not as early as 1939), but war itself was inevitable. In retrospect this seems so clear that one wonders how Paris and London were able to remain oblivious for as long as they did. It is yet another reminder that the hardest thing about interpreting the past is always keeping in mind that even well-informed people lacked clairvoyance about what was for them still in the future.
A work on a topic such as this needs to justify its existence in a crowded field either through the presentation of new documents, or a new interpretation of familiar ones. This volume, though admirably thorough and well-organized, really offers neither. In terms of documents, as far as I can determine it presents a single new source, the diary of a conservative schoolteacher in Hamburg, Luise Solmitz, who started out supporting the new order, then grew gradually disillusioned. Unfortunately her story is strung out through the book, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, forcing the reader to go back and check earlier entries to pick up the thread. To be fair, Evans does also draw on a variety of diaries kept by private citizens that have been published since the war’s end. And he gets details right that are frequently misquoted: Neville Chamberlain announced “Peace for our time” not “in our time,” and when he uttered that particular phrase he was not at the airport with the statement fluttering in his hand but speaking later from a window at Downing Street. (pg. 679)
In terms of interpretation, I cannot do better than the author’s own summary: “The story of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1939 was not a story of ceaseless radicalization driven on by inherent instabilities in its system of rule, or by a constant competition for power between its satraps and minions, in which the most radical policy was always the most likely to be implemented. Irrational and unstable though it was, the Third Reich was driven in the first place from above, by Hitler and his key henchmen…. This does not mean that everything that happened in the Third Reich was ordained by Hitler; but it does mean that he was in the driving-seat, determining the general direction in which things moved.” (pg. 712)
This argument is set forth in convincing detail over the preceding chapters, covering “The Police State,” “Mobilization of the Spirit,” “Converting the Soul” and so on. The result is a compendium organized topically, not chronologically, which gives it more the flavor of a reference work than a narrative. The chapters stand pretty much alone, like silos. Each could easily be turned into a book-length study of its own.
The volume can, of course, be read cover to cover, but my sense is that few will find the time or patience for that task. In the Preface, Evans is realistic enough to address those who will use it “simply as a work of reference” (pg. xvii) and helpfully points them to the index. The Third Reich in Power is something readers will dip into and consult about particular topics of interest to them – where they will indeed find a completely satisfactory overview of the current research.
So what we have here is a thorough, encyclopedic survey – how could it be otherwise at this length? The overall impression is that the author has been thorough, dutiful and conscientious. If he ever let himself get excited about any aspect of his research, he kept the urge well under control. He provides solid information on those subjects I know little about, such as church relations and school textbooks. When it comes to the arts, he goes through his list of topics, ticking them off one by one. Cinema? Check. Music? Check. Photography? Not on the list, even though the book includes many illustrations, including photos.
And that’s unfortunate. Photography was important for the Nazi movement then and remains so because even now it helps sustain the myth that Hitler’s support was total and enthusiastic. The cover shot (about which Evans says not a word) shows flag-waving German girls, no hint of disappointment in their eyes. It is a powerful piece of propaganda.
The reality, as shown by Gestapo reports, was different – the populace rapidly grew tired of the constant hurrahs and interminable parades. But the lasting images are photographic, and so the myth survives, stronger than the reality in terms of shaping our mental image of those times.
Pictures are the today’s entry-level drug for some who later “graduate” to full-blown support, carrying torches and chanting slogans. The knowledge that young neo-Nazis in the US have about the Third Reich comes largely from such images, I suspect, rather than from scholarly books like this one, much less from interviews with survivors. German propaganda from this era is remarkable for still being effective decades later. Hugo Boss goes unmentioned, even though the Nazis had a sense of style that the Italian, Spanish and Eastern European fascists largely lacked. Few of the uniformed followers of Franco or Mussolini managed to look dashing.
When it comes to film, plenty of accusatory fingers have been pointed at Leni Riefenstahl. When it comes to photography, the name Heinrich Hoffmann does not exactly resonate. Yet his long-term influence is perhaps more pernicious.
On the importance of photography in documenting the Holocaust, see Nina Siegal’s article in the NYTimes July 30, 2022:
“We know that the Germans used photography as a weapon, and they invested a great deal in propaganda photography,” said Sheryl Silver Ochayon, program director for Echoes & Reflections, an educational arm of Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.
Musical Matters
As noted, I have profited from reading this book, particularly the parts that deal with matters I know little about. On topics that I am somewhat familiar with, things are more problematic. Evans is dismissive when it comes to composer Carl Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana, which he sees as characteristically Nazi: “its crude tonality, its brutal, repetitious rhythms, its medieval texts and folksy tunes, its numbing, insistent pulse, its absence of anything to engage the mind, seemed to sweep away all the excrescences of modernity and intellectualism that Nazism so detested and take culture back to the supposed primitive simplicities of the distant, peasant past.” (pg. 199)
In his NY Times review, Brian Ladd commented on just this “uncharacteristically vehement opinion” by saying: “One does not have to be an Orff fan to see that a great deal of music might qualify as Nazi by his definition.” (Dec. 18, 2005)
On a personal note, I remember seeing Carl Orff himself give a dramatic reading from his works in the Munich Cuvilliés-Theater in the mid-1970s. The second half of the program, after Orff had retired from the stage, consisted of a lively, dynamic, even exuberant performance by a troupe of actors, featuring costumed characters swinging through the auditorium on ropes dangling from the ceiling. There was plenty to engage not just the mind but the ear and the eye. It’s not too much to say the audience was thrilled, even enraptured; their brains – and senses – seemed fully engaged.
Evans has little or nothing to say on glee clubs, very popular in Germany at the time. Under the Nazis, the Horst Wessel Song became a staple of these clubs. In his section on “Triumph of the Will,” he treats Riefenstahl’s film purely as a visual event, leaving out the modified version of the Horst Wessel Lied that can be heard in the opening sequence, just before Hitler’s plane breaks through the clouds above Nuremberg. For most viewers today, this is just background music; contemporary audiences would have recognized this and other tunes and intuited their relation to the images on screen.
Translation Questions
Like many other reviewers, Ladd also notes that “Evans prefers to translate and thus demystify German words like Führer,” calling Hitler “the Leader” instead. While one can applaud Evans’ intentions, the practice becomes problematic when his translations veer off into interpretation. Take, for example, the name of the main Nazi organ, the Völkischer Beobachter. This is usually rendered as the “People’s Observer” or “Popular Observer.” Evans, however, opts for “Racial Observer.” (pp. 31, 68) For this, he offers no justification I can find anywhere in this volume.
It could be argued that Volk encompasses “tribe” or “race” as well as “people” and that the adjective “völkisch” tends strongly in this direction. While it is undeniable that the organ in question was racist in content, nevertheless that alone does not justify this translation. Just on a practical level, it can lead to unnecessary confusion in the mind of the reader, who might think (as I did): “Does Evans mean the Völkischer Beobachter when he says ‘Racial Observer,’ or is he talking about some other paper?” What would he call the Völkischer Kurier – the “Racial Courier”? Timothy Ryback quite reasonably calls it the “People’s Courier.” (Hitler’s Private Library, pg. 66) Evans also translates “Volksgenossen” as “racial comrades”. (pg. 470) So it’s not just the adjective “völkisch” he translates this way. On the other hand, he translates Hitler’s phrase from Mein Kampf, “der völkische Staat,” as “the folkish state” not “the racial state.” (pg. 272)
This raises the question of the overall accuracy of his translations. For the most part they are fine, though there are some one could quibble with. When dealing with a text that contains errors, the usual approach is to do so with “[sic]” – but not for Evans. Instead of quoting an inaccurate text exactly (with corrections in the footnotes) or translating it himself, he feels free to go into the translated version of the document and fiddle with it until it meets his standards.
In his section on the Autobahn, for example, Evans quotes Victor Klemperer, who noted in his diary on 12 April 1936: “The car gobbles up my heart, nerves, time, money. It’s not so much my wretched driving and the occasional agitation it causes, not even the difficulty of driving in and out, it’s that the vehicle is never right, something’s always going wrong.” (pg. 326)
In his footnotes, Evans refers to Klemperer’s I Shall Bear Witness, adding parenthetically, “translation corrected” without revealing exactly how he has improved it. (pg. 771, note 10) To my ears, Evans’ version sounds awkward and incomplete, particularly the phrase “not even the difficulty of driving in and out.” One immediately asks oneself: driving in and out of what? The garage? The town? On and off the Autobahn?
Here is the original translation, by Martin Chalmers: “The car eats me up, heart, nerves, time, money. It is not so much my wretched driving and the occasional agitation it gives rise to, not even the effort of driving in and out of our property; but the car never works properly, something is always failing….”
I will grant that Evans’ “something’s always going wrong” is both more idiomatic than Chalmers’ “something’s always failing” and closer to the original (“etwas versagt immer”). On the whole, neither translation is ideal. But the phrase that caused me to check this passage in the first place is clearly better in Chalmers – for his version answers the question: “driving in and out of what?” (The original has “die Mühe der Ein- und Ausfahrt,” which does not specify where the difficulty takes place, but in context it is a pretty safe bet that Klemperer was talking about his property.)
Two more examples to close with. Talking about skepticism regarding the development of the so-called People’s Car, Evans translates “Zukunftsmusik” too literally as “music of the future” instead of a “pipe dream” or saying that the matter is “still up in the air.” (pg. 327) “Durch” is German for “through,” but “durch und durch” is not well translated as “through and through,” as in “a through-and-through political undertaking.” (pg. 573) It would be better to say it was a political undertaking “from top to bottom.” As these examples show, Evans sometimes veers towards the literal instead of the idiomatic.
Of related interest at this site, see my reviews of Timothy Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library, and Sam Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master.
Under the “Posts” section of this blog, see “Georgia College Students Find Germans Gay and Carefree,” for the first-hand views of two young people who had studied abroad in 1938; one of them was my father.
© Hamilton Beck
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