The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Transformation Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army. Roehm, Goebbels and the other "radicals" in the movement wanted to liquidate them too. (2.7.86)

Although Roehm and Goebbels had different reasons for wanting "the second revolution" to begin, they found themselves at odds with Hitler in the early days of the Nazi "revolution" in Germany. Hitler had no real investment in the socialist aspect of National Socialism. He didn't really care about the people.

Quote #8

The revolution is not a permanent state of affairs, and it must not be allowed to develop into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided into the safe channel of evolution... We must therefore not dismiss a businessman if he is a good businessman, even if he is not yet a National Socialist, and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take his place knows nothing about business. (2.7.91)

Shirer quotes this passage from a speech that Hitler delivered in July 1933. At the time, many prominent National Socialists were clamoring for "the second revolution" to begin. Hitler himself was unwilling to risk any kind of economic or political coup against the powerful German Right, which controlled most of Germany's wealth. After all, says Shirer, why risk bankrupting Germany "and thus risk the very existence of his regime" (2.7.89)?

Quote #9

No comprehensive blueprint for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose "undesirable elements"—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated. (5.27.1)

If Hitler's "revolution" had succeeded, the "New Order" that Shirer describes in this chapter—which extended from the Nazi Party's anti-Semitic legislation in the early 1930s all the way to the extermination camps and the millions of murders during the war—would have transformed the world in ways too horrible to think about.