A leading practitioner of counterfactual history, Gavriel Rosenfeld has produced a fascinating account of the perils and pitfalls of our century-long obsession with the “Fourth Reich.” In navigating a dizzying array of sources, drawn from politics, government archives, mass media, and popular culture, Rosenfeld examines “the history of what might have happened” in order to “better understand the memory of what actually did” (3). Concepts of a Fourth Reich, it turns out, have been utilized by people Rosenfeld characterizes as alarmists and apologists either to stabilize or to undermine democracy, influencing how we remember the past and understand our present.
The concept of a Fourth Reich has roots in the Old Testament, only evolving “into a more secular political concept” (31) after 1918. The trope was first appropriated by anti-Nazi dissidents, including German-Jewish liberals, such as Georg Bernhard, who drafted a liberal democratic “Constitution for the Fourth Reich” in the hopes of replacing the Third Reich (36). Right-wing opponents of Hitler produced their own “Fourth Reich” alternatives. The renegade Nazi Otto Strasser's “Black Front,” for example, rejected Hitler's “repugnant” methods for solving the “Jewish Question,” but had little interest in liberal democracy (41). The Allies likewise took up the concept of a Fourth Reich, though more ambivalently, with some viewing it as a trojan horse for neo-Nazism. Such fears, according to Rosenfeld, were not unfounded. In addition to the specter of paramilitary “werewolves” emerging from the forest to take revenge on Germans working with the Allies, the early postwar years saw a series of right-wing conspiracies led by erstwhile Nazis and Wehrmacht officers. These antidemocratic conspiracies to create a Fourth Reich helped justify Allied purges and mass arrests, such as Operation Nursery in winter of 1945–1946 and Operation Selection Board in 1947.
Unfortunately, given West Germany's conservative political leadership and the necessities of the emerging Cold War, the “policy of integrating ex-Nazis into the postwar social and political order was probably unavoidable” (155). Nazi State Secretary Werner Naumann, for example, managed to infiltrate the liberal (FDP) leadership; other Nazis joined Konrad Adenauer's CDU/CSU or created their own nationalist parties, such as the Deutsche Rechtspartei (DRP) or the Socialist Reich Party (SRP). Although none of these ex-Nazis’ efforts to overturn the Federal Republic proved successful, Rosenfeld argues that the bogeyman of a Fourth Reich helped encourage otherwise more apologetically inclined conservatives in Adenauer's government––and their American sponsors––to pass laws and carry out policies that helped better secure liberal democracy. Indeed, Rosenfeld suggests that, had the Soviets occupied a greater portion of Germany, had the economy not improved, or had a polarizing left-wing figure like Kurt Schumacher won the chancellorship instead of Adenauer, support for a conservative nationalist Fourth Reich may have been considerably stronger.
As the Federal Republic stabilized in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the trope of a Fourth Reich became internationalized. To be sure, the Federal Republic witnessed a brief neo-Nazi resurgence, where “vandals painted swastikas, SS runes, and Stars of David on synagogues, schools and shop windows” and young people were “caught singing Nazi songs, chanting Nazi slogans, and distributing antisemitic pamphlets” (162–63). The early 1960s also saw the foundation of a right-wing revisionist party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), and new publications, in Germany and elsewhere, auguring a “Fourth Reich.” But the concept of a Fourth Reich was most commonly associated in the 1960s with fears of neo-Nazi resurgence in South America, where many Nazi war criminals turned out to be hiding, and the United States, where a copycat “swastika wave” occurred in cities such as Kansas City and Cleveland, and George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party (ANP). Reflecting the increasingly transnational nature of the “Fourth Reich,” Rockwell soon developed ties to the German neo-Nazi Bruno Arno Ludtke, who sought to usher in his own Fourth Reich. Left-wing activists in the United States simultaneously warned that the policies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon might produce American-style fascism, as depicted in a poster of LBJ driving a Volkswagen Beetle adorned with the slogan “The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich” (184).
At the same time, however, images of the Fourth Reich were, by the late 1960s and the 1970s, becoming increasingly “normalized,” “aestheticized,” and consequently “stripped of [the concept's] original moral and political content” (189). In fact, the proliferation of the “Fourth Reich” in forms of mass entertainment and mass media, Rosenfeld suggests, signaled a decline in authentic fears of its resurgence. Certainly, Simon Wiesenthal, the Mossad, and others’ efforts to track down escaped war criminals uncovered the very real existence of (neo-)Nazi communities in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere. Wiesenthal's suggestion that Martin Bormann had survived, and his insistence that Nazis were secretly gathering “funds for a building of a Fourth Reich” (196), nonetheless fed popular demand for sensationalized science fiction (comic) books and movies, from Captain America, the Odessa File, and the Boys from Brazil, to the Indiana Jones franchise, which critics often panned for their aesthetic deficiencies, implausibility, or exploitative nature.
Since the 1980s, references to a “Fourth Reich” have continued to proliferate, if not always tethered to the actual phenomenon of National Socialism. The reunified Germany has been one of the chief targets of such accusations, first due to a resurgence of the neo-Nazi and conservative nationalist right in the 1990s, as exemplified by the NPD, the Deutsches Kolleg, and the Reich Citizens’ Movement (RBB). More recently, such accusations have been leveled in the context of Germany's role as an “economic superpower” (284) enforcing EU monetary policies in Greece and Spain. The concept has also been used quite malleably (and often tendentiously) by both the nationalist right and the anti-capitalist left to criticize the forces of neo-liberalism, with members of both groups attacking Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza, or characterizing the European Union as part of a “Fourth Reich.”
“Whether metaphorically conceived as an insurance policy, a prophylactic, or a self-fulfilling prophecy in reverse,” Rosenfeld concludes, the Fourth Reich's “ability to inspire popular vigilance about, and prevent the possibility of, a Nazi return to power underscores its value” (295). The evidence for this assertion, which undergirds much of the narrative, is at times more conjectural than empirical. But this is an easy and perhaps unfair caveat to make about a book working in a counterfactual idiom. As Rosenfeld himself observes, the Fourth Reich's transformation into “an all-purpose signifier of evil” (16), a political and mass media equivalent of Godwin's Law, indicates that “it may have outlasted its usefulness” and become more likely to “alienate people [than] convince them about the dangers of right-wing political radicalism” (295). Recognizing both the historical utility and the heuristic limits of invoking the “Fourth Reich,” Rosenfeld suggests, is what will prevent this concept from ever coming into fruition.
