The Third Reich in photos: The interim years

THESE RARE AND REVEALING IMAGES PROVIDE SNAPSHOTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN NAZI GERMANY, AND TELL THE STORY OF THE COUNTRY’S DANGEROUS PATH TO WWII

Paul Garson shares rare and unseen glimpses into pre-war Germany

ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR Stuttgart, 1916

This image on the cover of the Illustrated History of the World

War was published around 1916. Germans in tell-tale spike helmets (Pickelhaube) and their Austro-hungarian allies are depicted as heroically charging into battle. Once the truth behind such propaganda images became realised, the carnage of the war shocked civilisation to its core, regardless of nationality. In the wake of bloodshed on such a vast scale, long-secure world views of history, humankind, religion, economics and morality were left in ruins.

Whole generations of British, French, Belgian, German, Austrian and Russian young men disappeared into the muddy mayhem of protracted trench warfare, where the term ‘No-man’s-land’ took on a whole new meaning for the future of armed conflict. The toxic seeds of a future war lay sown into the bloody mire of the battle-scarred European landscape. Its societies were left festering with open wounds that never properly healed, especially in Germany, which saw itself as a victim of treachery and subject to onerous post-war punishment.

German military and radical political leaders foisted the ‘stabbed in the back’ excuse for Germany’s loss of the war, its loyal soldiers purportedly betrayed by conniving politicians and Jewish anti-german forces. Hyperinflation in 1923-1925 struck hard: the German monetary system was destroyed and inflation soared to disastrous heights, while the worldwide financial collapse of the 1929 Great Depression caused mass unemployment, leaving the average German floundering in a seemingly rudderless society. Battles raged on the streets between rival right and left-wing groups, the threat of Communism crashed head-on with ultra-nationalists – among them the nascent Nazi Party rising to the top of the violent stew of conflicting ideologies.

The German populace, having been torn apart externally by World War I and internally by violent political upheaval and economic despair, now looked for a way out, grasping for some straw of hope for a return of stability and prosperity, the angst increased by their self-conception of Germany as the intellectual, technological and creative leader of Europe. Hitler and his avowed goals of reestablishing Teutonic glory and national dominance found a ready audience.

The following original photographs chronicle the events during that interim between two world wars: a 20-year so-called ‘peace’, during which the turmoil in Germany metastasized into the ascension to power of the Nazis. With Adolf Hitler at the helm of the Third Reich, Nazi social planners would begin fashioning a new state of blood and steel from which would spring the Götterdämmerung of World War II.

“ONCE THE TRUTH BEHIND THE PROPAGANDA IMAGES BECAME KNOWN, THE CARNAGE OF THE WAR SHOCKED CIVILISATION TO ITS CORE”