MANY NAZIS, FROM HISTORIANS TO THE authors of popular books and pamphlets, imagined and explained Hitler's party rallies as successor events to the medieval German Reichstage (imperial diets). One typical title of a book about the city was Nürnberg die deutsche Stadt: Von der Stadt der Reichstage zur Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Nuremberg, the German City: From the City of the Imperial Diets to the City of the Reich Party Rallies). This title, the name of an exhibition put on at the Germanic National Museum in 1937 and organized by Alfred Rosenberg's ideological bureau, made explicit the Nazis’ claim that the Third Reich was a successor to the first one, and that Hitler was the modern equivalent of the Holy Roman Emperors.

With Hitler's rise to power Nazi historians took pains to point out that Moeller van den Bruck's dream of a millennial Third Reich had become a reality. One year before the annexation of Austria and the creation of a Pan-German Reich, Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, one of Germany's leading historians, called the first Reich “the embodiment of the universalistic and Central European idea,” an idea, he wrote, that had suffered a severe blow in 1806 with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. The second, Bismarckian Reich, Srbik claimed, had destroyed the idea of the first, universalistic, Reich. The Third Reich, he concluded, fulfilled the deepest aspirations of the first two: “What beckons to us as a guiding star is a new, a Third Reich and with it a Central Europe that is governed by German spirit and German power. These are notions already ignited by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and we must continue to think them anew today.” In Srbik's view, “by holding up to the people a mirror of their past and preparing the way for a future, more perfect form of existence in a unified country, history is a servant of the nation and its future.” Srbik's historical conception suggested an almost Hegelian teleological triad, with the second Reich as the antithesis of the first Reich and the third as the ultimate synthesis that would at once replace and preserve the best elements of the previous two empires.