The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

William L. Shirer
Pan Books Ltd., 1964
1436 pages

Oh, how times change. My copy of this tome states “over 1400 pages” on the front cover. Would today’s publishers use this to shift books? I doubt it. If anything, they would downplay book length, so the reader doesn’t feel intimidated. Literates shouldn’t be daunted because Shirer, who was a journalist by trade, writes in a clear, concise, matter-of-fact style which makes for easy going. However, the book’s length makes for a tough review. One cannot cover it all. These are my overall impressions.

Shirer was one of the first historians to tackle the entire National Socialist period. By necessity, this book relies very heavily on primary documents and a good historian must go to the primary sources anyway when writing. What secondary materials Shirer uses is for background on pre-Nazi Germany more than anything else. The author’s research was helped by the fact that he was fluent in German, French, Spanish and Italian. But his linguistic fluency, facility with historical documents and excellent writing were not his greatest strengths when putting this book together. What makes Rise and Fall particularly special was this: Shirer was there! He had been living in Europe as a reporter since 1925 and moved to Germany in 1934 to cover Hitler’s regime. So, Rise and Fall provides the unique perspective, up to 1940, of the author acting as primary source himself. How many non-German historians could say they were in Germany as the events unfolded? Probably one. And it makes for wonderful reading at times. Take, for example, Shirer’s first impressions of the Third Reich:

It was at this time, in the late summer of 1934, that I came to live and work in the Third Reich. There was much that impressed, puzzled and troubled a foreign observer about the new Germany. The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation. (p. 288)

Elsewhere, in his examination of the Nazification of German culture, the author explains how censorship and propaganda duped so many Germans:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris, and Zurich. And though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials, and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that, notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical regard for truth, said they were. (p. 308)

How many historians of National Socialist Germany can provide such first-hand insights let alone say that they hobnobbed with Nazi officials (which Shirer discusses at many places in his work)?

I mentioned above that the quality of the writing makes what could have been a slog breezy and pleasurable. The quotations I’ve used buttress my assertion. But do not leave with the impression that clarity and conciseness are Shirer’s only literary strengths. The man can turn a phrase. Writing about Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, he writes,

In this way, by way of the back door, by means of a shabby political deal with the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the former tramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became Chancellor of the great Nation. (p. 231)

This is how history should be written.

Those who love their military history may disagree with me, but it is the first four-hundred pages or so that I found the most enjoyable. It wasn’t just the subject matter of what was going on inside Germany, it was that Shirer struck the write balance of detail along with moving the story of Nazi Germany forward. The closer the book gets to the outbreak of the Second World War, the more it gets relatively bogged down in diplomatic cables, behind the scenes discussions and the minutiae of statecraft. My guess is that Shirer wanted his book to be the definitive account of the Third Reich, so he made a point of including everything of relevance. Fortunately, his gift for writing slows the pace only slightly. In the hands of a less skilful writer, the reader might have found himself struggling through a morass.

This book was originally published sixty years ago. The reader my wonder how much has the history moved on? Or put another way, how much did Shirer get wrong? Given that Rise and Fall is fundamentally a work of primary documents, Shirer is not going to stray far from the truth. Still, there are errors which are, nonetheless, understandable. He argues that Germany was geared up to a total war economy by 1939 (it was really 1943) and elsewhere overstates the power of the Gestapo. Ultimately though, these are minor quibbles. For anyone looking to gain a detailed understanding of Hitler’s Germany, this is the place to start.