Third Reich Victorious Read Online Free

English, one last blow for German honor, one last pound of British flesh to avenge dead comrades. To the last man, the crew cheered and vowed to follow their officers to Valhalla—or to Hell. 8 On November 1, 1918, their chance to see one or the other of those locations appeared imminent. Driven deep by British escorts after torpedoing two merchant ships in a daring daylight surface attack, depth charges pounded U-71. Then a series of loud noises shook the boat, as if a hammer were repeatedly striking inside the vessel. Rushing from the control room to the engine room, Hitler saw that one of the quarter-ton pistons had been ripped from the engine by concussion and was banging at the thin inner wall of the boat. Knowing that if the noise did not pinpoint the submarine’s location for its attackers, the piston would soon punch through the hull and sink the vessel, he leaped to cushion the blows with his own body.
     
    U-71 survived, and the engine was even repaired later that night. As the boat crept home, Adolf Hitler lay near death, his skull fractured by his heroic act. Admitted to Kiel Naval Hospital on November 10, he finally regained consciousness five days later. The following day the doctors gave him two pieces of news that would change his life forever. First, the young officer could never go to sea again. Irreparable damage to his inner ear would impact his sense of balance for the remainder of his life, guaranteeing symptoms similar to seasickness if he even tried to stand on a rolling deck again. Second, an armistice had been signed, and though negotiations continued, Germany had lost the war.
     
    Broken in body and stripped of his career, it would be months before Hitler could function with any normalcy again. Many people would have abandoned hope as they lay in a hospital and watched a once great nation collapse around them. Even Hitler later admitted that he felt that despair, felt the temptation to suicide. But rather than surrender, he chose to focus on the enemy who had brought him to this crisis in his life. And in those dark days of 1919, an even greater enmity for all things British began to consume Adolf Hitler. It would be the strength of this hatred that allowed a new Germany to arise.
     

From the Ashes, 1919-39
     
    From late 1918 through mid-1919, the Royal Navy continued its devastating blockade of Germany as the victorious allies ruminated in Paris on how best to punish their enemies and share the spoils of war. The Treaty of Versailles dismantled the German Empire, giving parts of its territory to France and the new nation of Poland. It hobbled the German military machine with limitations on manpower, weaponry, armaments industry, and even technological development. It crippled the spirit of the German people with its forced assumption of “war guilt,” demanding that they alone accept responsibility for causing the Great War.
     
    Worse, perhaps, than all the damning clauses of that fatal treaty, during 1918 and 1919 the German people lost faith in the leadership of their statesmen, admirals, and generals. The sense of betrayal from the top coupled with economic chaos led to near anarchy, controlled only by the heavy-handed police force that had once been the mighty Imperial Army. From the ashes of empire, the Weimar Republic rose to fill the political void, and in the late 1920s it actually restored a facade of economic prosperity to the nation. The economic depression that swept the globe after 1929 revealed that facade to the German people, and, discontented with the elitist Weimar Republic, they quickly called for a man of the people as their leader. His name, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
     
    Hitler’s meteoric rise owed much to his ties to the old Imperial Navy and to two officers in particular, Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz. Raeder had rescued his protégé from the hospital at Kiel and taken him into his own home to recover from his near-fatal injuries. Two months later Dönitz