The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Ratings56
Average rating4.3
Fuck fascists.
A comprehensive, albeit somewhat dry, history of the Third Reich. Many hundreds of pages focus on diplomacy and military tactics, but less attention is given to the sociological and genocidal elements.
Everyone, everyone ever, needs to read this book.
There's this idea that Hitler got to power on his voice alone. That's just not true. A lot of people had to enable him to get to the height he did, lots of people had to accept and believe in Nazism to keep it going. People who hated him and what he stood for made deals with him to try to gain their own power. And the world suffered.
Hitler is a monster, but bigger than that, he enabled monstrosity and allowed it to thrive.
Read this book.
Fifty seven hours of audiobook and totally amazing. A first rate first-hand account from a journalist who was present at all the major events of the war. First rate historical research as Shirer was able to get his hands on mint German secret files and the diary of one of the most important generals of the time who kept an unimaginably detailed account of all his interactions with Hitler and of all the decisions of the war. Now, I truly understand much, much more about War World II. Highly Recommended.
“Perhaps it will help ... if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”
William L. Shirer
May 1990
“[The Nazi party] lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.”