Third Reich

The Third Reich was the name given to the German government by the Nazis. "Reich" in German means "empire". Hitler believed that he was creating a third German empire, following the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) what he called the First Reich, and the one created by Otto von Bismarck which lasted from 1871 until 1918 or the Second Reich.

The Third Reich lasted from 1933 until 1945. It's birth and the death knell of the Weimar Republic, began on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Less than a month later, the Reichstag burned and Hitler seized power.

The Reichstag and Its Aftermath

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag in Berlin was destroyed in a fire that had plainly been deliberately set. Exactly who set the fire remains a question never fully resolved. Most contemporary observers both in and outside of Germany blamed and still blame the Nazis themselves, though Shirer admits in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that “The whole truth about the Reichstag Fire will probably never be known.”

Hitler and his followers lost no time in blaming the arson on the Communists. “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution,” declared Goering as he watched fire consume the building. Hitler himself told Gestapo Chief Diels that “The German Volk will have no sympathy with lenience. Every communist official will be shot where he is found. The communist deputies must be hanged this night. Everything connected with the communists is be settled – no more indulgence will be shown the social democrats or the Reichsbanner.”

A day later a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state” was passed:

“Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

Thus, the first taste of Nazi state terror was rendered “legal,” as over the next week Brownshirts took into “protective custody” several thousand Communist officials and many Social Democrats and liberals. These prisoners, often snatched from their homes and off the streets, were loaded onto trucks and carried off to SA barracks and hastily set up prisons where many of them were held, tortured and killed without the formality of a hearing or trial. The rationale for these drastic measures, Hitler’s government insisted, was the dire threat posed by the communist menace. The same day as the “defensive measure” was passed, the government declared that documents had been uncovered revealing a Communist plot (these documents were never actually produced):

“”The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war…it was ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.”

Goering announced just a few days after the fire, “my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking…I don’t have to worry about justice! My mission is to destroy and exterminate, nothing more!”

On the March 5 election that immediately followed, the Nazi’s support had increased by several million, which, coupled with the fact that many Communist and Social Democrat deputies had been imprisoned and could not take their seats, gave the Nazis enough of an edge in Parliament to pass an “enabling act” entitled the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and the Reich.” This essentially destroyed any check on Hitler’s power by “temporarily” handing over parliamentary functions to the Reich Cabinet and putting Chancellor Hitler in charge of drafting laws enacted by the cabinet. Hitler hastened to assure Germany that he would not abuse his new powers. “”The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.”

Among those “vitally necessary measures” was apparently the elimination of that “judicial thinking” Goering had mentioned. The trials of those defendants accused of direct involvement in the Reichstag Fire Marinus Van Der Lubbe, a young half-blind Dutch Communist, Ernst Torgler (parliamentary leader of the Communists), and Communists Georgi Dimitroff Blagoi Popov and Vassili Tanev, had resulted in only Van der Lubbe, who confessed to the fire, being convicted and executed. The Supreme Court at Leipzig had retained enough remnants of independence to acquit the other defendants (though they were immediately taken, of course, into “protective custody” after the trial.) The notorious Volksgericht or “People’s Court” was set up specifically to try political crimes.

Another “vitally necessary measure” was the destruction of the age-old autonomy of German States. The general assemblies of all states except Prussia were dissolved and Reich Governors – all of them Nazis -- were appointed.

The Communists had already been eliminated. Next were the Social Democrats, who on June 22 were dissolved as “subversive and inimical to the state” and its leader and a few politicians arrested. The Democrats, perhaps to forestall similar arrests, dissolved their own party on June 29, Followed by the Catholic Bavarian Party and the People’s party on July 4 and the Center Party on July 5.

Within a dazzlingly short time Germany had become a one –party state led by a dictatorship.

Genocide in the Third Reich

The violence of Hitler’s anti-Semitism can be measured in a disturbingly prescient quote from Mein Kampf:

“If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”

As much of Europe Germany had been anti-Semitic for centuries, but in the years immediately preceding Third Reich it had in fact been considered a good place, even a refuge for Jews, who in Germany had been “emancipated,” i.e, granted most of the same rights as gentile citizens, in the 19th century. The formation of the Weimar Republic in 1918 eliminated any remaining restrictions and German Jews could now act as complete citizens in German Civic life.

As Jewish artists, writers, politicians and civil servants became more visible, however, anti-semitism became more virulent, and the Nazis were able to tap into the resentment that inevitably rises to the surface when members of a minority group begin to make strides in fields that had formerly been closed to them.

Much of the groundwork for selling the mass murder of Jews to average Germans was laid by Julius Streicher, whose newspaper, Der Sturmer, offered a heady cocktail of simple-minded hatred, malice, and slander against Jews and anyone perceived as having sympathy for the Jews. While many educated Germans, even educated Nazis, considered Streicher a joke, the dehumanizing language he popularized helped to inure Germans to the increasingly draconian legal measures against the Jewish population. Streicher’s rhetoric presumed that Jews were inherently and unalterably evil, and flatly rejected the concept of the Jew as a human being like other human beings. “His blood,” Streicher wrote, “carries not honor and honesty, rather criminality, fraud, hypocrisy, lies, the lust for defilement, and the lust for murder…a race that has drives toward the unnatural and toward criminality cannot recognize natural moral laws.”

It’s little wonder that Heinrich Himmler, the man who oversaw the genocidal policies of the Third Reich, said of Streicher, “"In times to come when the story of the reawakening of the German people is written, and when the next generation will be unable to understand how the German people could ever have been friendly with the Jews, it will be said that Julius Streicher and his weekly newspaper were responsible for a good part of the education about the enemy of mankind."

At the same time that Streicher whipped up Hitler’s base of the uneducated and fearful, Hitler’s propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels offered a steady diet of smooth vindictiveness for those Germans too well informed to accept at face value Streicher’s wild tales of Jewish seduction and human sacrifice. Their stance was typically that any suffering the Jews endure at the hands of Germans was the responsibility of the Jews themselves, that the passage of laws restricting Jewish participation in public life was in fact an effort to protect Jews from the righteous indignation of an injured populace:

“One cannot make sense of this situation without understanding the significance of the racial or Jewish Question,” Goebbels declared in his speech at the first Nuremberg rally following Hitler’s takeover, “….The National Socialist government also cannot ignore it. Our laws suffer hard and often unjustified criticism abroad, above all from International Jewry itself. But one should not forget that dealing with the Jewish Question through legal means was the best approach. Or should the government have followed the principles of democracy and majority rule and let the people themselves solve the problem?”

Six years later, Hitler declared: ".. if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Following the Reichstag fire, Jews were frequently singled out for abuse along with the Communists and Social Democrats who were being rounded up. For the first three months that year, most of the abuse Jewish Germans faced was brutal but still of a relatively informal nature, cases of brownshirted rowdies vandalizing Jewish homes and attacking Jews on the street while the authorities looked away. This changed on April 1, 1933, with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. Shop front windows were painted with the word “Jude” and SA men were stationed at the doors to warn people away, or to take note of those who defied the boycott and went in. From then on, Jews within the Reich faced a steady erosion of legal rights.

On April 7, all Jewish Civil servants were forcibly “retired.“ On April 11, Jews were legally deemed a separate class in Germany with a decree defining as a “non Aryan” "anyone descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendant as non-Aryan...especially if one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish faith." By the end of that year, Jews were excluded from the Reich Chamber of culture, could not act as newspaper editors and could not own land. By the end of the following year, Jews could not participate in the German Labor Front or national health insurance, and could not get legal qualifications. By 1938, Jews could not serve in the military, could not teach Germans or work as accountants and dentists, and were denied tax deductions and child allowances. They could not marry “Aryans.” They could not display the German flag.

One element of the Third Reich’s policy of genocide was the innuring of Reich populations to the brutality of the Nazis. When Germany annexed Austria in March, 1938, the deliberate harassment and humiliation of individual Austrian Jews by Nazis was a public spectacle. “I was given a bucket of boiling water,” wrote Morris Fleischman, a Jewish survivor of that era, “and I was told to clean the steps. I lay down on my stomach and began to clean the pavement. It turned out that the bucket was half-full of acid and this burned my hands.” Martin Gilbert, author of The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, observes that “Dozens of passersby also watched these scenes of humiliation, laughing and mocking as Jews, having been forced to put their sacred prayer bands on their arms, were then made to clean unflushed lavatory bowls…The Germans who carried out the atrocities had already become corrupted by their tasks; laughing when inflicting pain and drawing in passersby to laugh with them. Gradually entire populations became immune to feelings of outrage, and learned to shun compassion.”

In November of 1938, a young Jewish man distraught over the deportation of his family, assassinated Ernst Vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris. The result was November 9th, 1938, a night that would afterwards be known as Kristalnacht, a reference to the amount of broken glass littering the streets afterwards. Jewish homes in Germany were ransacked, Synagogues burned, Jews chased down and beaten to death. More than 30,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps. The German government responded by charging the Jewish community for the damage and a few days later, barring all Jewish children from German Schools. What most people remember as “The Holocaust” had begun in earnest.

Jewish populations within the Reich were separated from the general population into horribly overcrowded ghettos, 365 of which were set up in Poland, the Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. The most famous of these were the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos. Those ghetto residents who did not die from malnutrition or disease were eventually “deported” to concentration and extermination camps. Extermination camps, which existed primarily for the execution of inmates, included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibór. The primary method of killing in these camps was through poison gas, though beatings, hangings, and lethal injection were also used. In addition, the Nazis used Einsatzgruppen, mobile squads operating in the Soviet Union who would typically round up Jews in Nazi occupied areas, herd them into remote areas, and shoot them en masse. These were discontinued in 1942 in lieu of the death camps.

It is currently estimated that roughly 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Third Reich, along with roughly 5 million victims that included homosexuals, Communists, Roma, Sinti, and political opponents of the regime. The methodical murder of Jews did not actually end until 1945, when the camps were liberated by Allied Troops.