Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation
- In this chapter, Shirer begins TRFTR's second book by telling us a little bit about Germany's booming economy in the years between 1925 and 1925. When he gives us his own impression of Berlin and Munich in those years, things seem pretty rosy.
- Things were lively, modern, and free. The intellectual climate was open and buzzing.
- No one had heard heard of Hitler or the Nazis except as butts of jokes. Everyone knew about the disastrous Beer Hall Putsch.
- All the same, the Nazi Party was growing. Hitler had managed to have it reinstated, and as Shirer explains, the would-be Fuehrer had decided that rather than trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic through an armed rebellion, he'd eat away at it from the inside by getting Nazi Party members elected to the Reichstag.
- Shirer goes on to tell us that in February 1925, the Bavarian government banned Hitler from speaking in public after he made threats against the state in a speech delivered to four thousand people.
- The other German states banned him too, for good measure.
- Despite the fact that Hitler wasn't allowed to speak in public anymore, he furiously began to expand the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
- Shirer describes the complex infrastructure that Hitler built for the Nazi Party in those years, explaining how Hitler divvied Germany up into territories, assigned prominent Nazis to oversee the party efforts in each region, and formed a number of committees, ministries, and organizations within the party itself.
- Hitler also oversaw the reorganization of the S.A. during this period, along with the creation of the dreaded SS.
- Many influential men began to join Hitler's efforts.
- He then describes the birth of the Nazi Party's "Committee for Investigation and Settlement," which was essentially the Party's judicial body for the settlement of accusations and disputes—or, as Shirer puts it, the "hushing up" of accusations and disputes.
- Finally, Shirer ends the first section of this chapter by telling us a little bit about Gregor Strasser, a Nazi Party member who would eventually pose a political threat to Hitler since, in Shirer's words, he didn't accept Hitler's domination.
The Emergence of Paul Joseph Goebbels
- It was Gregor Strasser who first discovered and hired Paul Joseph Goebbels, who'd go on to become one of Hitler's most faithful acolytes, as well as the head of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
- In this section, Shirer tells us a little bit about Goebbels's family history, his physical appearance and personality, and even his love life.
- After aiming a few low blows at Goebbels's girl troubles, Shirer gets serious again as he explains why Strasser and Goebbels hit if off.
- Unlike Hitler, both of them were actually invested in the "socialist" aspect of National Socialism, and Shirer argues that they genuinely wanted to build a party that would serve the working class.
- This made Hitler wary of the two of them. In Shirer's words, their views were heresy to Hitler, and he was dead-set against allowing them to build a radical proletarian party.
- A showdown eventually erupted between Strasser and Hitler; Hitler managed to use it to his advantage in order to bring Goebbels over to his side.
- By April 1925, Shirer writes, Goebbels became Hitler's most loyal follower and remained so until his dying day. Spoiler alert: In 1945, he killed himself, his wife, and their six children rather that living in a world without his beloved Fuehrer.
An Interlude of Rest and Romance for Adolf Hitler
- Having devoted some attention to the rising Nazi stardom of Paul Joseph Goebbels, Shirer now turns to the only real love affair of Hitler's life.
- Shirer had mentioned earlier on in TRFTR that Hitler had a short-lived but apparently passionate affair with his niece Geli Raubal, who was the daughter of his half-sister Angela Raubal. Now we get that story in all of its scandalous detail.
- In 1928 Hitler rented a villa near Berchtesgaden, a small village in the Bavarian Alps.
- Once there, he asked his half-sister to come and "keep house" for him, and when Angela came, she brought her daughter Geli with her.
- Shirer describes Geli as being a blond beauty with a cheerful disposition.
- Hitler fell hard for Geli and began a three-year relationship with her.
- In September 1931, Geli was found dead of a gunshot wound in her room in Hitler's apartment in Munich.
- Her death was determined to be a suicide, although there was some speculation that Hitler had her killed. Nothing came of that, though.
- Hitler was reported to be inconsolable with grief after her death.
- Shirer says a few words about a letter that Hitler was said to have written to Geli—one in which Hitler apparently expressed some sexual desires and needs that Shirer found unusual, to say the least.
- Finally, he closes out the section by discussing the would-be Fuehrer's finances throughout the mid-to-late 1920s.
The Opportunities of the Depression
- In this section, Shirer explains why Hitler's ride on the road to power started to get smoother when the Great Depression hit.
- Hitler used the fear and despair of the German people to his advantage by making it seem like he was the only solution to Germany's problems.
- Shirer starts by tracing the brief-but-fateful Chancellorship of Heinrich Bruening, whom he describes as unwittingly destroying German democracy and paving the way for Hitler.
- When Bruening couldn't get the Reichstag to approve his financial program, he forced an election. It had unforeseen—and, from the point of view of history, disastrous—results.
- Overnight, the Nazi Party jumped from having twelve members in parliament to having more than one hundred seats. Talk about an unintended consequence…we bet Bruening would have loved a do-over.
- The Nazi Party was now the second largest political party in the Reichstag, and this gave Hitler a kind of political leverage that he'd never enjoyed before.
- He used that leverage to his own advantage, of course, and started to woo the German Army as well as Germany's powerful financiers and industry leaders.
- Shirer explains why those two groups were so important to Hitler's ambitions, especially the armed forces.
- In Shirer's view, Hitler's efforts were beginning to have their desired effect. The German Army generals now began "to ponder whether National Socialism might not be just what was needed to unify the people, restore the old Germany, make the Army big and great once more and enable the nation to shake off the shackles of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles." (2.5.126)
- No-o-o-o-o-o…
- Shirer turns back to the industry magnates and big financiers in Germany, and traces Hitler's success in gaining their trust, too.
- Hitler managed to get financial backing from much of the German business world.
- As this chapter draws to a close, Shirer takes a few moments to pause and review the rising careers of Hitler's closest cronies in the Nazi Party, saying a few brief words about Herman Goering, Gregor Strasser, Ernst Roehm, Wilhelm Frick, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Hess, Hans Frank, and Alfred Rosenberg.
- Finally, he closes by describing the brief life and sudden death of Horst Wessel: a young Nazi who was killed in an altercation with Communists in 1930, and who'd written a song which, after his death, became the official song of the Party and later the second official anthem of the Third Reich.