No phrase more distinctly captures the millenarian yearnings ordinary Germans pinned to Hitler's rise than the “Third Reich”. Out of the ashes of the First World War and the Great Depression, mystical German authors such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Dietrich Eckart promoted the notion of a “Third Reich” that would fulfil the long-delayed destiny of the German peoples. On the newly revised Christian schedule, Nazism would deliver the third instalment of a divine plan that had worked through the First Reich of God the Father and the Hebrews, and the Second Reich of Jesus and the Christians. Alternatively, in more immediate political terms, the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne and the Second Kaiserreich secured by Bismarck had found a worthy successor in the Nazi war machine, led by Hitler.
But as Gavriel D Rosenfeld shows in his captivating book, the concept of the “Third Reich” is more strange than it at first appears. For one thing, the term itself was effectively banned by Hitler in the lead-up to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
The reason is hard to pin down. Rosenfeld suggests that Hitler found its Christological associations unattractive and, moreover, misleading. The Führer did not want to make false promises about delivering any kind of regime associated with peace and world brotherhood when he was planning to realise it through war, conquest, extermination and sacrifice. Hitler instructed the German press to use other formulations such as the “Germanic Empire of the German Nation” (Germanisches Reich Deutscher Nation) and the “Greater German Empire” (Grossgermanisches Reich).
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