The National Interest
Winter 2000

Extracts from The Real Synthesis

by John Lukacs

 

. . . By the Third Reich we should mean the great German state of 1933–45 that was a Germany different from its then recent past and of course from its future. Despite the inevitable presence and continuation of the same population and of many of its institutions, this was a new kind of state, with a drastically new flag, designed by Hitler himself, the flag of his party having become the flag of the Reich. Symbols do matter, and this was more than a symbol. There came a time when that swastika flag was hoisted and flown across Europe, from the Pyrénées to the Caucasus, and from the Aegean to the Arctic, carried by the armies of the Third Reich. For comparison, the French tricolor flew over a much smaller domain under Napoleon. The Second World War was a struggle of epic dimensions that the Third Reich almost won.

Even before the Second World War began, the Third Reich had become the greatest power in Europe, far surpassing the extent and the achievements of Bismarck's or William II's Second Reich. From a depressed republic without allies, with many millions of unemployed, there arose a new Reich within a few years, prosperous, arrogant and powerful, incorporating Austria and Czechoslovakia without having to fire a single shot, attracting powerful allies such as Mussolini's Italy and Imperial Japan, and surrounded by smaller states unwilling to challenge almost anything that the Third Reich desired.

By 1939 the Third Reich, in some ways, was the most modern country in Europe. Then came a war that its leader deliberately chose to bring about. Behind him his Third Reich produced armed forces and an organization that stunned the world. In 1940 the Third Reich came close to winning the Second World War. Had its leader not hesitated to invade England this may have happened. In 1941 it again came close to winning the war by knocking Russia out of it. Eventually the armies of the Reich were halted before Moscow; but, obeying their leader, in the ensuing winter they stood fast and deflected the fate that had befallen Napoleon's Grande Armée 130 years before. By that time the greatest powers of the world, with a combined population of at least four hundred million, were arrayed against the eighty-odd million of the Third Reich, having formed a coalition of British, Americans, Russians, Capitalists and Communists, which held together until the end. Even then, it took nearly four years before their overwhelming power was able to force the Third Reich to capitulate. The armies of the Reich did not surrender even after most of their homeland was conquered by the Allies. Some of them fought on for another ten days after their leader's death.

How was this possible? Burleigh's massive volume does not illuminate this awful story. Yes, a catastrophe it was, including the deaths of many millions, of even more innocent civilians than soldiers. Yes, the Third Reich was a brutal machine-but an awesomely efficient one, alas. Doomed to defeat it was not. And this had much to do with National Socialism. The Third Reich was a National Socialist Reich.

The National Socialist character of the Third Reich is something that Burleigh does not describe clearly and that he may not even understand sufficiently. The power, the attraction and the historical significance of National Socialism was a phenomenon of worldwide import. Besides a very long introduction, Burleigh devotes an unduly long chapter to the Weimar Republic, to how Hitler came to power; but the emergence of national socialism predated that. The classic categories of the political history of the nineteenth century were conservatives and liberals, their dialogue and debate (terms that are more and more outdated and yet employed even now). But, contrary to the Hegelian scheme, this Thesis-Antithesis did not lead to a Synthesis but to something else. After about 1870 two new forces appeared: nationalism and socialism. Their relationship, and their combination, rose above the conservative-liberal antithesis in almost every country of the world. . . .