The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933,

he declared his new regime to be the Third Reich and that it would last a thousand years.

Turns out he was only off by 988 years.

The big question for many people outside of Germany was and still is,

if that was the Third Reich, what were the first two Reich?

And for non-German speakers, what exactly is a Reich?

Learn more about the First and Second Reichs and what exactly they were on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Before I get into exactly what the first and second Reichs were, it's probably worthwhile to define exactly what a Reich is.

In German, the word Reich roughly translates in English to Empire. For example in German the Roman Empire would be the

Romishist Reich. The Mongol Empire would be the Mongolist Reich. The word also has a

second definition as realm, examples of which I'll provide in a bit.

So when Hitler was talking about The Third Reich, he was referring to a Third German Empire. In German it was called Drittis Reich. The idea of a

third Reich was not original to Hitler. The term was first coined in

1923 by the German historian and cultural commentator Arthur Molar Vandenbrooke.

Moeller wrote a book in the aftermath of the First World War titled Doss Drittereke or The Third

Reich. He was a right-wing German nationalist who thought that things like democracy, rationalism, and the

Enlightenment weren't true culture.

He felt that a fusion of the capitalism of the

capitalism of the United States and the communism of Russia could create a new German empire. Moller technically wasn't a Nazi, but that's only because he killed himself in 1925

before the Nazi party rose to national prominence. I'm sure if he was around when the Nazi party rose to national prominence.

I'm sure if he was around when the Nazis came to power, he would have been an enthusiastic

Nazi.

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