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Title: The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich by Outlet ISBN: 0-517-10294-3 Publisher: Gramercy Pub. Date: 01 June, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.61 (184 reviews)
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: The definitive account of Nazi Germany
Comment: William L. Shirer's classic "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is the most complete single volume account of the history of Nazi Germany ever written. Shirer was a journalist, not a historian and the advantages of this show in his very readable prose and his vivid descriptions (for example, often referring to Herman Goering as "the fat Field Marshall"). The book starts with the birth of the Nazi party and how it found a spokesman early on in an ex-serviceman named Adolf Hitler. The narrative continues through until the end of the war, Hitler's suicide and the final few days under Admiral Doenitz. The only warning to the casual reader is that the book's length exceeds 1100 pages and it is crammed to the brim with facts. Also, it should be noted that the book was published over forty years ago and does not include more recent information that has come to light from, for example, the former East German archives. Nevertheless, this is still a classic work of jornalistic history.
Rating: 5
Summary: Dated or Not - Still The Epic 5 Star Story
Comment: There have been a number of new revisions concerning the history of World War II as more and more documents were found, and then made available to the general public, or at least to researchers especially documents from the former USSR.
However I still like the books such as this book that were written by the people that actually lived through the war, especially when they were there as participants and reporters. To me they have the best perspective regardless of any "discoveries" 50 years later.
Also the war was a war of raw power and material and men carried out on a very large scale. It is hard to see how smaller details would have any meaningful impact on the outcome. The Third Reich had the upper hand initially because of their superb equipment such as tanks, planes, and submarines. Their people were trained and disciplined. But once they entered the vast lands of the USSR they were swallowed by the size and winter climate as was Napolean's army 130 years before. Then the German troops had to face the Americans who could turn out planes, ships, tanks, and trained troops like cookies.
From my perspective, the basic thrust of the war was set by the large scale military power and the massive movements of men and materials. I think this is portrayed faithfully by this epic book which is 1200 pages long. It is for the most part an accurate picture of what took place. Sure things have been discovered, and things could have been done a bit different if more information was available, but for the most part these things they would have had little impact on the war and its outcome.
So for me this book remains one of the definitive stories on WW II told by people there at the scene.
Five stars.
Jack in Toronto
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Title: Adolf Hitler : The Definitive Biography by John Toland ISBN: 0385420536 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 December, 1991 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William L. Shirer, Gordon A. Craig ISBN: 0801870569 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris by Ian Kershaw ISBN: 0393046710 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw ISBN: 0393049949 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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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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