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Title: Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer ISBN: 0-671-72868-7 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 15 November, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (192 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Eyewitness to History
Comment: This is a real reading project. My unabridged hard cover volume feels like the Manhattan phone directory, making it unwieldy to sit in bed and read. I had to buy a book stand to hold it on my lap desk!
Once the ergonomic problems were overcome it is, of course, a most worthy read.
Rather than recounting the details of the many battles of WWII (for example, the entire D-Day invasion is dispensed with in just a few pages), Shirer's book is instead focused on the mad genius and sheer will of Adolf Hitler and the fascinating story of his rise from poverty and obscurity to a position of absolute power. The book exhaustively details the political and diplomatic machinations that propelled Hitler and Germany into - and out of - WWII. Many pages are filled with footnotes (at a much smaller font size!) that give further detail about a subject in the main text. This virtually doubles the actual number of pages of reading material - it took me a solid three weeks of reading 1-2 hours a day to get through it.
Coupled with this is a keen insight into the German mindset, both from a mythological and historical standpoint, with a particular emphasis on the sense of injustice and deep anger the German people felt following their defeat in WWI and the Treaty of Versailles. All of this is vital to understanding how Hitler - who by all accounts was a hypnotic orator - was able to manipulate those around him and, ultimately, the German people.
Shirer has a unique perspective on the matter, having been both an eyewitness to many of the key events plus having had access to mountains of captured Nazi documents. He was also able to gain information directly from many of the principal figures involved. This allowed him to demolish the many self-serving recollections by various Nazi figures, and also to ferret out the inconsistencies and bona-fide errors found in many previously published works - even a few by Churchill himself.
The countless numbers of diplomats, generals, world leaders, obscure figures, Nazi thugs and unfortunate victims are woven together to produce an historical reference without parallel.
This is essential reading. It is the cornerstone of knowledge for any serious student of WWII and the horror of Nazi Germany.
Rating: 4
Summary: Important but flawed
Comment: It would be nearly impossible to overstate the importance of this book. It is, I believe, more pivotal in shaping the American popular understanding of Nazi Germany than any other book ever published. As such, it has helped shape everything from representations of Nazis and their victims in motion pictures to media protrayals of accused war criminals living in the United States.
As a work history, this book is also extremely impressive. Shirer makes extensive and critical use of a plethora of primary sources, including captured German documents and testimony from the Nuremburg trials, and this gives his account considerable credibility. His writing style is engrossing, making the length of the book seem less gargantuan than it is. I doubt that I would be able to identify a more comprehensive or readable single-volume history of Nazi Germany.
It should be understood, however, that Shirer does not really intend for this book to be merely a history of Nazi Germany. It is a morality tale. Shirer is aghast at the destruction and barbarity that Nazi Germany wrought in the world, and this book reads like an indictment of everybody everwhere who had a hand in allowing the barbarity to occur. Nobody can escape responsibility, not common Germans who brought Hitler to power, not the German generals who were unwilling or unable to control Hitler, not the German businessmen who profited through Hitler's various barbarities, not the Anglo-French architects of appeasement, and most of all not the Nazis themselves.
Of course, Shirer's sense of moral outrage sometimes causes some unfortunate lapses. It is rare that Shirer does not call Goering fat when Goering pops up in the narrative. Similarly, he invariably uses "fatuous" to describe Ribbentrop and reminds us on numerous occasions that Rosenberg was a "dolt." I have no idea what Goering's girth has to do with anything, and Shirer never really gives us a real idea of why he thinks that Ribbentrop was fatuous or Rosenberg was any stupider than any other member of the Nazi elite. Gratuitous pejoratives are distracting and unfair.
And then there's the matter of Ernst Roehm, Hitler's chief of the SA. Roehm and the rest of the members of the SA were a bunch of terrorist thugs who got votes for the Nazis by intimidating the opposition, but to Shirer, this thuggery is eclipsed by the fact that Roehm and some other of the SA leaders were or were thought to be gay (which Shirer consistently refers to as a "perversion"). To say the least, the credibility of Shirer's moral outrage at the racist and anti-semitic doctrine of the Nazi party is undermined by his bald homophobia.
More than that, Shirer makes no real attempt to understand why the British and the French behaved as they did in appeasing Hitler. He ascribes it to some sort of moral failing, and while this may be the case, it is only part of the story. France and Great Britain were bankrupted by the Depression. They couldn't really afford to rearm, and they were desparate to avoid a war at least partly out of a misplaced fiscal restraint. This fact does not obscure the reality that the appeasement policy was short-sighted and stupid, but at least it makes the whole thing more comprehensible. Likewise, Shirer doesn't really understand that Germany's rearmament was paid for with checks that the Reich couldn't cash without plunder. By 1939, the German economy was a house of cards that was about to collapse without a capital infusion. Unfortunately, one wouldn't know that from reading Shirer.
Finally, the emphasis that Shirer puts on different periods of the Third Reich is disproportionate. The war years, especially from 1943 to 1945, are sped through with very little detail about anything except the various plots against Hitler. It's almost as if Shirer ran out of gas after 800 pages or so. It is admirable that Shirer does not get bogged down the military details of the war, but at the same time, I would think that the war years deserve more than 25 or 30% of the book.
By all means, read this book, especially if you have only cursory familiarity with Nazi Germany. It is generally well-written, accessible, and reasonably comprehensive. Just beware of the problems with it as you are reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: A riviting read . . .
Comment: On the very eve of the birth of the Third Reich a feverish tension gripped Berlin . . . Wow! what a great first sentence! Having read this book almost thirty years ago, it still remains the best and most complete history of the Third Reich I have read. Shires purpose is not merely to describe the events that led up to the founding of the Reich and its eventual destruction; but to discover and document the intrigues, treachery, motives and aberrations that precipitated its rise and fall.
I will let others review the history and critique Shire on his research, I would like to comment on the beauty of his prose as he describes what must be the most hellish and destructive state that has existed. Historians have the tendency to be dull, they get so caught up in explaining facts and documenting the movement of armies across strange and foreign landscapes, that the reader tends to get lost in a maze of statistics, foreign names, and seemingly insignificant details. Shire avoids this common pitfall. For instance, after quoting from a German generals diary which described Hitlers intentions in occupied Poland, Shire describes the Nazi intentions in vivid prose. . . Nazi terror. . . forerunner to dark and terrible deeds. . . Nazi barbarism reached an incredible depth. Although Shire, in the introduction of this book made the assertion of strict objectivity, he did not let his objectivity hide the awfulness of Nazi atrocities.
Although well written, it is not an easy book to read. Its sheer length of over 1100 pages may be daunting to the faint of heart; yet, if you are not familiar with the Third Reich and want to have an understanding of the people whom were instrumental in its raise and fall, no other book will give you better oversight and understanding of it than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Title: INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer ISBN: 0684829495 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Adolf Hitler by John Toland ISBN: 0385420536 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William L. Shirer ISBN: 0801870569 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War Series) by John Toland ISBN: 0812968581 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Sony by John Nathan ISBN: 0618126945 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 05 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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