Hitler's Germany

...The history of the Third Reich has a deeper significance for us than this skillful narrative of its events would seem to indicate...

...This seems fantastic in the face of what he calls the "normal mind of the Twentieth Century...

...As one eminent professor put it: "National Socialism gave meaning once more to life...

...Himmler dreamed of an international elite of Aryan supermen who would rule the world not from Germany but from a revived Burgundy...

...The book is centered upon Adolf Hitler's role as the guiding spirit of, and the key to, the Third Reich, and rightly so...

...The section on the churches, for example, deals exclusively with Protestantism but makes no mention of the fact that the first organized protest against the National Socialism regime came from the Prussian state church...

...The millions who espoused the Fascist cause were neither misfits nor neurotics...

...Those who are fascinated by this narrative might well ponder these facts...

...It cracked, in many parts of Europe, under the first great crisis...

...For Shirer, the normal mind of our century is one which combines love for individual freedom with a belief in the power of reason...

...We still need to know more about why this should have been so, for the presence of these alternatives, in the end, constitutes the significance of the nearly victorious Third Reich...

...Obedience to the regime was always accompanied by internal struggles within the victorious party leadership...

...It needs to be explained...

...This is far indeed from Bismarck or Luther...

...This is the crux of the issue...

...The word "German" was expunged from "German Aryan" because it made the Nazi ideology too provincial...

...All these issues were debated then, and it was only by the narrowest of margins that Hitler triumphed during these early struggles for power and ideology...

...No wonder that in analyzing Hitler's ideas (exclusively through Mein Kampf), he stands in indignation and bewilderment before the fact that millions of Germans embraced such a "hodgepodge" of ideas, "concocted by a half-baked neurotic...

...Such an approach, especially as it tends to ignore the deep-running social and economic forces at work, is not very helpful in explaining National Socialism fifteen years after its demise...

...Many an American like Shirer finds it difficult to grasp that the horror that swept over Europe was not madness at all in any clinical sense...

...What Shirer seems to forget is that many Europeans in the postwar world, hungry and alienated from a rotting society, were only too glad to sacrifice individual freedom to the sense of belonging and fulfillment which in this case National Socialism promised, however fraudulently...

...That might be acceptable, but it leads him into attributing to them, in distorted degree, such national qualities as slavish obedience to the state and clumsiness in diplomacy...

...One must realize that such a view of the individual is basic to that totalitarianism which has given its impress to contemporary Europe...

...Undoubtedly, this is a frightening fact...

...It is a scholarly book, yet one full of indignation...

...it is, however, closely related to all of Fascism in the Twentieth Century...

...The feeling was widespread that the bourgeois era which this form of government supposedly typified was finished...

...but it demonstrates just how thin the veneer of rationalism and individualism is in the Twentieth Century...

...Perhaps Shirer left himself too little room in discussing the early history of the movement...

...Thus, foreign and military policies bulk in the foreground...

...My criticism is not mere academic pettiness...

...Emphasizing the years after 1937, his book describes the coming of the war and the war itself...

...For the most part Shirer has widely documented his text, though the early chapters rely to a great extent upon a history of the Nazi party written in the Thirties...

...Nazi ideology saw itself as the ultimate fulfillment of the individual through his integration with a cause, a higher purpose...

...It is incorrect to say, as does Shirer, that Germany stressed the state and not the individual person...

...Moreover, these national characteristics are attributed to a historical development in which Luther, as well as Prussia, is said to have played a leading role...

...Shirer places the blame for what happened squarely on the Germans...

...because of his approach Shirer's discussion of National Socialism ignores an essential point without which one cannot understand the movement...

...Neither moral indignation nor distorted emphasis on national character can be substituted for analysis...

...Shirer obviously holds in abhorrence everything about the Third Reich, and he makes no bones about it...

...Thus, Germany's Third Reich can be explained only by means of a peculiarly German tradition of obedience to the state— a belief in the supremacy of the state that National Socialism actually rejected in favor of the supremacy of the ideology...

...Reviewed by George L. Mosse The detailed nature of this history of the Third Reich necessarily exercises a fascination over the reader, for William L. Shirer writes well and with conviction...

...But though thoroughly understandable, the author's indignation does tend to get in the way of his analyses, particularly when it is unfortunately combined with a doubtful view of German history...

...Why, in the period between the two world wars, were the only alternatives for so many of the best minds of Europe either Marxism or Fascism...

...In the absence of a working parliament these struggles constituted the interplay of forces and pressure groups within a totalitarian regime...

...they go far to explain it...

...It was at this time that he got his real political training...

...More to the point than Shirer's analysis of German history is the fact that few between the two wars defended representative and parliamentary government anywhere in Europe...

...we must know what to guard against in a society which is not yet immune from the same sicknesses which alienated men from it in the recent past...

...Even National Socialism, dominated as it was by Adolf Hitler, was never quite so monolithic as Shirer makes it out to be...

...But this is relatively minor compared with my main point...