Nazis & Reds: A Chronology of the Prewar Years

Nazis & Reds: A Chronology of the Prewar Years is the first volume in The Protocols series, a four-book chronicle of the rise and impact of authoritarianism in the modern era. Spanning from the Industrial Revolution to the Nazi “Final Solution,” it traces the ideological roots, political maneuvers, and social transformations that enabled dictatorship. Through memoirs, diaries, speeches, and documents, this work illuminates not only the ascent of the Third Reich but the universal mechanisms of power that shape history. Its relevance extends beyond the past, revealing the enduring patterns of manipulation, belief, and control that define authoritarian rule.The Protocols is a chronicle of modernity’s promises and betrayals. It begins in the late eighteenth century, when machines remade the world, and ends in the early 1930s, as a new age of tyranny emerges from the ruins of an old order. Volume I, From the Industrial Revolution to the Night of the Long Knives (c. 1680–1934), follows the arc of an age that believed in progress yet sowed the seeds of its own undoing. It traces how industrialization transformed societies, how new ideologies—nationalism, socialism, and racial myth—rose to fill the vacuum left by crumbling monarchies and fading faith, and how fear and prejudice were given a voice in the form of a forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This volume closes as Adolf Hitler secures his power through murder on the Night of the Long Knives, a signal to the world that Germany’s fragile democracy had been extinguished. The stage is set for the catastrophe that will define the next decade—a descent to which the second volume will bear witness.