The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Chapter 8: Life in the Third Reich: 1933 – 1937 Summary

Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation

• Shirer begins this chapter by noting that it was in the summer of 1934 that he arrived in Germany and began his reporting on the Third Reich.
• Throughout the pages that follow, he'll paint a picture of what daily life was like for the German citizens who lived and worked under Hitler's dictatorship.
• He found that a surprising majority of Germans didn't seem to him to mind "that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation." (2.8.1)
• Of course, the Gestapo and the constant threat of being sent to a concentration camp also helped keep people in line—at least, those people who weren't already being arrested for their political affiliations or racial, religious, and ethnic identities.
• Although he did meet some individual Germans who made it clear that they were disgusted by Hitler's persecution of the Jews, they did nothing to stop it.
• Likewise, he writes that despite international denunciations of German anti-Semitism, the German public couldn't help but notice that those denunciations didn't stop tourists from visiting Germany in droves.
• In August, 1936, Berlin hosted the Olympics and the Nazis had the opportunity to dazzle the world.
• Shirer records that international visitors, especially the British and Americans, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparently a happy and friendly people, united in their admiration for Hitler.
• It was a very different picture, they thought, from what they'd read in the newspapers.
• Against this background of Hitler's success in pulling the wool over the eyes of the Western world, Shirer records the grim details of the Nazis' flagrant violations of civil and human rights.
• Specifically, he describes the intentions and consequences of the anti-Jewish Nürnberg Laws, and notes that by the time the Olympics were being held in 1936, Jewish people in Germany had been all but excluded from any kind of employment, so that half of them had no way to support themselves.
• In addition to explicit anti-Jewish laws, Jews also had to contend with public displays of hatred that made it difficult for them to acquire even basic necessities.
• As Shirer writes, many grocery stores, butcher shops, and dairies had signs over the doors: "Jews Not Admitted."
• In many communities Jews couldn't buy milk or bread even for their young children. Pharmacies refused to sell them medicine.
• This was just a prelude to Hitler's real plan—the total destruction of the Jews of Germany and Europe.

The Persecution of the Christian Churches 

• In 1933, Hitler had promised to uphold the rights of German Christians, but he soon reneged on that promise.
• Shirer begins this section by reviewing the Nazi persecution of German Catholics in a few brief paragraphs, then turns to the Nazi Party's relationship with German Protestants.
• He offers an account of the Nazi Party's struggle to consolidate and seize control of Germany's Protestant churches, and he argues that the party's ultimate goal was the destruction of Christianity in Germany in favor of a new Nazi paganism modelled on old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods.

The Nazification of Culture

• Book burnings began in the spring of 1933, and other measures were taken to ensure that the German public read only what the Nazis wanted them to read.
• Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, was also the father of the Reich Chamber of Culture, which was mandated to direct the moral intellectual development of the people and the professions.
• If a person wanted to work in any of the fields that the Reich Chamber of Culture controlled, like the press or the arts, they had to prove their Nazi bona fides.
• The result was that many writers and artists fled the country rather than be forced to further to philosophy and propaganda of the new regime.
• Germany's vibrant art and literary culture was quickly being destroyed by the Nazis.

The Control of Press, Radio, and Films 

• Given his profession, it's not surprising that Shirer would devote an entire section to Nazi control over press, radio, and film in Nazi Germany.
• Each morning, editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the press correspondents of papers published elsewhere in the Reich had to meet at the Propaganda Ministry, where Dr. Goebbels or one of his assistants told them what news to print, what to suppress, and how to write it.
• Non-Nazi and anti-Nazi journals and journalists were removed from the publishing and broadcasting world; the Nazis made a fortune through their total control over German presses, radio, and film.
• Shirer had firsthand experience of the propaganda machine. He admits that even he sometimes found that steady exposure to lies and distortions could eventually make an impression on the mind.
• He says that nobody who hasn't lived inside a totalitarian regime can even imagine the scope and force of this kind of propaganda.

Education in the Third Reich

• Shirer begins this section by summing up Hitler's vision for education in the Third Reich.
• Education wasn't to be limited to the classroom. Rather, it permeated all aspects of life.
• Youth were indoctrinated in social groups and were required to participate in compulsory labor, followed by enlistment in the army.
• One of the clearest aims of Hitler's new educational program was to indoctrinate Germany's youth in Nazi ideology.
• The Nazi educational system was organized from German primary and secondary schools all the way up to the universities.
• Shirer then turns to the Hitler Youth movement and examines the uniquecontributions that it made to the "education" of Germany's youth. All youth programs except Hitler Youth were discontinued.
• What, no Boy Scouts?
• There were three specialty schools that the Nazi Party developed in order to train young Nazi elites.
• Shirer concludes this section by making a pretty shocking comparison between Germany's youth and the young people of other European nations.
• Even though their minds were being poisoned, the regime emphasized physical health and well-being.
• He admitted that the youth of all economic and social classes (except Jews, of course) grew up with a sense of camaraderie and pride in their country.
• He thought of that later when he'd happen to see young British POWs, who looked emaciated and dispirited—the result of their neglect by their home country.
• As Shirer notes more than once throughout TRFTR, examples like this made it easy to see why so many Germans were willing to accept Hitler's totalitarian rule.

The Farmer in the Third Reich

• Shirer describes the early measures that Hitler took to safeguard the livelihoods of German farmers.
• In 1933 the Nazis passed a law instituting a program that was a lot like the old feudal system.
• As he puts it, the law was a combination of pushing the laborers back to medieval times and protecting them from being financially disadvantaged by the modern economy.

The Economy of the Third Reich

• In this section, Shirer offers a broad overview of the Nazi Party's economic management of Germany in the years leading up to the outbreak of war.
• Although he gives some credit to the economic wizardry of Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, Shirer argues that Germany's economic recovery depended on rearmament.
• War can be very good for an industrialized nation's economy, and Germany was no different.

The Serfdom of Labor

• Shirer turns his attention to the nation's working class, who had lost their unions, and with them, right to strike or bargain.
• This turned the worker into a serf, just like in medieval times, tied to his employer.
• Although unemployment levels in Germany dropped under Nazi Party governance, it was the capitalists and businesses who benefitted most, not the working people.
• German workers may have had jobs, he explains, but on average they were bringing home less pay—in large part because of various dues, taxes, contributions, and "optional" charity gifts that the Nazi Party expected them to contribute.
• Laborers in Nazi Germany also had less freedom of movement, because strict regulations bound employees to their places of employment and made it hard for them to seek work elsewhere.
• Shirer describes how the working class was distracted from its loss of rights by a Nazi program of "regimented leisure." This was a system of clubs and organized travel opportunities that the German people were encouraged to take part in, in order to nurture "Strength through Joy." (2.8.138-41)
• Even though the working classes had less freedom under the Nazis than they'd had before, the Nazis had given them a degree of economic security, so the trade-off didn't seem quite so bad.
• Shirer makes one more point about Hitler's treatment of the working classes. It made sure that when the time came, he had a body of workers who were ready, willing, and able to produce the necessary supplies for war.

Justice in the Third Reich 

• Shirer believes that starting in 1933, Germany under the Nazis stopped being a society based on laws. Arbitrary arrests, assaults, and murders became the norm.
• In Nazi Germany, he concludes, Hitler himself was the law.
• Shirer reminds us that even before the Nazis rose to power, the German courts were extremely biased against the Weimar Republic and its supporters.
• He suggests that—in some ways at least—Germany's judicial system was already aligned with key Nazi interests even before Hitler grabbed the reins completely.
• The Nazis steadily consolidated power over the courts throughout the 1930s, first by dismissing all Jewish professionals from the judiciary—along with anyone whose commitment to Nazism wasn't complete—and then by packing the courts with officials sympathetic to the regime.
• The Nazis also created new courts, such as the People's Court, which became Germany's most feared court.
• Shirer discusses the dreaded Gestapo, which began as a secret police service employed by Goering to arrest and murder the regime's political opponents of the regime.
• Over time, it became a complex, well-organized group that held "the power of death and life over every German." (2.8.157)
• Shirer also offers brief descriptions of the concentration camps that were established early on in Hitler's reign. By the end of 1933, there were at least 50 camps under the control of the SS and the S.A.
• Next, Shirer describes the formation of the Nazi SD (Security Service, or Sicherheitsdienst), which began as the S.S.'s intelligence branch.
• In 1936 the Nazis created a unified German police force, and Hitler put Himmler in charge of it.
• In Shirer's view, this moment signaled the fact that Nazi Germany had finally become a police state.

Government in the Third Reich

• Shirer argues that because Hitler found the details of day-to-day governance boring, he left most of the work to the bureaucratic management system that Nazi Party had established.
• The result was a top-down government with a large bureaucracy, totally corrupt and inefficient, and living in constant terror of the Gestapo.
• Perched at the very top was Hitler, who, after only a few years in office, had unified the state, taken control of the culture, destroyed civil freedoms, and reinvigorated industry.