Third Reich
From Hobson's Choice
This article is under construction
A state created by the NSDAP by destroying the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Third Reich was created using a combination of deception and terrorism. It had pretensions to rulership over virtually anywhere; at its peak, it controlled territory of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Additionally, its armies would ultimately overrun nearly a third the territory (by population) of the USSR, and between allies and occupied states, it controlled the territory of what is now the EU.
The Third Reich is usually regarded by historians as the epitome of both totalitarianism and (in particular) its fascist version. It is most notorious for perpetrating the Holocaust, in which at least 11 million people were murdered.
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Context
Fitting the Third Reich into the longer period of German history is problematic because the Reich was actually a regime over several countries. Moreover, it sought to obliterate the structure of the antecedent polities, by destroying political liberalism, judicial legalism, and the fiduciary authority. Many of its key figures were Sudetenlanders, Austrians, and Danzigers; its enablers included large numbers of non-Germans, such as the leadership of Hungary, Romania, and other European nations. Indeed, the rise and destruction of the Third Reich may be characterized as a European civil war.
Of all forms of government and organizations of people, the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely, and is only rarely, and with difficulty, won from conquered peoples. No nation-state could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples, since such a conscience comes only from the conviction of the conquering nation that it is imposing a superior law upon barbarians. The nation, however, conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory. Whenever the nation-state appeared as conqueror, it aroused national consciousness and desire for sovereignty among the conquered people, thereby defeating all genuine attempts at empire building...From the first moment the goal of the Nazis was to obliterate the confines of the nation and constraints of democracy.. Hence, the curious Nazi conception of freedom, in which personal liberty was destroyed so the Volk could sweep aside any obstacle to its expansion. This was the unifying principle of Trans-European visions of empire: that the expansion into and subduing of other nations would make nations themselves an irrelevant concept.
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1949), p.126
The inner contradiction between the nation's body politic and conquest as a political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream. It is due to this experience and not to humanitarian considerations that conquest has since been officially condemned and has played a minor role in the adjustment of borderline conflicts, The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people's national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
Ibid, p.128
After World War I, the people of Germany and other Central Powers were deeply angered by what they believed was a treacherous deal. During the conflict the Germans had been led to believe they were winning; when defeat came, and with it, the Versailles Treaty, they could not accept that the terms were reasonable. Additionally, the victorious Allies took several steps to severely weaken the republic created in Germany, such as occupying the Rhineland to exact reparations from the hardpressed German economy.
At this time, Germany also experienced several shocks to its social mores: traditional forms of piety, nationalism, respect for the monarchy, respect for the military, and conservative rural virtues were suddenly cast into doubt. In the east, there was the Russian Revolution and a semi-Marxist government in Poland, a short-lived Communist regime in Hungary, and two (doomed) Communist insurgencies in Germany itself (1918 and 1923). The customary pride that Germans had been accustomed to feel was now replaced by public expressions of despair, doom, and frivolity. Finally, there was a deep and angry fissure between town and country, with the urban proletariat mobilized for class war, and the rural freeholders prone to side with the bourgeois.
The Weimar Republic had serious coping problems as well. It was dominated by a galaxy of extreme rightwing parties and one large center-left party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD was badly split between those who intended to usher in socialism, and those who were interested in reforming capitalism; the latter dominated the Reichstag, while the former dominated the trade unions. The SPD's political fortunes were ruined by the hyperinflation of the mid-1920's, plus a short but intense depression that ended in 1930. During the second half of the Republic's existence it was dominated by conservative parties (as was Austria) that implemented the "state of exception," or suspension of civil liberties. This was intended to forcibly prevent a Communist revolution. While the Nazis utterly despised the Weimar Republic, they were reliant on its frequent lapses of civil liberties; they also relied on the Republic's vulnerability to constitutional crisis.
While the Nazis despised the liberalism of the Weimar Republic, they had developed a view that the narrow confines of German nation-state were not merely an unsatisfactory territorial settlement, but part of a grand scheme to destroy the German people. They propagated the notion that German identity lay not in citizen but in the blood; that non-Aryan citizens of the Republic were in fact, foreigners. Nazi rhetoric insisted that European B'nei Yisrael were not only foreigners whose "residence" in Germany was illegitimate, but conspirators to prevent the fulfillment of the Nazi plan. Much like the hard left whom they self-consciously imitated, early Nazi demagoguery claimed its tenets were obvious and natural, and some conspiracy was preventing their (otherwise inevitable) logical conclusion; for example, Germany would "naturally" dominate Europe were it not for a conspiracy of B'nei Yisrael to prevent this from happening; class conflict would "naturally" evaporate if the "natural" economic management of Medieval Germany had not given way to rationalist, "Jewish" capitalism. Hence, admirers of the Nazis were led to assume that they did not propose to impose a totalitarian order so much as remove obstacles to history running its natural course. The fact that Nazi goals were a hodgepodge of mutually contradictory claims, or else terminally vague, was not a serious problem.[1] At the time of the Weimar Republic, there was an intense debate and corresponding political struggle over an endless number of nationality "questions," such as the "question" of the Hungarian-speaking population of Transylvania (awarded to Romania in the Treaty of Trianon). First, the imposition of national self determination on Central Europe created immense practical headaches, since the enclaves of ethnicities and languages amounted to scattered islands, and there was substantial overlap. In the case of Transylvania, for example, there were population centers "contested" by Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans; there is absolutely no way that boundaries could be drawn to please anyone. Second, the Paris negotiations, in awarding territories to newly-created nations (such as Poland and Czechoslovakia) or to massively enlarged ones (such as Romania or Serbia), incorporated clauses on the rights of "minorities," which effectively denied them the usual level of internal sovereignty. The minorities "left behind" in countries such as Poland and Lithuania did not trust the League of Nations to protect their rights, while the new states publicly objected to the restrictions on their efforts to naturalize and assimilate recalcitrant peoples.[2] In this regard, the B'nei Yisrael of Central Europe were regarded by the "international community" of the day as merely one of many ethnic "questions" that evaded resolution. While experts working for the League attempted to finesse the assignment of nationalities to states, European thinking tended to absorb the idea that citizenship was subject to ethnic membership; not merely Nazi demagogues, but sober Usonian and European statesmen accepted the idea that the state was largely a logical terminus of the idea of ethnicity.
The Nazi Rise to Power
The Nazi Party (NSDAP) had been gradually taking over the streets of major German cities with its Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers), or private army. The SA was funded by industrialists because it would attack and occasionally murder trades union leaders; meanwhile, the NSDAP won control of just over a third of the seats in the Reichstag. During the constitutional crisis of 1930-1932, the circle of conservative businessmen around Pres. von Hindenberg sought to prevent a return to power of the radical political parties by cobbling together a tenable coalition. Under the state of exception law, kingmaker von Papen was able to have the leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler, made chancellor of the Reich despite his lack of a parliamentary majority (30 Jan 1933). A month later, the Reichstag building was destroyed in a huge fire, which was blamed on Communists. Hitler was able to pass the enabling act, which he then used to jail the Communist Party, and then the Social Democrats. While the governing bodies within Germany—Prussia, Hesse, Oldenberg, Bavaria—remained, the Nazis were awarded control over them, so that Germany became a de facto unitary dictatorship.
By 1935, Hitler had effectively merged the party and the state. The Nazi flag replaced the old tricolor as the national flag; the SA was destroyed and superseded by the Schutzstaffel (SS). The legal and educational system were purged of Hitler's opponents subordinated to Nazi jurisprudence. A brief phase of economic populism ended (the trade unions were dissolved soon after Hitler came to power); corporatist economic policy now placed the German worker under a renewed, ferocious tyranny.
Jewish Policy
At the core of Nazi ideology was hatred of B'nei Yisrael (Jews). Occasionally this was played down in favor of the "positive" aspects of the new regime, such as wholesome family values, [a newly purged] church, and physical fitness. Typically, judeophobia was considered somewhat declassé in the English and German-speaking countries; it was regarded as a form of populism, in so far as it glorified the lower class gentiles (as being "natural" Germans) at the expense of the "effete" bourgeois. However, this was purely a marketing ploy: the entire belief system of the Nazis was that the B'nei Yisrael were a nation unto themselves, and their physical destruction was the only way to liberate Europe from them.
The basic rationale behind this was twofold. First, the German political system tended to be oligarchic; its elites professed to despise the bourgeois, but were dependent upon industrialists great and small in order to remain in power. Both conservatives and radicals denounced capitalism, which was blamed for an extremely cruel factory system, and for "selling out" to foreigners (the Dolchstosslegende). Radicals had a more obvious reason for loathing capitalism, but as a process of social change it did tend to serve the radicals by dragging German social consciousness into the 20th century. The prevailing stereotype of B'nei Yisrael was that they were masters of a great web of finance capital; even SPD theorists like Rudolf Hilferding argued that the latter was much stronger than "industrial capital," and thus replicated Marxian ideas of surplus value. The association of B'nei Yisrael with banking was wholly reflexive.
Second, the Central Europeans saw no contradiction between the B'nei Yisrael as arch-capitalist, and the B'nei Yisrael as architect of global communism. This is a very startling, but consistent point of view; contemporary writers like Oswald Spengler conceived capitalism and communism as essentially identical forces, distinguished only by their peculiar outrages. Spengler and his admirers were not being ingenious; they literally could not understand the Anglo-American idea of the pro-market and anti-market world views as fundamentally opposed. Instead, they saw communism as a end product of capitalism,[3] which was conspiring to destroy their traditional social order, and possibly collectivize the privately owned land as well. Many of the most prominent political radicals of the day were either B'nei Yisrael or said to be, and European B'nei Yisrael were often under attack from conservatives—driving them into the arms of the political left.
The Nazis were obsessed with destroying a political force that had, in fact, never had more than tertiary influence on European politics; their motivation was partly a confluence of bizarre distortions of religious precepts (Hitler was determined to revise Christianity into a European identity cult), a totalitarian obsession with purity, and internal group dynamics (the German right was in a bidding war to find the most terrifyingly hard-core among its ranks). In power, however, it found the doctrine of a cosmic war with the mythologized "World Jewry" to be political dynamite. Adherents deeply and sincerely believed the USSR was part of the vast Jewish conspiracy, and the UK somewhat less so.
Third Reich Jewish policy began as a program of ostracism, especially with the Jewish laws of 1937. It intensified during the early phase of World War II with the conquest of Czechoslovakia and Poland, during which B'nei Yisrael were deported to ghettos such as Łodz and Theresianstadt. After the beginning of 1942 the SS adopted a plan of physically exterminating all the B'nei Yisrael of Europe. This came to an end in November 1944, when the SS decided to stop the gas chambers, dismantle the death camps on the Eastern Front, and march the inmates to the Western Front. The Nazis were terrified at the prospect of the Soviets discovering what they were doing to their Jewish controllers (as they imagined it). The dismantling of the camps and the efforts at concealing the Holocaust have played a major role in Holocaust Denial.
Foreign Policy
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Notes
- ↑ This impression of Nazi ideology arises from two main sources: first, a lot of Nazi or proto-Nazi literature is available online. This site does not link to any, however. One example is Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's The Third Reich, from which nearly all of the main Nazi ideas were drawn (included the name of the regime); Francis Parker Yockey wrote Imperium in 1946 after "converting" to Nazi zealotry; his book has the temerity to pose as a sequel to Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. Monad Books (1973/1936), chapter IV, provides ample documentation of Nazi views, although Guerin neglected the extreme importance of Nazi judeophobia. That's one source.
Another is Richard J. Evans' partly-completed trilogy on the subject (the last volume, The Third Reich at War, is not yet completed at the time of this writing). The part that is available includes [The Coming of the Third Reich] and The Third Reich in Power, all by Penguin (2004-2006). - ↑ Arendt, p.270-274. Arendt mentions (footnote 8, p.272) "It has been estimated that prior to 1914 there where about 100 millopn people whose national aspirations had not been fulfilled," citing Charles Kingsley Webster's "Minorities: History" in the 1929 Encyclopædia Britannica. Minorities were believed to number between 25 and 30 million (P. de ZAzcarate, "Minorities,: League of Nations," ibid.).
- ↑ An important point to bear in mind is that the Continental European uses the word "capitalism" to refer to an economic process whose end is the expropriation of surplus value. In orthodox Communist thought, finance capital expropriates surplus value from the industrial capitalist, just as the industrial capitalist expropriates surplus value from the worker. The other indispensable part of the idea is the internationalism of both capitalism and Communism.
See Also
Holocaust
NSDAP (Nazi Party)
World War II
External Links
Dedicated Sites
- "Third Reich:Overview," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Raffael Scheck, "Germany and Europe" lecture notes, Colby College
Books
- Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Harvest Books (1973)
- Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Penguin (2006)
- Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business, Pathfinder Press (1969)
- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (excerpt) University of Chicago Press. (1966)
- Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, Penguin (2008)
