Book One: The Rise of Adolf Hitler
- It was in prison that Hitler first began to compose and dictate the materials that would eventually be published as Mein Kampf, which means "My Struggle."
- Having brought his narrative up to the point of Hitler's prison sentence, Shirer takes this opportunity to pause and assess the cultural and intellectual underpinnings that informed Mein Kampf—not to mention Nazi ideology more generally.
- Shirer begins by telling us a little bit about Mein Kampf itself, including the details of its early sales. As he notes, the book did OK in its first seven years on the shelves, but sales really rocketed in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor of the Republic.
- With that said, Shirer adds, it's more that likely that many Germans who bought Mein Kampf never bothered to read it. Even some of Hitler's close associates admitted to having trouble getting through its rambling pages.
- As he turns to the actual contents of Hitler's autobiographical/political treatise, Shirer emphasizes a crucial point that he'll return to multiple times throughout TRFTR: "whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest." (1.4.5)
- So, what?... Thanks for the heads up?
- Shirer's point is this: If Hitler made his intentions clear, why did his actions come as a shock to so many? And more importantly, why was he ever allowed to go as far as he did?
- Turning to the actual contents of Mein Kampf, Shirer offers a detailed description of the kind of Germany that Hitler describes in its pages.
- Among the many disturbing ideas that Hitler shares, Shirer emphasizes a few in particular. Among them are Hitler's desire for a final decisive struggle with France; his belief that Germany should expand eastward at Russia's expense; his obsession with finding new Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people; his belief that Germans were the master race; and his pseudo-Darwinist belief in the survival of the fittest.
- In these pages, Shirer introduces us to the German word Weltanschauung, which he defines as "view of life," and he discusses Hitler's personal Weltanschauung at length.
- As he does, he takes stock yet again of the would-be Fuehrer's deep-seated racism, and also discusses his lack of historical knowledge and his obvious appreciation of both genocidal and eugenicist practices.
- He concludes, however, that as sadistic and crazy as Hitler's ideas were, they weren't unique.
- Ultimately, he argues, they had deep historical roots in German experience and thought. (1.4.55)
- In fact, he takes that argument one step further, and declares: "Nazism and the Third Reich […] were but a logical continuation of German history." (1.4.55)
- That forms this basis of Shirer's controversial thesis.
The Historical Roots of the Third Reich
- Shirer is making a pretty provocative argument here, and so he needs to back it up. Throughout this section, he does his best to do so, starting with the historical premises that he needs to support his claims.
- He begins by noting that the Nazi Party actively promoted a public perception of Hitler as the fateful "successor" of historical German luminaries like Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and President Paul von Hindenburg.
- He then explains what Hitler meant by the concept of the "Third Reich"
- The first glorious Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the second was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia defeated France. More glory.
- But the Weimar Republic, according to Nazi propaganda, had dragged that glory through the mud.
- The Third Reich restored it, a logical continuation of the glorious German history.
- To offer some counterpoints to the Nazi argument, Shirer takes note of some of the less glorious aspects of German history.
- Throughout the pages that follow, he argues that the German admiration for "great" men like Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Hindenburg, and Hitler came with a high price.
- In order to glorify "great" men, he argues, the Germans learned to diminish the value of average, or "lesser" men.
- Shirer begins by considering the cultural, political, and religious legacy of Martin Luther.
- Although Shirer concedes that Luther had a few pretty good qualities, he emphasizes the fact that Luther's political influence in sixteenth-century Germany reduced the German people to poverty, in subservience to the state.
- Nice going, Luther.
- Now, that "subservience" is something that Shirer is going to come back to (once or twice... or maybe ten or twenty times) throughout the next 1000+ pages of TRFTR, so make a mental note of it.
- Whereas Shirer lays a fair bit of blame on Luther, he isn't the only one to get the finger pointed at him.
- Shirer turns to the legacies of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia—seventeenth-century events that re-imposed serfdom throughout Germany, and even introduced it to areas where it hadn't been previously known.
- According to Shirer, this degrading situation lived on in Germany throughout the centuries that followed.
- As he puts it: "Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parliament, which made such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which exploded in France in 1789, did not sprout in Germany." (1.4.62)
- According to Shirer, all of this has to be understood in order to comprehend the catastrophic and distorted road that modern Germany took.
- Shirer now turns his attention to Prussia, which he says controlled the destiny of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century.
- He charts Prussia's changing relationship with the German Empire throughout the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the legacy of Bismarck, who, as he explains, destroyed the divided Germany which had existed for nearly a thousand years and replaced it by force with Greater Prussia.
- Shirer characterizes von Bismarck as an "apostle of blood and iron"—a characterization that could apply just as easily to Hitler, as Shirer no doubt expects us to notice. (1.4.68)
- Shirer sketches the outline of Bismarck's career, noting the role he played in establishing King Wilhelm I of Prussia as the Emperor of Germany in 1871.
- He then offers a political analysis of the Reichstag (parliamentary government) that existed in Germany up until the end of the First World War, characterizing it as a façade of democracy.
- In reality, he writes, the German Empire was an autocracy, with the King of Prussia as its ruler. The King, who was also the Emperor, claimed divine right of rulership and no need to consult the Parliament.
- As Shirer demonstrates, Hitler thought very highly of this system, and sought to restore it—or something very much like it—when he came to power himself.
The Intellectual Roots of the Third Reich
- Having discussed the historical roots of the Third Reich, Shirer turns now to its intellectual underpinnings.
- In this section, Shirer argues that Hitler's ideological obsessions were neither unique nor original, but were spawned by philosophers, historians, and teachers who were influential during the century before Hitler.
- Their ideas had consequences that were disastrous, as it turned out, not only for the Germans but for the whole world.
- Shirer singles out a number of well-known and not-so-well-known names for attention:
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heinrich von Treitschke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Count Joseph de Gobine au, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
- Each of these thinkers contributed something unique to Germany's cultural character, and he reviews each of their contributions in turn.
The Strange Life and Works of H.S. Chamberlain
- Because Houston Stewart Chamberlain stands out to Shirer as a particularly rare historical oddity, Shirer devotes an entire subsection to his life and works.
- Chamberlain was a British-born immigrant to Germany, and was a prolific thinker and writer who wrote many books, some of which had a huge influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, and ordinary Germans.
- Many of those books were on the subject of race and history—two themes that obviously obsessed Hitler. As Shirer puts it, Chamberlain's treatise Foundations of the Nineteenth Century "sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations." (1.4.120)
- Shirer goes on to explain that when the Nazis came to power, Chamberlain was celebrated as the spiritual founder of Nazi Germany.
- Not only did his racial theories and beliefs about the destiny of the German nation and people inspire Nazi nationalism, he writes, but Chamberlain was also one of the first in Germany to believe that Hitler had a great future.
- In the passages that follow, Shirer attempts to consolidate all of the historical, cultural, and intellectual context that he's been discussing throughout this chapter, and to demonstrate how it all helped to pave the way for Hitler's rise.
- He argues that Hitler's megalomaniacal feeling that he was destined to lead the German people to glory was bolstered by a culture that did two crucial things simultaneously: it glorified great men who could demonstrate willfulness and power, and it glorified the contented servitude of the masses, who would gladly accept that power.
- Shirer adds that Hitler's "studies" had also taught him that great men who are destined to lead are above the laws and morals of ordinary men.
- Looks like he never read Crime and Punishment.
- As he draws the chapter to a close, Shirer gives us a recap on how things stood for Hitler when he was released from prison in 1924.
- The Nazi Party and its press were banned; there was dissent among it's former leaders; Hitler was forbidden to make public speeches.
- Other roadblocks stood in his way as well: he was facing deportation to Austria, the Weimar Republic seemed to be thriving, and Germany's economy was on the upswing.
- Any other politician might have found another profession.
- But Hitler wasn't easily discouraged. In prison, he saw his destiny even more clearly and now had no doubts about his mission.
- Shirer ends the chapter by reiterating one more time that the twisted furrows of Hitler's mind were rooted deep in German life and thought, and that the political "blueprint" he established in Mein Kampf possessed a certain degree of logic.
- Hitler's vision, according to Shirer, offered a continuation of German history and a road map to its destiny.