In How could Hitler happen? Max Hastings reviews The Coming of The Third Reich by Richard J. Evans :
A generation of historians, among them A. J. P. Taylor, believed that Hitler was inevitable. Germany possessed a long tradition of authoritarianism and indifference to human rights, matched by dreams of world domination, of which Hitler was the logical consequence.Richard Evans’s new study of the rise of Nazism, the first volume of a trilogy, argues that this perspective is mistaken. At every turn in the few short years of Hitler’s rise to power, he says, matters could have turned out differently.
It is scarcely surprising that Germany’s post-1918 experiment with democracy suffered difficulties from the outset. The country possessed no convincing democratic tradition. Although the Kaiser’s subjects had the vote, real power had always been vested in the crown. Anti-Semitism was less widespread in Germany than in France or Russia, but by 1914 was already gaining ground in the political mainstream. The Army was able to impose its will ruthlessly upon Germany’s colonies and indeed upon Alsace-Lorraine. The Kaiser was vastly more influenced by his generals than by his civilian ministers.
In 1918, German soldiers returned to their native land to find its monarchy overthrown by revolutionaries, the nation’s dreams of greatness cast down. A 30-year-old army officer wrote: “We no longer found an honest German people, but a mob stirred up by its lowest instincts. Whatever virtues were once found among the Germans seemed to have sunk once and for all into the muddy flood . . . Promiscuity, shamelessness and corruption ruled supreme. German women seemed to have forgotten their German ways. German men seemed to have forgotten their sense of honour and honesty. Jewish writers and the Jewish press could ‘go to town’ with impunity, dragging everything into the dirt.”
I was almost surprised that that 30-year-old army officer wasn’t Hitler.
The German republic brought little happiness to its citizens between 1918 and 1933. It failed to maintain social order, or to establish its legitimacy in the minds of many of its people, at a period when the middle classes were thoroughly frightened by communism. Its economic policies were crippled first by blockade and the reparations imposed at Versailles, then by the 1929 slump.