Seventy years have passed since Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and in the intervening years a vast amount has been written on the origins and nature of the Third Reich. The years from 1933 to 1945 cast such a grim shadow that the moral, ethical and religious elements embedded in the narrative are such that the subject still resists treatment as part of a historical past. Fierce debates still rage over both the how and the why of these terrible events. In this concise and accessible account, Martin Kitchen addresses the major issues - How did Hitler come to power? How was the Nazi dictatorship established? What was the essential nature of the regime? What were the reasons for Hitler's extraordinary popularity? Why did Germany go to war? What led to the Holocaust? What was the legacy of National Socialism?
THE THIRD REICH: Charisma and Community
Martin Kitchen
ISBN: 978-1-4058-0169-0
The twelve years of the Third Reich cast a dark shadow over history and fierce debates still rage over the reasons why the regime survived for so long.
What was the secret of Hitler’s extraordinary popularity? What was the appeal of National Socialism? Why did the German people stay loyal to the Reich even when it seemed that all was lost?
In this impressive and often disturbing new work Martin Kitchen shows us how ordinary people can fall prey to fanatical, irrational, even apocalyptic ideas in times of seeming desperation. In exploring such key concerns as the role of ideology in National Socialism, the cooption of elites, the descent into war over ‘race and space’ and the culminating horror of the holocaust, Kitchen compares Nazism to a ‘secular religion’ whose charismatic leader retained enormous power over the minds and bodies of an entire population even when the military and economic basis of its appeal began to erode.
Nazi Germany continues to fascinate because of its extraordinary radicalism as well as its strange and deadly mixture of the modern and the atavistic. The Third Reich: Charisma and Community is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand the destructive lure of charisma and power.
Martin Kitchen is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, Canada and the author of numerous books and scholarly articles on German and European history including Nazi Germany at War (Longman, 1994), Europe Between the Wars (2nd extended edition, Longman, 2006) and A World in Flames: A Concise History of the Second World War in Europe and Asia (Longman, 1990).
