The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William L. Shirer
One of the consequences of using Goodreads to catalog my library has been rediscovery of old books. The very first adult history book I ever read was "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L Shirer. I found an old hardback copy sometime in the mid 1970s when I was in my mid-teens and couldn't put it down, and somehow finished the 1200 page tome within a week. The book, along with the early 1970s BBC documentary TV series "The World at War" sparked my interest in the Second World War.
Over the decades I accumulated many books on the War, but never read them in a systematic fashion. Now that I started to list them all, they have been sorted out and I even came up with a reading list. On February 27 I picked up Shirer's massive tome and started to read it again. Originally published in 1960, only fifteen years after the end of the war, he was writing for an audience that lived through it. Shirer was an American journalist who had been stationed in Germany from 1934 up until December 1940, and had published his experiences after leaving when he returned to the United States with "Berlin Diary" in 1941. He later went back to Germany after the war to cover the Nuremberg Trials.
Although "Rise and Fall" is well researched, one of the things I like about it is that Shirer was a journalist, not an historian. He's not detached, and makes no effort to hide his contempt for Adolf Hitler and many members of the Nazi hierarchy. I do not see him as anti-German, just anti-Nazi. Shirer was there, had talked to many of these people, saw them often, and just didn't like them. It's a refreshing viewpoint.
The book is a dual history of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Thus far the most disturbing part was about how the Nazis were able to come to power and bring about the end of the flawed Weimar Republic. I could write volumes on that...the deceit, the consistent misunderstanding and undersestimation of Hitler by others, the belief of the German conservatives that they could use Hitler by bringing him and the Nazi party into the government in 1932.
Right now I'm up to page 718 of 1246, and am reading about the May 1940 western offensive against Belgium, the Netherlands and France. I should read more of it each day but tend to get bogged down on teh interwebs when I'm home from work.
Over the decades I accumulated many books on the War, but never read them in a systematic fashion. Now that I started to list them all, they have been sorted out and I even came up with a reading list. On February 27 I picked up Shirer's massive tome and started to read it again. Originally published in 1960, only fifteen years after the end of the war, he was writing for an audience that lived through it. Shirer was an American journalist who had been stationed in Germany from 1934 up until December 1940, and had published his experiences after leaving when he returned to the United States with "Berlin Diary" in 1941. He later went back to Germany after the war to cover the Nuremberg Trials.
Although "Rise and Fall" is well researched, one of the things I like about it is that Shirer was a journalist, not an historian. He's not detached, and makes no effort to hide his contempt for Adolf Hitler and many members of the Nazi hierarchy. I do not see him as anti-German, just anti-Nazi. Shirer was there, had talked to many of these people, saw them often, and just didn't like them. It's a refreshing viewpoint.
The book is a dual history of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Thus far the most disturbing part was about how the Nazis were able to come to power and bring about the end of the flawed Weimar Republic. I could write volumes on that...the deceit, the consistent misunderstanding and undersestimation of Hitler by others, the belief of the German conservatives that they could use Hitler by bringing him and the Nazi party into the government in 1932.
Right now I'm up to page 718 of 1246, and am reading about the May 1940 western offensive against Belgium, the Netherlands and France. I should read more of it each day but tend to get bogged down on teh interwebs when I'm home from work.