Three on the Third Reich: High-Speed History

Rüdiger Barth & Hauke Friederichs - The Last Winter of The Weimar Republic

Peter Fritzsche- Hitler’s First Hundred Days

Robert Gellately - Hitler’s True Believers

The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2020

On Dec. 14, 1932,Germany’s head of state, President Paul von Hindenburg, a former general, a Prussian’s Prussian, hosted a party in honor of Ernst Lubitsch, a German Jew who had emerged as one of Hollywood’s finest directors. As two German writers, Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs, relate in “The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic,” another guest asked Lubitsch why he no longer worked in Germany. “That’s finished,” he replied, “nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.” Less than two months later, von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s chancellor.

“The Last Winter” is a day-by-day retelling of Weimar’s final collapse. After a brief introduction, its authors turn their attention to Berlin on Nov. 17, 1932, a day dominated politically by the question of who should become Germany’s new chancellor. According to custom, the job should have been offered to Hitler, leader of the largest party in the Reichstag, but the Nazis had lost ground in elections held earlier in the month, and those who still controlled Germany were not ready for Hitler, not quite yet. “The Last Winter” concludes on Jan. 30, 1933, when, after weeks of intricate maneuvering deftly sketched by Messrs. Barth and Friederichs, von Hindenburg hands the chancellorship to Hitler.

The book’s strictly chronological approach adds pace, if at the cost, sometimes, of depth. But the pointillism that comes with being written diary-style is effective, and even when the detail is trivial, it can be startling: Goebbels played the accordion? We are told that the outgoing chancellor, the clever and devious Kurt von Schleicher, displayed little emotion as he said farewell to his cabinet, although one colleague observed that “this experience has been a matter of life or death to him.” A little over a year later, von Schleicher was murdered by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives; the dangerous game, well described in this book, that he had been playing had come to an end.

What comes clear in the authors’ account is how few understood the extent of the abyss that lay ahead. Normal life went on: Department stores held linen sales in the week that Hitler took over. Well, why would they not? And then there were the politicians who thought that, by bringing Hitler into what they imagined was a coalition, they could use and control him—a view initially shared by many, if not the Swiss journalist, quoted by the authors, who wrote that “a bear is still a bear, even if you stick a ring through his nose . . . .”

The authors’ account of the January day Hitler was named chancellor is understandably focused on the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin’s government quarter, but they keep to the mosaic approach that serves their narrative so well. As expected, there are torchlight parades and a brawl between communists and Nazis. But we also read of an American labor organizer discovering that there are no tickets left for the play he planned on seeing, and of a group of German writers deciding their best option is to wait things out. One, Carl von Ossietzky, warns that the nightmare will last longer than they think: In an epilogue, it’s revealed that he will be in a concentration camp within months. The more the reader knows about the horrors to come, the darker “The Last Winter” seems.

In “Hitler’s First Hundred Days,” Peter Fritzsche takes the story through, as its title would suggest, the next three months. At the book’s heart lies a mystery. There was, as Mr. Fritzsche rightly notes, “nothing inevitable” about Hitler’s appointment—the product of a backroom deal—and nothing “self-evident” about a Nazi future. The party’s progress had gone into reverse in November, and there had been no “march on Berlin.” Yet within 100 days of January 30, the Nazis had landed the general election result they needed to effectively bypass the constitution; had centralized power; had smashed the trade unions; had brutalized the opposition; had opened the camp at Dachau (the first “official” successor to countless “wild” lockups) and had passed laws denying Jews equal rights. The 101st day—May 10, 1933—saw the start of ritualized book burnings, an episode labeled by some, Mr. Fritzsche notes, as a “holocaust.”

The extraordinary speed of this transformation can be partly attributed to the Nazis’ adroit outmaneuvering of not only their opponents on the left and center but also the conservative nationalist “partners” who were supposed to contain them. It can also, in part, be put down to their willingness to resort to violence against their opponents, a willingness that was often condoned by authorities not yet officially under their thumb. Mr. Fritzsche, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, describes in detail how these tactics did their bit to pave the way to the Nazis’ assumption of absolute power. But none of these factors alone would have been enough to take Hitler to the dominant position he had reached by the beginning of May. The Nazis and their allies only took 52% of the vote in early March, despite grabbing every unfair advantage they could. Yet barely two months later, many of the 48% were either changing sides or settling into acquiescence.

In some perceptive passages in the earlier stages of this book, Mr. Fritzsche examines how, during the party’s years in opposition, the Nazis were able to broaden their support away from the original ideological core to voters who, for example, just thought that “something” had to be done to sort out a deeply unsettled country. And Mr. Fritzsche looks particularly closely at those who swung behind the party in early 1933 (an approach he also took in his 1998 book “Germans Into Nazis”).

What the author stresses is that, contrary to what is so often assumed, many Germans were seduced not by despair but by optimism. Mr. Fritzsche sets out the ways that the Nazis produced the impression that the party was creating a Volksgemeinschaft—a people’s community—through such methods as transforming the Left’s traditional celebration of the first of May into “The Day of National Labor,” a festival of national unity rather than class struggle. This appealed to a very human need to feel a sense of belonging, an inclusivity that was reinforced by exclusion: The people’s community was defined by a notion of nation as well as race. Germany’s Jews were not only ineligible to join the Volksgemeinschaft but were supposedly a threat to it. The myth of the enemy within impressed too many and bothered too few.

Mr. Fritzsche covers a longer period of time than his book’s title implies, but in the scholarly—and more comprehensive—“Hitler’s True Believers,” Robert Gellately, a distinguished historian of 20th-century totalitarianism, travels the whole length of the National Socialist arc—from grubby origins to miserable conclusion—in his attempt to explain how “ordinary people became Nazis.” Mr. Gellately differs from many in the weight he places on the appeal of the “socialist” element in an ideology that, almost from its earliest days, had combined nationalism and anti-Semitism with a distrust of capitalism. Crucially, however, this distrust did not entail the hostility to private property or the nationalizations that were central to the thinking of Hitler’s fellow totalitarians in the U.S.S.R. Quite what the Nazis meant by socialism was conveniently opaque, but it could clearly be differentiated from Soviet and other varieties.

In an intriguing passage, Mr. Gellately argues that the movement’s early followers were not “converted” by Hitler. Rather, his party was a vehicle for crystallizing what they, in large part, already thought. In many respects this anticipated the way that less politically conscious Germans would eventually succumb to Hitler. “He became a kind of representative figure for ideas, emotions, and aims that he shared with . . . millions of others, who were on the same wavelength,” Mr. Gellately writes, an incarnation made more credible by the vagueness of the Nazi platform. There were few specific policies, making it easier to tell different audiences what they wanted to hear.

Mr. Gellately is, however, possibly too dismissive of just how much Hitler’s success owed to his own strange charisma and, by extension, his curiously personal bond with millions of Germans. This was reinforced by the way that the Nazis used ritual and rhetoric as a form of political religion, something the author acknowledges (mainly implicitly) but passes over too quickly.

Yet Mr. Gellately is correct to stress that many voters had been radicalized by the inflationary spiral of the early 1920s or by the Great Depression. The latter, it is worth adding, was exacerbated by a German banking crisis, in which the legacy of the ruinous terms of the Versailles settlement played a large and politically poisonous part. In “Hitler’s First Hundred Days,” Mr. Fritzsche notes that a “depression cuts unevenly,” but even if the middle classes from which the Nazis drew so much of their support suffered less than those further down the social scale, they would not have been immune to the feelings of social, economic and political insecurity that these shocks engendered.

And in their alienation from the Weimar Republic, they were hardly alone. Look again at that November 1932 election, in which the Nazis suffered setbacks. Mr. Gellately notes that, after including the votes won by another party of the nationalist right and by the Communists, a majority of voters opted “for parties that rejected the constitution of the Weimar Republic, and hoped instead for some kind of authoritarian dictatorship.” Interestingly, “a majority . . . also wanted parties favoring “socialism” in one form or another.”

That a “German” socialism could be fitted within the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft did the Nazis no harm, helping them first win power and then tighten their grip. The Nazis boasted, not inaccurately, of having “harnessed” capitalism. They made a show of breaking down class barriers and developed recreational, cultural, charitable and social programs for all—an approach that came, as Mr. Fritzsche points out, with the added advantage of squeezing out an older civil society. And so the Nazis secured the acquiescence and even the approval of some of their former opponents on the left. Economic recovery also helped.

It was probably the memory of that Volksgemeinschaft, however much it rested on illusion, that explains one of the most remarkable facts in Mr. Gellately’s book: When Germans in the country’s west and in West Berlin—a people still living amid the ruins of the Reich—were asked in 1948 whether National Socialism was a good idea, but poorly implemented, 57% of those polled replied “yes.”