Essay on Nazi Germany – the Third Reich

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator, envisioned his dictatorship as the historical heir to two great German empires. Hitler wanted to place himself into the greater framework of German and European history by claiming the mantle of the Third Reich for his regime.

In his opinion, Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” would be the inevitable culmination of a process that began with Charlemagne’s crowning in 800. However, the notion of a succession of “Reichs” had its origins barely ten years before Hitler’s ascent to power, and individuals living in the retrospectively called “First Reich” or “Second Reich” would not have recognized the legitimacy of such a designation.

Das Dritte Reich (1923; “The Third Empire,” or “Reich”) was published by German cultural critic Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1923. Moeller’s treatise promoted a conservative theory that called for the elevation of German intellectualism and nationalism at a period when the Weimar Republic was striving to curb revolutionary tendencies from both the right and left.

Both Marxism and Western-style democracy were seen as obstacles to Germany’s rightful ascension to European dominance, and Moeller claimed that the Third, or ultimate, Empire would be realized through the harmonic union of Germany’s socialist and conservative organizations.

It’s possible that positioning his theoretical Reich as the third in a sequence was an effort to invoke the Hegelian idea of synthesis or Joachim of Fiore’s Trinitarian historical philosophy. Moeller’s Third Reich, on the other hand, was not blatantly national socialist.

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