Third Reich Period

The Third Reich Period is the novel’s name for an era in which an initially dreamlike political rupture became a machinery of persecution and mass murder. Its history is shown through both high-level authorization and the frictions of daily administration: institutions argued over the use of prisoners even as their shared system narrowed toward extermination. Looking back, the narrator treats the period not only as a sequence of political events but as a test that exposed who people were.

From political unreality to rule

In January 1933, when the NSDAP took the keys to the Chancellery, the change seemed unreal to many Germans. The familiar world remained visible, but, in the narrator’s description, it felt like a photograph or newsreel: recognizable and yet ersatz, abstract, pretend. He identifies this as the beginning of a German compromise with sanity. The period’s violence does not arrive in the narrative as Gothic fantasy or a tale of heroic transformation; its governing register is social realism, in which ordinary political life accommodates what should have been intolerable.

That sense of unreality persists in the narrator’s later image of the regime as a ten-year Walpurgisnacht. By the time its spell appears to be breaking, public gestures have changed: straight-arm salutes have given way to ordinary greetings, and the sarcastic nickname Grofaz has displaced reverence for Hitler. The change registers as political disenchantment, not yet as repair. Konrad Peters predicts that Hitler will not stop until Berlin resembles Stalingrad, and allows only the possibility that resistance might kill him.

Administrative conflict and escalating persecution

The machinery of the period is visible in a desk scene where the narrator weighs demands from the Economic Administration Head Office against pressure from the Reich Central Security Department. One wants him to increase the labor force for the munitions industries; the other presses for the disposal of evacuees. A teletype proposes that able-bodied mothers be worked in the boot factory at Chełmek. The narrator recognizes the proposal’s human consequence: separating mothers from their children at the ramp. Yet his response remains embedded in the system’s language of administrative demands and targets, exposing how exploitation and deportation could operate as competing bureaucratic objectives rather than opposing principles.

The account given by Peters traces a further escalation. He locates a decisive authorization on July 31, 1941, when a letter drafted by Eichmann and Heydrich was sent to Goring and returned with his signature. As Peters interprets it, the letter conveyed the Fuhrer’s wish for a total solution and authorized action after manpower had been assembled in the east. He also describes an earlier possibility of expelling Jews to a cold, barren region beyond the Urals, perhaps in the Arctic Circle. In this account, that proposed mass expulsion gave way as territorial plans receded and pressure mounted among officials in Poland, including after the annexation of another three million Jews.

Peters marks August and September 1941 as a further turn: the killing, already directed at Jewish men for months, expanded to women and children. His explanation presents the shift neither as a single isolated decision nor as an accidental by-product. Central authorization, an abandoned territorial answer, and pressure from officials below appear together in the story’s account of how policy radicalized.

The means and the will to kill

Peters distinguishes the industrial apparatus from the underlying purpose. Gas chambers and crematories, he argues, were means to accelerate killing, economize, and spare the killers’ nerves; they were not indispensable to the intended destruction. Bullets and pyres, he insists, could have achieved it in the end. He cites the Einsatzgruppen’s killing of well over a million people with bullets as evidence that mass murder did not depend on industrial facilities. The grim counterfactual is that millions more women and children could have been killed in the same way.

This distinction gives the period’s violence a particular moral emphasis. Technology altered the speed and administration of killing, but, in Peters’s account, did not create the willingness to kill. The novel places the modernity of the machinery beside the older, more fundamental fact of intent, resisting any explanation that would make the apparatus itself the principal cause.

What the period reveals

In his postwar reflection, the narrator describes life under National Socialism as looking into a mirror and discovering one’s soul. The revelation applies most forcefully to victims, but also, with different responsibility and consequence, to perpetrators, collaborators, witnesses, conspirators, martyrs, and minor obstructors. He includes himself and Hannah Doll among those who were made to reveal who they were. The period thus becomes a moral test whose reach exceeds the officials who issued orders or the people who carried them out.

The narrator’s later distinction between being doubled during the camp years and halved after the war sharpens that reckoning. Under the system, he felt himself to be both the person acting and someone further within him; afterward, he struggled to construct a self-sufficient inner life. His frequent memories of Hannah do not feel like an unfinished story so much as one scarcely begun. The period’s end therefore remains unsettled: political enchantment may break, but recognition of the self and of others does not restore what the years have destroyed.