How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It is almost like a dream... a fairy tale... The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun! (1.1.12)
So wrote Paul Joseph Goebbels in his diary on the night of Monday, January 30, 1933—the day that Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich. For Goebbels and Hitler, Nazi power in Germany was synonymous with "revolution." It would be different, that's for sure.
Quote #2
Nazism appeared to be a dying cause. It had mushroomed on the country's misfortunes; now that the nation's outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observers believed. (1.4.147)
Shirer suggests here that the success of the Nazi "revolution" was due—at least in part—to Hitler's ability to make the most of hardship and despair in Germany. Germans were hoping for a transformation of their economy and government. They got it.
Quote #3
"We recognized," he said, in recalling the days when the party was being reformed after the putsch, "that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be practically ready to one's hand... In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours." (2.5.18)
Although Hitler's words are exaggerated (it did take the Nazis more than just "a few hours" to destroy the remains of the Weimar Republic after Hitler became Chancellor), they accurately describe the strategy that Hitler used to create a Nazi "state within a state" before he seized power in Germany. When the time came, all he had to do was build on the foundations he'd already laid.
Quote #4
The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. (2.5.98)
When times are good, people don't want change.
Quote #5
The hard-pressed people were demanding a way out of their sorry predicament. The millions of unemployed wanted jobs. The shopkeepers wanted help. Some four million youths who had come of voting age since the last election wanted some prospect of a future that would at least give them a living. To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. […] To hopeless, hungry men seeking not only relief but new faith and new gods, the appeal was not without effect. (2.5.104)
Those first four sentences sound a little too familiar; you read this stuff everyday in the newspaper—um, we mean your newsfeed. Fortunately, there aren't any Hitlers out there at the moment, but you can see how easy it is for politicians to promise solutions for social problems and how tempting it is to believe them.
Quote #6
Everyone among the people is talking of a second revolution which must come. That means that the first revolution is not at an end. Now we shall settle with the Reaktion. The revolution must nowhere come to a halt. (2.7.85)
In this passage, Shirer is quoting an entry, made in April 1933, from the Goebbel's diary. Like Ernst Roehm and a number of other prominent Nazis, Goebbels believed (at first) that Hitler's appointment as Chancellor would allow the Nazis to carry out the "socialist" aspects of the party's cause.
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.
Quote #10
The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.
But the Third Reich had passed into history. (6.31.241-42)
This is how the Nazi revolution actually transformed Germany—into a war-traumatized, impoverished, humiliated people. No glory or greatness, just suffering.