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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by journalist William L. Shirer, is the first definitive history of Nazi Germany in English.
Shirer, an American radio reporter for CBS who also worked for a number of newspapers and United Press International, covered Germany for many years, until December 1940, when increasing Nazi censorship of his broadcasts made his work impossible. This 1,245-page book, first published, in 1960, by Simon & Schuster, Inc., and still in print, colors its historically accurate information with denunciation of Nazism and tyranny.
The book is based mostly on the captured documents of the Third Reich, including the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and General Franz Halder.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by journalist William L. Shirer, is the first definitive history of Nazi Germany in English.
Shirer, an American radio reporter for CBS who also worked for a number of newspapers and United Press International, covered Germany for many years, until December 1940, when increasing Nazi censorship of his broadcasts made his work impossible. This 1,245-page book, first published, in 1960, by Simon & Schuster, Inc., and still in print, colors its historically accurate information with denunciation of Nazism and tyranny.
The book is based mostly on the captured documents of the Third Reich, including the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and General Franz Halder. Additional major sources include testimony and evidence from the Nuremberg trials; British Foreign Office reports; and the detailed diary of Ciano, who was Benito Mussolini's son-in-law and the Italian Foreign Minister. Other sources include confidential speeches, conference reports, transcripts of telephone conversations, and Shirer's personal recollections of his six years spent reporting on the Third Reich as a journalist.
When the book was written, only a part of the Goebbels diaries was known. Other documents have since been discovered, and many documents have become available from Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The book was adapted into a television program for the ABC network in 1966. It was one of the first programs to be marketed as a miniseries.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich received the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1961.
Content and themes
Rise and Fall was the first book to present a comprehensive synthesis of the Nazi era. Shirer argued for the view that German history proceeded logically from "Luther to Hitler", seeing Hitler's rise to power as an expression of German character, rather than of the international phenomenon of totalitarianism. Shirer encapsulated this view with the passage, "...the course of German history... made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility." This point of view (known as the Sonderweg thesis to historians) was widespread in the United States at the time, but critics of the book generally considered this interpretation of Nazism to be its worst flaw.
Success and acclaim
Upon its publication and release on October 17, 1960 , the book quickly reached the US bestseller list, and remained there for over a year, selling over a million hardback copies (two thirds through the Book of the Month Club) and then over a million paperback copies. In addition, it was condensed and serialized by Reader's Digest in 1962, thus reaching another 12 million readers.
Shirer himself was surprised by his book's reception. Neither his agent nor his publisher thought there was much interest in Hitler or Nazi Germany in 1960; only 12,500 copies were made in the first printing. Rise and Fall also did well in Britain, France and Italy. It also sold well in West Germany, although there, its fame and success were due to a long stream of editorial attacks.
The book was widely hailed as a great work of history. It won the National Book Award and the Carey-Thomas Award in 1961. In the New York Times Book Review, Hugh Trevor-Roper praised the book as "a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions."
Criticism
Whereas nearly all American journalists praised the book, academics were split. Some of these acknowledged Shirer's achievement, but most condemned it. The harshest criticism tended to come from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis mentioned above.
Klaus Epstein listed "four major failings": a crude understanding of German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.
Elizabeth Wiskemann stated in a 1961 review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands ... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual ... which will certainly prove useful."
William O. Shanahan in 1962 wrote that "Shirer's history of the Third Reich is woefully inadequate. Shirer's monumental narrative does not rise above the most commonplace level of understanding. The inadequacies of Shirer's account could be dismissed...if his book had not found an enormous audience. Shirer's [writing] facility.. does not compensate for this book's essential weakness as history.".
Richard J. Evans concedes that Rise and Fall is a "readable general history of Nazi Germany". His issue with Shirer is that he worked outside of the academic mainstream, and that his research was not informed by the historical scholarship and academic fashions of the time (1960).
While it is criticized for not being academic enough for purposes of academic research, the text does include extensive references and footnotes. The book also includes several speculations (clearly marked as such), such as a footnote that theorizes that Heinrich Müller, an SS chieftain, later went to serve in the NKVD, for which Shirer had no evidence.
Karl A. Wittfogel wrote to the West German publisher of Rise and Fall:
I view the book as very damaging, politically, and as intellectually ... contemptible. How, more than fifteen years after the fall of Hitler, does one want to explain National Socialism for us by claiming that there are good and bad peoples -- the bad people, this time, not the Jews, but the Germans? The attempt to promote a ... rational, scientific, serious analysis of Fascism (as a part of totalitarian power) has been seriously harmed by his pathetic work.
In West Germany, the "Luther to Hitler" interpretation was almost universally rejected in favor of the view that Nazism was an instance of totalitarianism, which arises in various countries. Rise and Fall was unanimously condemned, and considered dangerous to relations between America and West Germany, as it could inflame anti-German sentiments in the US.
Publication
The book has been reprinted many times since it was published in 1960. Current in-print editions are:
- ISBN 0-671-72868-7 (Simon & Schuster, US, 1990 paperback)
- ISBN 0-09-942176-3 (Arrow, UK, 1990 paperback)
- Folio Society Special Book Club Edition (2004 Hardback)
See also
External links
- at the University of Michigan Digital General Collection
- Online collection of many original WWII documents, including some of Shirer's sources (e.g. British/French "Color" books, captured German Foreign Office docs, various Nuremberg and NCA documents).
- Geoff Walden's then/now photo-essay collection of many sites mentioned in Shirer's book, early Hitler locations featured.
- (fee-based jstor link). by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, in: Journal of Contemporary History v29.n1 (Jan 1994): pp95-128.
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