The Third Reich: rise and fall

Two men lean over a table in a hall full of mirrors, and their hands tremble. Not from cold. In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles a pen awaits them, and what they are about to sign will not be read in Germany as peace, but as a sentence. Somewhere in the crowd that will recall this humiliation twenty years from now stands a young front-line soldier who does not yet know it.

The German delegates Müller and Bell sign a document that strips their country of territory, reduces its army to a shadow, and saddles it with reparations that will last generations. Clemenceau watches with the look of a man who knows he has won. But what seems a victory in Paris becomes a wound in Germany that will not heal. A story arises, the stab-in-the-back legend, claiming the army was never defeated on the battlefield but betrayed at home. On that lie, fed by poverty and humiliation, something far more dangerous will soon grow.

Four years later, one of those frustrated veterans, a certain Adolf Hitler, stands with a pistol in a Munich beer hall and declares the Bavarian government deposed. The plan is reckless, inspired by Mussolini's march on Rome, and within a day it collapses against a line of police officers at the Feldherrnhalle. Shots are fired, people die, and Hitler is taken away. But the prison sentence that follows becomes his unintended stroke of luck: in the calm of Landsberg he dictates the book in which he spells out exactly what he intends. No one takes it seriously enough at the time.

Taking it seriously does happen almost ten years later, when the global economic crisis grips Germany and the unemployed stand in droves at kiosks waiting for news. In July 1932 the election results show that the NSDAP, once a marginal splinter party, has become the largest political force in the country. Not a majority, but a fact no one can ignore any longer. Behind the scenes of power, conservative politicians begin to calculate: can we use this man, contain him, tame him once he takes the reins?

The answer comes on 30 January 1933. Paul von Hindenburg, the old field marshal now serving as president, appoints Hitler chancellor, convinced that a cabinet full of conservatives will keep him in check. That same evening an endless stream of torches moves through the Brandenburg Gate, SA and SS men marching twelve abreast, and on a balcony of the Chancellery the new chancellor stands waving to the crowd. Whoever looked closely that evening saw that the roles had already been reversed: it is not Hitler who is being tamed, but the country that is being remade in his image.

Six weeks is enough to turn that into legislation. After the Reichstag fire, communist delegates are arrested, their seats in parliament remain empty, and in the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag is forced to convene, the Enabling Act is passed while SA troops occupy the streets outside. From that moment Hitler can issue laws without parliament. Democracy is not abolished by decree; it is simply hollowed out from within, with the consent of a majority that let itself be intimidated or did not mind.

Three years later he risks his first great gamble on the international stage. German troops cross the Rhine into the demilitarised Rhineland, in open violation of Versailles. Hitler knows, or hopes to know, that France and England will not intervene. He is proven right. At Cologne, civilians line the bridge cheering, officers march with chins raised, and in the capitals of the victors of 1918 all remains silent. That silence is a lesson Hitler remembers: threats work, and so does yielding.

He applies that same lesson two years later to his native country. In March 1938 he drives through the streets of Vienna, swastika flags on every façade, a crowd weeping with emotion and holding its arm outstretched. The Anschluss with Austria is in name a union, in reality an annexation, and the world once again looks on without intervening. Greater Germany, of which Hitler has dreamed for so long, begins to take shape, stone by stone, border by border, without a single shot being needed anywhere.

Until September 1, 1939. Near Gleiwitz, the German secret service stages a border incident to justify the attack, and in the early morning armored divisions roll forward and Stuka bombers dive into Poland. It is a new way of waging war, fast and crushing, which later becomes known as Blitzkrieg. For the first time the outside world does not respond with silence: Britain and France declare war. What began as a series of unpunished steps is now a war whose eventual scale no one can foresee.

No one had expected France to fall within six weeks. Through the forests of the Ardennes, which the French considered too rough for tanks, the Wehrmacht breaks through at Sedan, and the French army collapses like a house of cards. Hitler has himself photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower, and the armistice is signed in the same railway carriage at Compiègne in which Germany was forced to capitulate in 1918. It is theater, meant as humiliation, mirroring exactly the humiliation that set all this in motion.

A year later Hitler breaks the non-aggression pact with Stalin and sends more than three million men into the Soviet Union, convinced that victory will come within a few months, well before winter. Operation Barbarossa is the largest invasion in history, driven by the dream of Lebensraum in the east and a ruthless ideological goal: the destruction of what the Nazis call Judeo-Bolshevism. What begins as a seemingly unstoppable advance becomes the front on which the Third Reich will ultimately bleed.

A year and a half later, amid the ruins of Stalingrad, it becomes clear how costly that dream is. Despite Hitler's order not to retreat a single step, the Sixth Army under General Paulus is completely encircled, starved, and ground down. More than 90,000 emaciated soldiers go into captivity. For the first time, in Berlin the question is raised, if only in whispers, whether this war can still be won. The Eastern Front, which once carried the promise of swift triumph, is now the place where the tide definitively turns.

A final attempt to turn that tide follows at Kursk, where in July 1943 the Wehrmacht masses its remaining armored strength for an offensive meant to regain the initiative. But the Soviets have dug in and prepared, and after the largest tank battle ever fought, the German armor lies burning on the steppe. From this moment on, the Red Army no longer takes the defensive. Many generals realize, even if they do not say so aloud to Hitler, that the war in the east is already lost.

In the south, meanwhile, an ally falls away. After the Allied landing on Sicily, Mussolini is deposed, and the new Italian government signs an armistice with the Allies. German troops must hastily occupy the Italian peninsula to prevent the entire southern flank from collapsing. A daring rescue operation later frees Mussolini from captivity, but that is cosmetic: Italy as an ally no longer exists, and Germany must now spread its scarce troops here as well.

While the front splinters, the home front burns. Operation Gomorrah destroys Hamburg in a firestorm that costs tens of thousands of civilians their lives, and similar attacks follow on other industrial cities. The Allied air war is no longer a side issue next to the fighting on the fronts: it is an attack on Germany's ability to keep waging war at all. For the leadership in Berlin it becomes clear that the sky over their own country has become as dangerous as the front itself.

This accumulation of defeats also sows doubt within their own ranks. At headquarters on the Eastern Front, officers around men like Henning von Tresckow whisper about plans to remove the regime. Earlier attempts have failed or been called off at the last moment, but distrust grows, and with every report from the front the conviction grows too that Hitler is leading his country into the abyss. The military leadership, once united behind the Führer, begins to fracture from within.

While that doubt ferments behind closed doors, the German high command expects the next Allied blow at Calais. On June 6, 1944, that expectation proves fatally wrong: at Normandy Allied troops break through the Atlantic Wall, despite years of coastal defenses. From a bunker, a German officer watches through his binoculars as hundreds of ships emerge from the morning mist. There is now a front in the west, a front in the east, and Germany can no longer defend either with any conviction.

Six weeks later a bomb explodes at the Wolfsschanze headquarters. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed it there, hoping to decapitate the regime with a single blow. Hitler survives, with minor injuries, and Nazi propaganda immediately turns it into a sign of destiny. The retaliation is merciless: thousands of suspected conspirators are arrested and executed, including high-ranking officers. The internal opposition that had just become visible is wiped out within a few weeks.

While the regime purges its own ranks, Paris falls. General Dietrich von Choltitz is ordered by Hitler to raze the city to the ground before it is lost, and refuses. Instead he surrenders to the advancing Allied and French forces. It is a loss that reaches beyond the map: the symbol of German dominance in Western Europe, once celebrated in front of the Eiffel Tower, now falls back into other hands, and the Vichy regime that leaned on German support collapses along with it.

In December 1944 Hitler gambles everything on one last throw. In the deepest secrecy, the Wehrmacht gathers its final reserves for a surprise attack through the densely forested Ardennes, aimed at the port of Antwerp. Thick fog keeps the Allied air force grounded, and in the first days the Germans achieve unexpected success. But fuel runs out, resistance at Bastogne holds firm, and what was meant as the last chance in the west gets stuck in the snow.

While in the west that offensive finally runs out of steam, hell breaks loose in the east. The Red Army breaks through the German lines along the Vistula with an overwhelming force that can no longer be stopped, and within a few weeks Soviet troops stand on the Oder, less than seventy kilometres from Berlin. Millions of German civilians flee in panic. It becomes inescapably clear to the high command what many had already feared: the eastern front effectively no longer exists as a defensible line.

In the west, too, the last natural barrier falls. At Remagen, American troops manage to capture the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine intact, before German engineer troops can blow it up. It is a matter of minutes that makes the difference between a defensible river and an open door to the Ruhr area, the industrial heart of what remains of Germany. The high command, surprised and disintegrating, has hardly anything left to set against it.

Meanwhile in Hungary, the last offensive reserve is squandered. The Sixth SS Panzer Army, with the precious remnants of Tiger and Panther tanks, is tasked with protecting the oil fields near Nagykanizsa and pushing back the Soviets at Lake Balaton. Within days the offensive grinds to a halt due to fuel shortages, the tanks sink into the mud, and Hitler reacts with fury: he has the honour armbands stripped from the SS units involved. It is the last time Germany still attempts to attack.

What follows is only collapse. Marshal Tolbukhin's troops advance on Vienna, where SS units and the Red Army fight from street to street for a city that was once the setting of the cheered Anschluss. German propaganda keeps silent about the loss, but silence changes nothing about the facts: the Reich shrinks by the week, and the cities it once annexed as a triumph now fall back as a defeat.

In the west, American troops completely encircle the German Army Group B within the Ruhr area, trapping more than three hundred thousand soldiers in the so-called Ruhr Pocket. Germany thus loses its last major industrial production centre. Field Marshal Model, who refuses to submit to an order to surrender, chooses death in a forest near Duisburg. Hitler sees betrayal in the mass capitulation, and his distrust of his own generals reaches a peak in these final weeks.

In late April, Soviet soldiers fight from street to street through a devastated Berlin, until they reach the Reichstag. Deep beneath the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, in the Führerbunker, Hitler shoots himself, together with Eva Braun, whom he had married shortly before. The Third Reich, which once promised to last a thousand years, ends in a cellar, while above ground a city lies in ruins and a war runs out its final days.

Karl Dönitz takes command as the new head of state, but nothing more can be saved. In Reims, and shortly afterwards in Berlin-Karlshorst, Field Marshal Keitel signs the unconditional surrender, as photographers' flashes go off and Allied officers look on. What began with a signature in a hall of mirrors in 1919 ends with another signature, in a bare room full of cameras. Europe celebrates Victory in Europe Day; Germany counts its ruins.

Even the aftermath gets no respite. From Flensburg, Dönitz tries to keep a short-lived government afloat, hoping to negotiate with the western Allies. British troops put an abrupt end to this: aboard a moored ship, the entire cabinet is arrested. From that moment on there is no form of Nazi administration left anywhere, no shadow government and no last redoubt.

Half a year later, a trial begins in Nuremberg the likes of which the world had not seen before. Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and other surviving leaders of the regime sit in the dock, confronted with charges of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Before the cameras and the press, it is made visible what twelve years of Nazi rule truly meant — not as propaganda, but as evidence.

What began in a hall of mirrors as humiliation ends in a courtroom as accountability. Between them lie twelve years in which a country first lifted itself up with lies about recovery and honour, and then smashed itself to pieces against the world it tried to subjugate. This story is told from Berlin, from the perspective of those who gave the orders and those who carried them out. There is also another perspective, that of the side on which most German divisions ultimately fell: the story of the Soviet Union in this war. And whoever wants to know exactly how that last, desperate gamble in the Ardennes unfolded in the snow will find that story worked out separately, day by day.