When it comes to villains, the National Socialist German Workers Party—better known as the Nazi Party—is the gold(?) standard. Their evil is legendary and unlikely to ever be surpassed. In the near century since the Nazis seized power in Germany, interest in them and their evil doings has never wavered. Given this, it should come as no surprise that bookstores have entire sections devoted to Nazi Germany. Everything, from multi-volume biographies of Hitler to individual stories collected from ordinary people who lived under the Nazi dictatorship, has been dutifully recorded in book length form. But by far the most interesting books on Nazi Germany try and grapple with the why.
Why did it happen? How could it happen?
For history books trying to answer that question on any subject, only lengthy hindsight can provide a definitive answer. New evidence comes to light, documents once overlooked get a second reading, and unexpected outcomes can finally be fully understood. This is why we’re getting some of the best books on World War I now rather than in 1921.
But for Nazi Germany, a book explaining the regime’s malign influence, complete with every bit of context anybody could have ever wanted, came a mere fifteen years after the system’s apocalyptic collapse.
The book in question was The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer.
What’s It About?
The title is unambiguous about the book’s subject. It’s not a clever pun or an ironic postmodern eyewink. The book is about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Full stop, no exceptions. First published in 1960 to rave reviews, the book is considered one of, if not THE, most significant works on the topic.
It’s easy to see why. Clocking in at a jaw-dropping 1,029 pages, no expense was spared in telling the story of history’s most evil empire. For readers who might be intimidated by the length, don’t be.
The author, William Shirer, was a journalist, so the book reads like a 1000+ page newspaper article. Academic fluff and authorial bloviation are nowhere to be found. Speaking of Shirer, his approach to making the book is why I’m reviewing it here.
The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich is not merely a recommended read (its sterling reputation existed well before I came along), but it’s also a perfect case study in how a mountain of paper makes for more substantial books in all genres.
How Shirer Got The Material
In the forward dutifully resting atop the 1000 pages of Nazi history, Shirer outlines how he came across the idea for the book and why it needed to be written. He makes a compelling case that’s worth quoting at length.
“The swift collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 resulted in the surrender not only of a vast bulk of its secret papers but of other priceless material such as private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference reports and correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversations of the Nazi leaders tapped by a special office set up by Hermann Goering in the Air Ministry. The 485 tons of records of the German Foreign Office, captured by the U.S. First Army in various castles and mines in the Harz Mountains just as they were about to be burned on orders from Berlin, cover not only the period of the Third Reich but go back through the Weimar Republic to the beginning of the Second Reich of Bismarck. For many years after the war tons of Nazi documents lay sealed in a large U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, our government showing no interest in even opening the packing cases to see what of historical interest might lie within them.”
Most historians would drool at having access to so much material on a subject. Indeed, most historians will never get access to that amount of material because rarely does this amount of material survive. But as the US Army stormed across Germany in 1945, they faced an enemy who was notorious about keeping their paperwork tidy. You might say they were Nazis about it (ba-dum-tish). Joking aside, Shirer was right: never before has a fallen empire’s bureaucratic apparatus been seized so completely and so dramatically.
Shirer mentions later in the forward that he has not read every single document, an impossible proposition, not the he needed to. Shrier didn’t start building an epic history of Nazi Germany from nothing. Instead, he linked up the documents he read with his own experiences living in Nazi Germany. Shirer was a journalist posted to Hitler’s empire, and so he had kept a lengthy diary during his time there, which would prove useful in constructing this book.
Another item in the forward worth quoting at length is Shirer’s policy toward objectivity: “No doubt my own prejudices, which inevitably spring from my experience and make-up, creep through the pages of this book from time to time. I detest totalitarian dictatorships in principle and came to loathe this one the more I lived through it and watched its ugly assault upon the human spirit. Nevertheless, in this book I have tried to be severely objective, letting the facts speak for themselves and noting the source for each. No incidents, scenes or quotations stem from the imagination; all are based on documents, the testimony of eyewitnesses or my own personal observation.”
As far as I’m concerned, a version of this paragraph should be inserted into every non-fiction author’s contract. Too often books are published by people with a clear vested interest that leaves the reader with a wholly false view of the world. For those wondering, a wholly false view of the world is far more harmful than mere ignorance as ignorance can be rectified in short-order. But talking people out of an incorrect viewpoint they already have is much, much harder. Some people are so stubborn that an atomic bomb exploding on their head wouldn’t be sufficient enough to move them.
But with this policy, Shirer’s book takes an emotionally charged topic and wipes clean the prejudice wherever it can, and Shirer is honest about the inevitable failures. Speaking of those failures, that leads me to the funniest part of the book.
Unintentional Comedy
Shirer by and large keeps his word and removes himself from the narrative, except when the topic concerns his firsthand experiences. When he does make an appearance, it’s memorable and well worth the effort to find it.
For example, in Chapter 4, which discuses at length the intellectual roots of Nazi Germany, Shirer gives the reader a run-through summary of Main Kampf. Such a summary is necessary because Hitler’s obscene absurdities are choking on his turgid prose. Shirer makes that last point clear enough with this quote: “Hitler insisted on airing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages...“
Put in Shirer’s context, Hitler’s rambling about STDs is way funnier than anything JoJo Rabbit could have come up with. Humour is rare when talking about Nazi Germany, but Shirer unintentionally creates these comedic moments from his brief editorialising.
Another example, also from Chapter 4, similarly benefits from Shirer’s opinions. In this section, Shirer is continuing the summary of Main Kampf. He has this to say, hilarious moment in bold: In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the sun greater than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader – himself – with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day become ”lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and, second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth-century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying.”
I can’t help it, but I always burst out laughing every time I read that. Shirer’s comment is blindingly obvious, yet its placement amongst the otherwise stern and serious text is like watching someone slip on a banana peel. I love it.
Moments like these are sprinkled throughout the book, making the 1000 page march more enjoyable than it would otherwise be.
Conclusion
The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich is one of the most substantial books ever written. Its subject is immense and timeless, revealing exactly how the darkest hour came to pass. The author’s first-hand experience with Nazi Germany when combined with the US Army’s outstanding document preservation makes an authoritative read backed up by the strongest possible evidence any author could ever hope for.
In my view, all books, fiction or non-fiction, should be approached in this manner. Creativity resting atop a fully-mastered subject is a force to be reckoned with.