The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Absorbing, Appalling, Necessary When I was about eleven I saw a fat paperback copy of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) on my parents' bedside table. I opened it and was stunned by its many pages densely packed with tiny difficult words. Then I found the photographs and gazed with a weird fascination at the fascist uniforms--until the mounds of nude Jewish concentration camp corpses seared my retinas before I could shut the book. Ever since, I kept a wary distance from Shirer's tome, fearing that it'd be too heavy, too long, too disturbing, until finally, 45 years later, I listened to the audiobook. The ever-professional Grover Gardner reads it in his clear and accurate voice--assuming no German or other accents--and enabled me to survive the 57+ hours of listening time. It is an absorbing, appalling, necessary book--reminding us of how horrible people can be to each other and how in times of chaos and distress people are willing to cede their autonomy to nationalist fascist leaders. Drawing on hundreds of tons and hundreds of thousands of documents (diaries, speeches, telephone conversations, conference reports, military files, etc.) made available from 1955, as well as on documents assembled for the Nuremberg trials and on books by other surviving eye witnesses and key players in many of the events, etc., Shirer is at pains to be, if not exhaustive (which would be impossible for a single person writing a single book), thorough--and objective--in his history. (Grover Gardner reads all of Shirer's many footnotes identifying his sources.) Every history makes you ponder What Ifs, Shirer's probably more than most. More than once one thinks (or Shirer says), 'History might have taken a different turn, if . . .' If Hitler's grandfather had not late in life acknowledged an illegitimate son so as to make Hitler Hitler and not Schicklegruber. If Hitler had been killed in WWI. If President Hindenberg had not made Hitler Chancellor. If the Reichstag had not voted to give Hitler dictatorial power. If France had immediately kicked the puny German army out of the demilitarized Rhineland. If Chamberlain had appeased less. If Great Britain and France had made a pact with Stalin before Germany did. If one of the anti-Hitler conspiracies had acted or if one of the plots against his life had succeeded. And so on. Shirer is less interested in battle details, tactics, and accounts than in diplomacy, psychology, culture, and communications. Despite saying, 'It was rarely easy . . . to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler's fevered mind,' Shirer really does lay it bare. Some readers may feel exhausted (if not bored) by some of the many behind the scenes diplomatic maneuverings. But he is a witty writer, with an eye and ear for the savory phrase and detail: 'It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope, and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars.' As an American correspondent stationed in Germany and Europe, Shirer attended many of Hitler's public speeches and was present in Vienna for the Anschluss and in France for the humiliating armistice. He draws on his own diary entries and memories, as in a potent description of Hitler addressing the Reichstag: 'Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots. . . leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream 'Heils'. . . Hitler raises his hand for silence. . . He says in a deep, resonant voice, 'Men of the German Reichstag!' The silence is utter.' As is evident from that passage, Shirer's biases sometimes surface, but they are usually entertaining rather than off-putting. I enjoyed, for instance, his caustic epithets, like 'the Baltic dolt' for Rosenberg, 'the one-time Vienna vagabond' or 'the demoniac dictator' for Hitler, 'the mild-mannered former chicken farmer' for Himmler, 'the strutting fascist Caesar' for Mussolini, and so on. Shirer does make a few homophobic asides that date his book, like equating SA homosexuals and murderers and saying, 'They quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations with their peculiar jealousies can.' Another thing that dates Shirer's history and reveals some bias is that he doesn't seem to think much of female contributions to history. He calls a female pilot hanging out in Hitler's bunker near the end, 'the aviatrix,' and paints her account 'lurid.' He mentions Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels only briefly in the last chapter. If Eva did nothing of historical interest, Magda sure did, according to a 2017 French documentary I just watched. And perhaps Shirer places Hitler too dramatically in the context of the German mind and culture, as when he explains that Wagner's Ring Cycle, which gave Nazis their mythology, ends 'in the Goterdamerung, twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan. . . goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation, which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul.' The Germany of Angela Merkel today seems different. . . Finally, anyone interested in learning about what happened to enable the Final Solution and the ravaging of the world during World War II should read this book. There are more up to date histories, but probably no other American writer who had personal experience of many of the key figures and events during Hitler's rise to power has written anything as thorough and compelling as Shirer's book. And when one reads of Hitler promising to make Germany strong again, the resonance with Trump promising to make America great again should cause a pause for reflection. View all my reviews
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