In the popular imagination, the rise of Nazism was a spectacular, incomprehensible, sudden event. Yet in reality it was hardly an anomaly, considering the circumstances. The Weimar Republic, situated upon, from the beginning, uncomfortable grounds, slowly (rather than suddenly) descended onto a tyranny well before the Nazis, through the process of Gleichschaltung, established a totalitarian one-party society.
Now, it must be noted that Evans clearly does not condone the idea that it was foretold in the stars. He makes it clear that chance has lead Germany to become a Nazi dictatorship, but chance wasn't alone in this regard - the foundation was already laid, in many regards.
It could have gone differently - it would not be entirely unwise, in my opinion, to compare the conditions that Germany dealt with after WWI with the conditions France dealt with after the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 - both were established after a humiliating military defeat, both were established by an uneasy coalition of both liberals and conservatives in fear of a socialist revolution, both had to deal with a lack of democratic values in the population and their representatives, and yet things ended up differently: France, with the exception of WWII, remained a democracy to this day in spite of the crisis that threatened to quickly wrap it up. And yet Germany did not make it, and only 15 years later became probably the most totalitarian, violent regime the world has ever seen.
I would like to address 2 points of interest regarding the content of this tome. The first in the descent onto the Nazi dictatorship. There were already threats to the Republic in the early 1920s, but there were also powerful forces that could maintain the Republic's existence. When the Kapp Putsch happened, it was a general strike that overcame this attempt to re-establish an authoritarian regime in the likeness of the old Reich. The true turning point came in 1929, with the financial crisis. The way to deal with it caused the grand coalition to break - with the SPD refusing the cut social welfare. This lead to a situation in which no democratic coalition that represents a majority of the Reichstag could be formed. This was exploited by Hindenburg, a reactionary himself, that decided to use this weakness of the representative body to re-establish an authoritarian regime, headed by Heinrich Bruening. This regime not only didn't represent a majority of the Reichstag but the Zentrum, Bruening's party, wasn't even the largest party. He lead his government no longer with the parliamentary vote backing him but with presidential decrees from above - based on an article of the constitution initially created only for marginal emergency cased. This, alongside an increasingly hostile approach to the freedom of the press and freedom of speech, in which he ordered the closing of newspapers, from his perspective, to defend the regime against radical forces, was the prelude to the dictatorship to come. Later, Bruening too lost the confidence of Hindenburg, for being too moderate and being too co-operative with the SPD, he was replaced with Franz von Papen - that orchestrated a military coup and established, de-facto, a military dictatorship in Prussia in 1932. Unlike with the Kapp Putsch, the degree of unemployment (due to Bruening's deflationary measures) was too great that the labor movement simply did not hold enough leverage anymore to prevent the new Putsch. The Nazis, that had a massive paramilitary organization of their own, the Sturmabteilung, only needed to threaten with a civil war for both the major Capitalists, as well as the army (which was still the reactionary force loyal to the old Reich) and the Stahlhelm, to accept a sharing of the political power and rule Germany together. The only forces that truly had existential reasons, or at least knew they had these reasons, to oppose the Nazis were the Communists, the SPD and the Zentrum. Divided among themselves, the Labor movement weakened, and the Catholic Church feeling under threat and increasingly supporting the establishment of authoritarian regimes made this a hopeless struggle the moment the Putsch of 1932 succeeded.
The second point is the common anachronistic perception of the Nazis, fully knowing what they did after taking over the reigns of power and during WWII. But before taking power, apart from their effective populist, lowbrow rhetoric and "violent vitality" of the Sturmabteilung and the movement at large, it seemed hardly a unique group, in many regards. It must be noted that they didn't display any coherent ideology apart of a nationalistic pathos - communicating a sense of humiliation due to the Treaty of Versailles and generally having a disdain for the modernism and avant-garde of the Weimar era. These values, however, were in fact very common in Germany, and to an extent in Europe at large (which explains the reactionary politics of that era not only in Germany but also Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Yugoslavia, Poland and Bulgaria). The Nazis typically told, or emphasized, different things to different groups - claiming to be Socialists in front of workers, Capitalists in front of the wealthy, in front of virulent anti-Semites they emphasized this aspect - in front of people of more "respectable taste" downplayed the antisemitism. Their was not a party of clear ideology but sheer, emotive sense of nationalism and "patriotism" and a desire to drive away the modernism of the Weimar republic, as well as its "spineless", "suited" politicians away. This is the reason why from a minor party it managed to absorb the votes of those that used to vote for regular conservative and even regular bourgeois liberal parties - precisely because their ideas, including ones like "racial hygiene", eugenics (popular among some progressives as well) were hardly unique. In reality we can only say in hindsight that the Nazis represented something wholly different - before rising to power people couldn't have known that their votes for the "guys that have a lot of energy" would result in something entirely new, a dictatorship whose likeness the world has yet never seen in its terror, brutality and destructive urges.
These, I believe, are 2 key points that ought to be emphasized. Of course many other insights are present in this brilliant, thorough text, and yet these two stand up to me as the most illuminating.
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