Volume XVI · 1933 — 1945
A single party seized total power in January 1933, abolished every other political institution within seven months, and was destroyed by the combined armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the spring of 1945. In those twelve years it killed about six million Jews and another five to six million civilians from a dozen other categories, and started the deadliest war in human history.
Foreword
A successor state of a German republic that had survived for fourteen years and was, in January 1933, the largest constitutional democracy in continental Europe. By August 1934 the republic had been formally abolished by its own legislature, the presidency had been merged with the chancellery, and the armed forces had sworn personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Nothing comparable had happened in any other European country.
This volume is an attempt to write the history of Nazi Germany in the same editorial register the rest of this library uses for vanished states: clear, factual, restrained, and committed to making the reader understand both how it happened and why it cannot be repackaged as anything other than what it was. The country was not strange in some unique national-cultural way. It was strange in the way that all dictatorships of its century were strange: in the rapidity with which it dismantled the institutions of its predecessor, in the comprehensiveness of its racial laws, in the war economy it built on slave labour, in the camps where it killed people industrially, and in the totality of its eventual military and moral defeat.
The volume is also, in places, a travel guide. Most of the physical sites of the Third Reich survive — the Reichstag, the New Reich Chancellery's site, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, the Wolf's Lair, the Nuremberg rally grounds, the Königsplatz in Munich, Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's Nest. Many of them are now memorials and document centres. They are the principal way Germans, since 1945, have constructed the post-war moral architecture of their country, and a visit to any of them is worth more than a year of textbooks.
You are about to read a short, very dense book. When you finish it you will know how the Weimar Republic ended, how the dictatorship consolidated, how the camps worked, how the war was lost, and what was done — and what is still being done — afterwards.
"Without National Socialism we would not have had the European Union. The Union is the answer to the question that was finally asked in 1945." — Helmut Kohl, speech at the European Parliament, 1996
The Book — ten chapters
After the book — three ways to travel inside the Reich
The Guide
The Reichstag, the Topography of Terror, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nuremberg rally grounds, the Wolf's Lair, Berchtesgaden, the German Resistance Memorial Centre, the Bavarian-Austrian alpine sites. Ten stops, in Germany, Poland and Austria.
The Routes
The Memorial Route from Berlin through Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Nuremberg; and the Eastern Camps Route from Kraków to Auschwitz, Birkenau and the smaller sites at Płaszów and the Schindler factory.
The Errors
Hitler was not the only Nazi voters wanted. The Nazi economy did not "work". Germans did not all know about the camps. The Wehrmacht was not honourable. Eight beliefs about Nazi Germany laid politely but firmly to rest.