2023-06-02 09:41:03
Hitler’s First 100 Days. When the Germans Joined the Third Reich
by Peter Fritzsche. Preface by Johann Chapoutot, translation by Patrick Hersant
Tallandier, 448 pages, €24.90
Impressive, this book! And not useless for those who would still think that in the 20th century the Nazis, the fascists and other putschists were only yelling, frustrated or perverted. Think again, says Peter Fritzsche, an American scholar who has long studied the terrible German example. The Nazis had a well thought out and seductive project, they proved it in a few weeks. In short, a democracy can be swept away very quickly. Here is the film of a political kidnapping and a national union, stuffed with images and daily testimonies, following a scenario which aimed at the hearts of the Germans and which convinced them.
On January 30, 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the impotent President Hindenburg. Not for having finally won an election, but following a seedy plot, that very morning, between some members of the presidential entourage who believed they could manipulate a useful idiot and him, the leader of the only party who knows where he wants to go, to an economically and politically down-to-earth Weimar Republic, delivered to violence and despair, where the rule of law has lost sight of the common good.
Household by household, street by street, farm to farm
The sequel was “a thunder”. As the spring of 1933 progressed, the SA and SS took control of the police, the Dachau concentration camp was opened; the Constitution is suspended, parties and unions sidelined, Social Democrats and Communists hunted down; Jews become second-class citizens, decree-laws inaugurate anti-Semitic and eugenic “biopolitics”; the street, the radio and the newspapers daily praise the swastika, the “forest of outstretched arms” marches everywhere, while students and their teachers burn the bad books. 1is August, Hitler becomes the founding Führer of a Third Reich where national fervor will be repainted and the people victorious.
Peter Fritzsche makes it clear that misfits and gangsters – there were – couldn’t have done it alone. No, he says, Nazism would not have murdered Weimar and seduced Germany without the active support of hyper-educated people, sharp lawyers, civil servants and experts under orders, academics exalting the soil and the bloodshed, desperate business leaders, beleaguered middle classes and workers burning red banners.
The secret of this successful revolution where everything has been reduced to the alternative “Nazis versus non-Nazis” and who launched “the most popular dictatorship of the 20th century”, it is above all, he concludes, this promise that Hitler and his people made to the Germans, household by household, street by street, from farm to farm: never again will you be victims of History; the happiness of each of you depends on security and greatness for all; your awakened nation will take its revenge on the defeat and the revolution of 1918, on the hyperinflation of 1922, on the Great Depression, on the Reds and the Jews. Yes, “the great success of the Third Reich will have been to bring the Germans to see themselves as the Nazis saw them: a people in peril who gave themselves a new chance to create a collective life”.
#Germany #Chancellor