We are used to referring to Germany during the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 as the “Third Reich”.
However, it should be kept in mind that the “Third Reich” is nothing more than a metaphor, and the German state was never formally called that. From 1871 to 1943. Germany was officially called the “German Reich” (Deutsches Reich), without regard to whether it was ruled by the Kaiser, the President or the Führer. The first article of the Weimar Constitution, for example, stated: “The German Reich is a Republic“ (”Das Deutsche Reich ist eine Republik"). In terms of the official name of the state, nothing changed in 1933. In 1943 - already in the midst of the war - the official name of the state “for the sake of impressiveness” was changed to the “Great German Reich” (Großdeutsches Reich). Under this name, Germany temporarily ceased to exist in May 1945.
Where did the phrase “Third Reich” come from?
First it should be noted that the word “Reich” itself is what is called “high doldrums”, coming straight from the Bible and the Middle Ages. “Kingdom of Heaven” is ‘Himmelreich’ and chiliastic theological concepts promise the coming of the ‘Thousand Year Kingdom of God’ - ‘Tausendjähriges Reich’. So “Reich” in the meaning of “empire” or “state” originally carries a much greater emotional and even mystical charge than the soulless and purely technocratic word from the New Age - “Staat”.
Originally the word combination “Third Reich” was used in medieval chiliastic theology as a designation of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit (after the kingdoms of the Father and the Son).
Interest in the old theological term was revived in Northern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. German and Scandinavian writers and philosophers each put their own meaning into it, but more or less agreed that the “Third Reich” was some bright future that would come in the 20th century.
The political use of the term became popular after the publication in 1923 of a book of the same name by the German “conservative revolutionary” Arthur Møller van den Broek. According to the author, the “First Reich” was the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the “Second Reich” was the German Empire created by Bismarck and Wilhelm I, and the “Third Reich” was a future political regime where German nationalism would be organically combined with socialism.
In the following years, the phrase “Third Reich” became a password for German right-wing anti-republicans with the meaning “German National State” or “the beautiful Germany of the future”. Naturally, there was no clear consolidated idea of what the “Third Reich” should be in reality, and everyone imagined this “beautiful Germany of the future” as he wished.
The Nazis, who came to power in alliance with right-wing conservatives, gladly monopolized the rhetoric of the “Third Reich,” indoctrinating their conservative-revolutionary allies that Hitler's dictatorship was the right-wing “German nation-state” they had long dreamed of.
Very quickly, the term “Third Reich” was taken up by political opponents of the Nazis and began to describe National Socialist Germany with this expression. Eventually, in the summer of 1939, first Hitler and then Goebbels issued private circulars, according to which further use of the term “Third Reich” was considered undesirable. By doing so, the Nazis effectively recognized that their state had little in common with Christian prophecies or with the ideals of the conservative revolutionaries of the 1920s.
In postwar Germany, there was a debate about whether it was correct to use the propaganda cliché “Third Reich” for the period 1933-1945. After all, Hitler did not establish any separate state, but “legally” continued the continuity of the German Reich. That is why “Third Reich” is usually put in quotation marks as a metaphor. As for more academic designations, the German articles on the years 1933 - 1945 are ultimately entitled “NS-Staat” and “Zeit des Nationalsozialismus”.
