Reddit reviews The Coming of the Third Reich

We found 20 Reddit comments about The Coming of the Third Reich. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Penguin Books

20 Reddit comments about The Coming of the Third Reich:

u/Baloney-Tugboat · 68 pointsr/politics

I recommend everyone read Richard Evans' 3-part series on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, especially the first book about the rise of the movement. There's so many parallels between then and what we're seeing now in the US it chills me to the bone.

u/mikeaveli2682 · 52 pointsr/hiphopheads

u/Bearjew94 · 27 pointsr/TheMotte

The reason I hate the Nazi analogy, besides the fact that it’s overused, is that it just is not apt. 1920’s Germany was pro-Jewish, only compared to other countries. Being anti-Semitic was not a career ending move and plenty of people in power vocally hated them, even if something like Holocaust was not on their mind. People should actually learn something about early Nazi history before making this comparison. Even if they weren’t popular before right before their rise to power, they were considered more like rabble rousers, not pariahs. I recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans to get an understanding of what led to their assuming and consolidating power.

u/Atlas_Rodeo · 21 pointsr/GetMotivated

University mobilization was extremely important to the Nazis. Student groups grew to the point where the entirety of student unions were controlled by extremist Nazi youth groups. They then moved on the faculty, getting leftists and jews and other undesirables sacked in favor of ideologically similar folks.

This of course doesn't even begin to mention the effort that was put into indoctrinating even younger grade-school students.

Everyone should read Richard Evans' fantastic 3-part series on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Now more than ever do people owe it to themselves to see how this kind of thing starts as a fringe movement and gradually proceeds to....well, everything.

u/GlorifiedPlumber · 19 pointsr/politics

Far far far more nuanced than that.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/

Fantastic book. The rise of the Nazi party within Germany, and then Hitler's subsequent takeover of that party, was far more complicated than: Nobody protested... or the SA Brownshirts had more guns.

Germany is/was a complicated place.

u/[deleted] · 10 pointsr/AskSocialScience

It was a protest party really; a "catch all" if you will, without a lot of specific policies. The Nazis tailored their message specifically for different audiences: when speaking to business leaders they'd eliminate the antisemitism and anti-capitalist rhetoric; when speaking to farmers and the working class they'd do the opposite. They never really broke into the working class vote though, which was dominated by the communists. Their main backing was in the middle classes, with some working class and upper class support.

And yeah, the youth part was a huge part of their success. That's a big part of what allowed them to smash all the other minor parties at the polls, and bite into the votes of the Social Democrats and the Nationals. The whole amazing dynamism and youthfulness of the movement was a massive draw for many people (especially the many young men who had missed WW1 and felt they had missed out, and therefore joined the SA, the Nazi political paramilitary or "brownshirts"), and this is where they far excelled any other political party in Germany: the marching, the rallies, the brawling, the whole 'struggle' and 'movement'. Only the communists had any chance of competing there, and the other parties were eventually forced down this level in order to compete: the Social Democrats for instance had always been about the debate and reasoning, but even they ended up trying to emulate the simple slogans, imagery and short sharp rhetoric that the Nazis excelled at. Of course they couldn't beat the Nazis at their own game.

> Sometimes it feels like we're one bad economic disaster and a serpent-tongue away from the same damn thing.

The economic disaster the Germans had in this period was far, far worse than anything USA could hope to have. 1 out of 3 were out of work, the welfare system couldn't take it, and the government was engaging is hugely damaging deflationary policies which made it worse. Not only that, but the Nazis were never able to gain a majority vote by themselves (in their last election they got 46% of seats I believe, and were only able to just break above 50% with help from the Nationals), and Hitler was appointed Chancellor, not elected (Hindenburg and co. thought they could restrain the Nazis, heh). This was after a huge campaign of SA violence against most other parties too, which intimidated people out of running (especially the communists). They were only able to take this tiny majority and create a one-party dictatorship with the help of force, through the violence and intimidation of the SA (and to a lesser extent, the SS), as they fell far short of the two thirds majority needed to change the constitution. But the fact that they did it semi-legally legitimised the whole thing. And very importantly, they managed to co-opt the army, which is always a prerequisite. Finally, there is the crucial fact the majority of Germans never saw the Weimar democratic system as legitimate anyway; the communists hated it, the conservative parties loathed it, the army resented it, civil servants were never fans and the average German couldn't see many good results from it by looking back since 1918. It was only really the Social Democrats that championed it. I find it very hard to imagine political paramilitaries like the brownshirts running around beating and killing people in USA, that the U.S Army could be co-opted, or that the majority of Americans will come to see the democratic and constitutional republic system as fundamentally illegitimate, so I wouldn't worry about a Nazi-style dictatorship in USA just yet :p

btw a sweet book on the topic is this one.

u/DMVBornDMVRaised · 6 pointsr/PoliticalHumor

So what earns them the title? Do you realize the Nazi's spent a decade and a half doing exactly what was done in Charlottesville? Like exactly? Why are you talking out of your ass on such an easily researchable topic?

Start here...

The Coming of the Third Reich https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143034693/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_34hLzbJYY3W61

And do yourself a favor and don't speak again on this topic until you are done with it. At least that.

u/You_Dont_Party · 5 pointsr/worldpolitics

>If you think Hitler/Stalin would have handled that the same way, you're ignorant of history.

Considering I have said nothing of the sort, I’m not sure why you’d think that’s a position anyone is taking. Seems like you’re just creating a strawman argument because the argument I made, that the right-wing loves to censor topics, is one you can’t argue against.

>People who think that Trump is a fascist don't have a gnats worth of knowledge what fascism is. Please open up a damn history book and read a thing.

Fascism isn’t only achieved through a Nazi state though, and rhetoric can certainly be fascistic without requiring a nation to reach the depths of becoming a full blown authoritarian hellscape.

Have you read Eco’s dissection of Italian fascism? Have you read about the Weimar Republic and the rise of Fascism in Germany?Perhaps you should, because you might understand the context of fascism in a non-fascistic state, and recognize the many valid comparisons it has to modern far-right ideology. Don’t take my word for it, I can point to any number of Holocaust survivors organizations which have stated the same thing about Trumps policies and rhetoric, and I’m sure they’d love to hear you tell them that they “don’t know a gnats worth of knowledge” about fascism.

u/Urist_Galthortig · 4 pointsr/history

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693

This is the first in a Trilogy by Evans. Excellent research, and when ready today, while still very different from the United States, will seem closer than you would like. When he starts explaining about how journalism fractured into political journalism along ideological lines, you can see the same problems we suffer today.

Also, a highlight for the section explaining what happened to Adolf Hitler after the Beerhall Putsch. He talks about the country put him in a deluxe cell, and his probation was no public speaking for five years. They came and went.

u/DebateFascism · 3 pointsr/DebateFascism

Wages of destruction by Adam Tooze

History of the Third Reich Series which include:

The Coming of the Third Reich

The Third Reich in Power

The Third Reich at War

Rise and fall of the Third Reich

Thats very good reading material right there.

u/PaperbackWriter66 · 3 pointsr/progun

>The Nazis were pretty explicit about their intent.

Not actually true, really. Yes, Hitler and the NSDAP were explicit about their intent in the early 1920s, when they were getting 2% of the vote at most (I think in the 1928 elections they got something like 0.7% of the vote, if memory serves).

Then, once the Depression started and things were going from bad to worse, Hitler saw his political moment and he actually toned down his anti-Semitism and political extremism, toned down his attacks on capitalism and became more friendly to big business in much the same way the British Labour Party would in the later 1940s.

When one-third of the German people voted for Hitler in 1933, they were voting for a party which played to long-held German beliefs and prejudices (including anti-Semitism) about the need for a strongman like Otto von Bismarck rather than feeble parliamentary democracy, a party which appealed to Social Democratic notions of strong trade unions and welfare for the old and the poor and war veterans and a basic standard of living for all, a party which talked about reining in the excesses of exploitative (read: Jewish) capitalism, a party which appealed to the nostalgia of "the good old days" before 1914, a party which would stave off a Bolshevik Revolution (the threat of which was very real and which was, after widely disseminated reports of Trotsky's Red Terror in the early 1920s, widely reviled), a party which would throw off the shackles of Versailles and put Germany back in the top tier of nations which Germany's economy and kultur deserved, and, most of all, a party which promised an end to the political deadlock of the Weimar Republic--which was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of practically all Germans.

But what's astonishing is just how vague Hitler and the NSDAP were about all this. Like any politician, they spoke in platitudes and phrases which were open ended in their interpretation. When Hitler spoke of smashing Jewish finance, moderates heard him saying that international bankers were strangling Germany economically after WWI and needed to be reined in with reasonable regulation; the hardcore anti-Semites heard Hitler talking about expropriating Jewish banks outright.

Far from voting for an party which explicitly promised another world war and death camps filled with Jews, Germans thought they were voting to "Make Germany Great Again" by returning to a kind of Kaiserreich where a strong leader, aided by a loyal, dispassionate, efficient civil service carrying out the Leader's every order without being tangled up in messy parliamentary politics, would make ordinary Germans richer and esteemed in the eyes of the world. And more than some voted for the NSDAP to "keep those Jews in their place."

That's not my opinion, but rather the opinion of eminent historian Richard J. Evans.

u/lux_coepi · 2 pointsr/books

This, which some say is too sympathetic to Weimar excesses.
and

This which tells you that Nazis are bad, and it's all the Kaiser's fault.

u/skepticalDragon · 2 pointsr/AskEurope

I highly recommend The Coming of the Third Reich, which covers the background in which the Nazi party came to exist and then took power. It covers 1871-1933. Incredible book.

And yeah, the parallels to current world leaders are obvious and upsetting.

The Coming of the Third Reich https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143034693

u/WARFTW · 2 pointsr/history

Try:
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1301528097&amp;sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/0143037900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1301528097&amp;sr=8-1

u/dtiftw · 2 pointsr/ConspiracyII

> Can you show me where it says socialists can't be authoritarian, violent, racist, etc?

I never made that argument. So that's a strawman and I don't see how it adds to the discussion.

>It seems the argument is, "None of these people were real socialists because they were racists and/or nationalists."

Again, I don't know who is making that argument. Because that's not what has ever been said.

>And yet for some reason, when it comes to the Germans, it's always, "Well, they weren't really socialists because they were racists and white supremacists..." or whatever.

No, it's that they weren't really socialists because they weren't really socialists.

>But it seems those who disagree simply find it sufficient enough to cut and paste links to Huffington Post, Reader Digest-level academics

Now you stoop to throwing attacks at experts because their credentials don't suit you?

Ian Kershaw is a Huffington Post level academic?

William Shirer, who actually saw the Nazi party's rise?

How about Richard Evans, who was knighted for his scholarship?

>Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism. True, as some have pointed out, its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. Famously, too, anti-Semitism was once declared to be “the socialism of fools.” But from the very beginning, Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: after all, the “November traitors” who had signed the Armistice and later the Treaty of Versailles were not Communists at all, but the Social Democrats.

I'll take the work of actual experts who have studied this far more than me or you.

u/RangersCrusader · 2 pointsr/RedLetterMedia

Well, Sir Richard Evans IS an esteemed historian specializing in Nazi Germany.

u/NewMaxx · 1 pointr/worldnews

I absolutely have to recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans for anyone wanting to better understand the process of Hitler's rise. There are many other books I would suggest that deal with causes earlier and external, such as The Twenty Years' Crisis, but I am specifically responding to a comment about WWI.

There is much relevant information on the causes of WWI and it is safe to say that there were a multitude of factors at play. If you were to ask me, however, I'd say one of the primary causes was the weakening of two empires - that of the Ottoman Empire (the "sick man of Europe") and the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the latter thanks to Prussia.

Vienna was long the vanguard of Europe against the Ottomans and the Balkans were always a hotbed of controversy and revolt. The most direct causes of the pre-WWI situation are seen in the wars of the 19th century, which included things like Italian and German (Prussian) unification, the Franco-Prussian War, The Crimean War, etc.

Obviously WWI was the death-knell of monarchism and the coming of age for nationalism, but I digress. Definitely a complicated subject but certainly the after-effects of it led directly to WW2. Wars have long been generational. It's safe to say that it had deeper roots than the Treaty of Versailles; I'd argue the Treaty was merely a symptom of the European multi-polar way of thinking.

u/thedarkerside · 1 pointr/KotakuInAction

> Big business was thus already disillusioned with the Weimar Republic by the late 1920s. The influence it had enjoyed before 1914, still more during the war and the postwar era of inflation, now seemed to be drastically diminished. Moreover, its public standing, once so high, had suffered badly as a result of financial and other scandals that had surfaced during the inflation. People who lost their fortunes in dubious investments searched for someone to blame. Such scapegoating focused in 1924-5 on the figure of Julius Barmat, a Russian-Jewish entrepreneur who had collaborated with leading Social Democrats in importing food supplies immediately after the war, then invested the credits he obtained from the Prussian State Bank and the Post Office in financial speculation during the inflation. When his business collapsed towards the end of 1924, leaving 10 million Reichsmarks of debts, the far right took the opportunity to run a scurrilous press campaign accusing leading Social Democrats such as the former Chancellor Gustav Bauer of taking bribes. Financial scandals of this kind were exploited more generally by the far right to back up claims that Jewish corruption was exerting undue influence on the Weimar state and causing financial ruin to many ordinary middle-class Germans.

For the Barmat scandal, see Bernhard Fulda, ‘Press and Politics in Berlin, 1924-1930’ (Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, 2003), 63-71, 87-117.

[...]

> On 20 February a large group of leading industrialists met at Goring’s official residence, and were joined by Hitler, who once more declared that democracy was incompatible with business interests, and Marxism had to be crushed. The forthcoming election was crucial in this struggle. If the government failed to win, it would be compelled to use force to achieve its ends, he threatened. The last thing business wanted was a civil war. The message was clear: they had to do everything in their power to ensure a victory for the coalition - a coalition in which some leading businessmen evidently still thought that Papen and the conservatives were the key players. After Hitler left the meeting, Goring reminded his listeners that the forthcoming election would be the last, not just for the next four years but probably for the next hundred. Hjalmar Schacht, the politically well-connected financier who had been the architect of the post-inflation stabilization programme in 1923-4, then announced that business would be expected to contribute three million Reichsmarks to the government’s election fund. Some of those present still insisted that a portion of the money should go to the conservative coalition partners of the Nazis. But they paid up all the same.

Turner, German Big Business, 330-32.

[...]

> The new funds made a real difference to the Nazi Party’s ability to fight the election, in contrast to the lack of resources that had so hampered it the previous November. They enabled Goebbels to mount a new kind of campaign, portraying Hitler as the man who was reconstructing Germany and destroying the Marxist menace, as everybody could see on the streets. Fresh resources, notably the radio, were brought to bear on the Nazis’ behalf, and with a fighting fund vastly bigger than before, Goebbels really could saturate the electorate this time

Paul, Aufstand, 111-13.

Or, you know, read a book.

u/asaz989 · 1 pointr/news

This is very very inaccurate.

Within a year of becoming Chancellor, Hitler took legislative power from Parliament, suspended civil liberties, dissolved, suppressed, and/or banned other parties (including opposition parties like the Social Democrats and Communists as well as the Nazis' former conservative coalition partners - which were necessary because even in the elections they won, they did not receive a majority), and imposed party and state control over voluntary organizations (see the previous link). From March 1933 until the 1949 West German elections, there were no multi-party elections in Germany.

If you want more information on this period, I highly recommend Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich for events up to the Enabling Acts and Reichstag Fire Decrees, and The Third Reich in Power from the period from that point until the outbreak of the war.

u/SchurkjeBoefje · 1 pointr/worldpolitics

Evans is one of the most eminent living historians on the subject of Nazi Germany, having dedicated his entire career to researching it.

He and many others, the majority of actual historians, agree that the circumstances and methods in which the Nazis rose to power had little to do with actual democracy. Just because a bunch of people voted doesn't mean it was actually democratic, or adhering to the democratic structure of Germany at the time.

You are the one who is challenging that.

"The slide away from from parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state ruling without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures"

"Political power had seeped away from the legitimate organs of the constitution onto the streets at one end, and into the small cabal of politicians surrounding President Hindenburg at the other, leaving the vaccuum in the vast area between, where normal democratic politics take place. "

What part of that is 'democratic'? Without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures. How can we call that 'democratic'?

The circumstances regarding the Nazi rise to power are complex, but people like to go "hurr, democratically elected" because that's an easy answer, when the reality is complex and doesn't yield an easy answer. You're the one here putting your fingers in your ears and going "LA LA LA DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU".

Read a book, man. Start with this one