The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
Summary
William L. Shirer watched the Third Reich happen. As a correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, broadcasting for CBS, he stood in the Nuremberg rally crowds, followed Hitler to the Anschluss and Munich, and read the fall of France from the German side, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich joins that eyewitness knowledge to one of history's great documentary windfalls. The Nazi state's own paperwork, captured whole in 1945, along with the Nuremberg trial testimony, Goebbels's diaries, General Halder's war journal, and Count Ciano's papers, let Shirer reconstruct the regime from Hitler's birth in 1889 to the Berlin bunker in 1945 largely out of its own mouth. Across 1,249 pages he narrates the failed putsch and the legal seizure of power, the night of the long knives, the diplomacy of lies that dismantled Europe between 1936 and 1939, the war in its whole arc, and the machinery of the Holocaust, documented from the killers' own records at a time when many readers were learning the details for the first time. The book was a publishing phenomenon with few equals: more than a million hardcover copies, two thirds of them through the Book of the Month Club, a Reader's Digest serialization that reached twelve million readers, and the 1961 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Academic historians praised its narrative power while attacking its central thesis, the argument that Nazism was the logical outcome of German history from Luther onward, and later scholarship has largely rejected that reading. The narrative itself, journalism raised to the level of epic, remains in print more than sixty years on.
Historical Context & Significance
The book appeared in October 1960, only fifteen years after the war, when no comprehensive history of Nazi Germany existed for general readers and much of its documentation was newly available. Its enormous success, capped by the 1961 National Book Award, fixed the Third Reich at the center of American historical consciousness just before the Eichmann trial intensified attention to the Holocaust. Historians led by academic specialists disputed Shirer's Luther to Hitler thesis as a distortion of German history, and the scholarly literature has moved far beyond him, yet the book remains the gateway through which millions of readers first entered the subject, Hugh Trevor Roper saluted it as a splendid work of scholarship, and its title became the phrase the whole era is remembered by.