Idk how I'm closing this book thinking that it was a bit light on the details, all things considered. It's phenomenal, required reading for anyone who wants to throw around accusations of Nazism in the 21st century.

In the wake of WWI, the German people felt as though their government had failed them and widely considered the Reichstag government to have held too-capitulatory of an attitude towards the victors. Said government failed to levy taxes on those who could pay, and instead leaned into the inflation in order to pay off the debts that they incurred in order to fund the war which zeroed out all of the lower and middle working class people's life savings. German people were hungry for a dictator to correct the wrongs done them by their lame-duck government – perfect storm for Hitler in 1923.

I appreciate Shirer's treatment of Nietzsche, quickly reducing most of his arguments to boysih blasphemies:

His books might be full, as Santayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.

with the aside that

Women, whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief role in life to beget children for German warriors. Nietzsche put the idea this way: “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”—which prompted Bertrand Russell to quip, “Nine women out of ten would have got the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women …

Does a good job of connecting the cultural dots between Wagner -> Nietzsche -> Hitler:

There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western world—Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven—and they had made unique contributions to the civilization of the West. But the German culture which became dominant in the nineteenth century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismarck through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hegel, to begin with, and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and a host of lesser lights not the least of whom, strangely enough, were a bizarre Frenchman and an eccentric Englishman. They succeeded in establishing a spiritual break with the West; the breach has not been healed to this day. ... From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his life neared a close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters on the Russian front, with his world and his dreams beginning to crack and crumble, he loved to reminisce about all the times he had heard the great Wagnerian works, of what they had meant to him and of the inspiration he had derived from the Bayreuth Festival and from his countless visits to Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home, where Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, still lived with his English-born wife, Winifred, who for a while was one of his revered friends.

The fact that the SA (Sturmabteilung) was as big as 400k in 1933 when Hitler lost the election against the incumbent Hindenburg. Insane because he only got like 14 mil votes, and so only like 2.85% of them were in the SA.

Love the details of the Reichstag being a false flag against commies which allowed him to institute effective martial law and consolidate power via his thugs. Shirer notes that all of those who likely did know any details about what actually happened/who started the fire did not live to tell the tale; Hitler had many of them slain in the months afterwards '34, allowing him to take over Germany.

On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. ... Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested.

Pinned it on a Dutch Communist, known pyro, who they picked up off the streets conveniently days after he was boasting about his attempts to set alight other government buildings. Evidence supports the fact that he was in fact just the perfect scapegoat. Goering (?) denied having anything to do with it @ Nuremberg, but everyone else in the know said that he bragged about orchestrating the whole thing.

From Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.

Something that I find to be highly fascinating about the effectiveness of propaganda so long as there is any semblance of free speech, is that after the insane propaganda efforts by whoever of Hitler's big five henchman was in charge of the ministry of propaganda blaming the communist on the rReichstag fire, they still retained something like 4 million votes in the last free election before Hitler was able to consolidate power losing by less than 100,000 votes.

On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler’s life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. All the persecution and suppression of the previous weeks did not prevent the Center Party from actually increasing its vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally, the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million votes. Even the Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party, polling 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost a million supporters but still polled 4,848,058 votes. The Nationalists, led by Papen and Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own showing, a vote of 3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain of less than 200,000.

That is to say, in this case, at least perhaps not in general propaganda is only effective at the point after which it becomes a moot point.

March 13, 1933 Goebble's became the minister of propaganda

Hitler, then swiftly destroyed any sort of federal power conferred to the states doing what Bismarck and Frederick Wilhelm would never have even dreamed of in order to arrive at a truly unified Reich, where all of the state assemblies and governments were utterly subservient to the central Reich, which he sat atop.

On May 2 ahead of Mayday, European holiday celebrating labor and workers. Hitler announced a even larger national holiday to celebrate labor union's workers, etc., which ended up being a total trap where and they confiscated all labor union funds, arrested, trade leaders and did a miniature crystal knocked on all organized labor after inviting them and speaking to them in masses hundreds of thousands of people about how valuable they were.

3/4 of the way into chapter 7 we get a good description of the timeline of efforts for Hitler to unify power. It ends with for all of his efforts. Worth, including verbatim.

Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmed state to the very end of the Third Reich, serving infrequently as a sounding board for some of Hitler’s thunderous pronunciamentos, its members henceforth hand-picked by the Nazi Party, for there were to be no more real elections. It was this Enabling Act alone which formed the legal basis for Hitler’s dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler was the dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all practical purposes, by the weary old President. To be sure, much remained to be done to bring the entire nation and all its institutions completely under the Nazi heel, though, as we shall see, this also was accomplished with breathless speed and with crudeness, trickery and brutality.

Hitler being scary mf:

It was crime enough, he said lamely, for any responsible German in the Third Reich even to see foreign diplomats without his knowledge.

When three traitors in Germany arrange … a meeting with a foreign statesman … and give orders that no word of this meeting shall reach me, then I shall have such men shot dead even when it should prove true that at such a consultation which was thus kept secret from me they talked of nothing more than the weather, old coins and like topics.

As a reward for encouraging the traitors in June 1933 the SS (Schutzstaffel) was named independent of the SA and Himmler was named its leader.

Hitler's dictatorial consolidation of power was completed when Hindenburg died at the ripe old age of 87 and Hitler was able to merge the offices of Chancellor and President, basically removing president from a position and instituting the Reich Fuhrer

Pope Pius XII maintained far too cordial of relations with the Nazi party throughout the 1930s really up until 1939? Not sure about that but certainly as late as 1934 after Mein Kampf after the push after the boom after plenty of violence and antisemitism for the pope to not make a concordant directly with Hitler:

Scarcely four months later, on July 20, the Nazi government concluded a concordat with the Vatican in which it guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic religion and the right of the Church “to regulate her own affairs.” The agreement, signed on behalf of Germany by Papen and of the Holy See by the then Papal Secretary of State, Monsignor Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi government. But coming as it did at a moment when the first excesses of the new regime in Germany had provoked world-wide revulsion, the concordat undoubtedly lent the Hitler government much badly needed prestige

with the footnote:

In an allocution to the Sacred College on June 2, 1945, Pope Pius XII defended the concordat which he had signed, but described National Socialism, as he later came to know it, as “the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of His doctrine and of His work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity.

Five days after the concordant Germany, ratified the sterilization law which helped enable the disillusion of the Catholic Church and much of the clergy in Germany. By 1937 Pius XII had started criticizing the Nazis.

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and, furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed … and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies … in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.

N.B. about this particular comment – wikipedia notes:

The harshest criticism came from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis. In West Germany, the Sonderweg interpretation was almost universally rejected in favor of the view that Nazism was simply one instance of totalitarianism that arose in various countries. Gavriel Rosenfeld asserted in 1994 that Rise and Fall was unanimously condemned by German historians in the 1960s, and considered dangerous to relations between the United States and West Germany, as it might inflame anti-German sentiments in the United States

Interesting and valid on the first point, lmao at German historians crying in the 60s.

Jobs, prosperity, and restoration of national pride made the German people willing to overlook the disappearance of a couple thousand of their ranks. I think it is a truism that people vote according to their wallets and social issues are secondary despite what people might say.

1/3 of the way through chapter 8 there is a list of rules that were instituted to mollify the church, including the removal of all religious symbols and the replacement with the swastika include this list. It's like 18 or 19 things long.

1 The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it“declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

5 The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably … the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.

7 The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.

13 The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany

14 The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It … not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.”

18 The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.

19 On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.

“On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels … and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika”

Something of a remarkable erosion of German culture, which was decidedly dominant for much of the 19th century on the heels of Wagner and philosophy in general. Book burning, and the unification of or rather of the regimentation of culture made it illegal for all of these people to practice their trade.

On Nazi education, Hitler or one of his cronies said something along the lines of your children already belong to us:

Hitler’s contempt for “professors” and the intellectual academic life had peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas on education. “The whole education by a national state,” he had written, “must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core.” But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service “of a new national state”—a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

Concentration camp sprung up under Hitler's Empire as early in 1933 largely used as a blackmailing trafficking mechanism for the SA to beat up their opponents and then ransom the prisoners back to their family members:

The first concentration camps sprang up like mushrooms during Hitler’s first year of power. By the end of 1933 there were some fifty of them, mainly set up by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their relatives or friends for as much as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, the prisoners were murdered, usually out of pure sadism and brutality. At the Nuremberg trial four such cases came to light that took place in the spring of 1933 at the S.S. concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich. In each instance a prisoner was cold-bloodedly murdered, one by whipping, another by strangulation. Even the public prosecutor in Munich protested.

Criticizing any leaders of the Reich could result in being placed into a concentration camp where you would probably die. The likening of modern American politics to Nazi in 1933 betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of history. I am reminded of my Kazakhstahni uber driver who said "in my country..." True story.

Hitler's government was technically constitutional because of the enablement act and whatever else Hindenburg signed the day after the right dog fire. He was kind of bamboozled into it by an inflation of the impending danger that Hitler told him the fire represented. But from these two documents, Hitler's police state and continuation of martial law stemmed it's legality.

When Germany invaded the Rhineland and France refused to uphold the treaty of mutual protection despite wildly outnumbering germans in force at this point in its early, secret efforts to remilitarize, it signaled to the rest of Europe and the East that France would do nothing to expend its lifeblood against aggression, even when victory was certain, so why would they expect aid when victory was tenuous. Brits were also hoodwinked and were helping Germany circumvent tonnage restrictions on ship building. Hitler bluffed and got away with it

Quickly after Hitler's consolidation of power and institution of the Gestapo, all German polls about e.g. occupation of Rhineland looked v favorable / popular. 1) they may have been, 2) “no” votes would be seen by Gestapo.

1938 and 1939 are marked by British and French capitulation as they refused to take any action such as striking opportunistically when they could have obliterated Germany as Hitler wheeled and dealed with Mussolini and Stalin and took over Czechoslovakia and Poland without any sort of resistance.

Hitler fully assumed that Britain would surrender after France did and then even when Churchill started to speak publicly about continuing a resistance, he didn't take it seriously. The bombing of Britain in September 1940 was the first decisive battle in the air the world had ever seen:

As will shortly be seen, this savage bombing of London on September 7, though setting off a premature warning and causing much damage, marked a decisive turning point in the Battle of Britain, the first great decisive struggle in the air the earth had ever experienced, which was now rapidly approaching its climax.

Operation sea lion was a German plan to invade England

Somewhere in chapter 24, he references a published by one of the Nazi officers and rather disdainfully says "I won't go into the details because it's poorly written." Can't find it again though..

Truly Adolf Hitler had become not only the Leader of Germany but the Law. Not even in medieval times nor further back in the barbarous tribal days had any German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legal as well as actual, to himself.

Part five chapter 27 is one of the toughest things I've ever read – detailing the concentration camps.

I love how petty Shira is in keeping track of the details. In recounting the Valkyrie attempt on Hitler's life towards the end of chapter 29 he has a footnote about the legitimacy of the 'von' in ' von Ribbentrop's' name:

Admiral Doenitz, who had rushed by air to Rastenburg at the news of the attentat and arrived after the tea party had begun, lashed out at the treachery of the Army. Goering, on behalf of the Air Force, supported him. Then Doenitz lit on Goering for the disastrous failures of the Luftwaffe, and the fat Reich Marshal, after defending himself, attacked his pet hate, Ribbentrop, for the bankruptcy of Germany’s foreign policy, at one point threatening to smack the arrogant Foreign Minister with his marshal’s baton. “You dirty little champagne salesman! Shut your damned mouth!” Goering cried, but this was impossible for Ribbentrop, who demanded a little respect, even from the Reich Marshal. “I am still the Foreign Minister,” he shouted, “and my name is von Ribbentrop!

with the footnote:

Ribbentrop had been a champagne salesman and then had married the daughter of Germany’s leading producer of the wine. His “von” had come through adoption by an aunt—Fräulein Gertrud von Ribbentrop—in 1925, when he was thirty-two years old.

Hermann Göring – head of air forces, Gestapo (next in line)

Heinrich Himmler - head of SS

Joseph Goebbels - minister of propaganda

Albert Speer - head minister of armaments

Rudolph Hess - responsible for the Nuremberg Laws (tried to defect IIRC)

Wilhelm Keitel - Field Marshal & chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW)

Joachim (von) Ribbentrop - Minister of Foreign Affairs (salesman)

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