The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — A History of Nazi Germany

The Book That Defined a History

When The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published in 1960, William Shirer had just returned to the documentary record of a period he had witnessed in person. As CBS Radio’s chief correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, Shirer had attended the Nuremberg rallies, watched the Anschluss, covered the fall of France from the same railway carriage in which Germany had signed the armistice ending World War I, and kept a secret diary that became another important historical document.

The result — over a million words, ten years in the writing — is one of the most remarkable works of historical journalism ever produced. Shirer combined his own eyewitness accounts with the captured Nazi documents that became available after the war, the Nuremberg trial testimony, and interviews with survivors to produce an account that remains the standard single-volume history of the Third Reich.

The Argument

Shirer’s central argument is that the Nazi catastrophe was both specific — rooted in German history, culture, and the particular circumstances of Weimar — and general: a demonstration of what becomes possible when democratic institutions are surrendered and when the public fails to take seriously what its leadership tells it in plain language.

Hitler’s intentions were openly stated in Mein Kampf. The response of German society and international observers to those stated intentions is the book’s most disturbing subject.

The Scope of the Narrative

Part of what makes the book monumental is its sheer comprehensiveness. Across some 1,250 pages and more than a million words, Shirer carries the reader from Hitler’s obscure Austrian origins and the failed Beer Hall Putsch, through the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis’ exploitation of democratic machinery to seize total power, into the diplomatic brinkmanship of the 1930s — the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, Munich, the cynical pact with Stalin — and on through the war itself to the bunker and the Reich’s final ruin. He devotes unflinching chapters to the machinery of the Holocaust, insisting on its bureaucratic, systematic, institutional character rather than reducing it to the cruelty of individual monsters. Few single volumes attempt so much, and fewer still sustain narrative momentum across such a span. The book’s enduring lessons land with uncomfortable force: that the Nazi ascent was not inevitable but the product of specific, avoidable choices; that democratic institutions can be dismantled with alarming speed; and that Hitler announced his intentions plainly in Mein Kampf while a society and a watching world declined to take him at his word.

The Eyewitness Dimension

No subsequent historian can replicate what Shirer brings to this history: he was there. His account of the Nuremberg rallies — the spectacle, the emotional manipulation, the sense of individual dissolution into collective ecstasy — is the most revealing account in English. His Berlin diary entries, drawn from the secret journal he later published as Berlin Diary, are woven through the narrative and give the abstraction of historical events the texture of lived experience.

The “Luther to Hitler” Thesis and Its Critics

Shirer’s boldest and most contested interpretive claim is that Nazism grew organically out of a long arc of German history and national character — a line of descent he traces provocatively “from Luther to Hitler,” treating the Third Reich less as a modern totalitarian aberration than as the culmination of a peculiarly German path. This thesis is the part of the book that subsequent scholarship has most firmly rejected. Professional historians have long argued that it flattens the contingency of the Nazi rise, ignores comparable currents in other nations, and rests on an insecure grasp of German intellectual history — critics famously faulted Shirer’s naïve bracketing of Hegel with the nationalist Treitschke. The reception split along exactly these lines: the public devoured it and Hugh Trevor-Roper praised it as “a splendid work of scholarship,” even as many academics and West German readers bristled at its sweeping national indictment. Modern readers are best served by treating the narrative as magnificent and the central thesis as a period interpretation to be weighed against later historians such as Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans.

A Journalist’s History

It is worth remembering that Shirer was a reporter, not a trained academic historian, and the book’s strengths and weaknesses both flow from that. The narrative drive, the eye for the telling scene, the moral clarity, and the accessibility that made it a million-selling bestseller and a National Book Award winner are journalistic virtues. So, less happily, is the pervasive moral condemnation that some scholars find crowds out cooler analysis, and the relative thinness of social, economic, and class explanation. Six decades of research have refined, qualified, and in places overturned his conclusions, and anyone wanting the current scholarly consensus should supplement him. But as a single-volume, cover-to-cover narrative of how a modern democracy was dismantled and a continent set ablaze, written by a man who watched much of it happen, it has never been surpassed for sheer readability and scope. More than sixty years on, it remains the book most often pressed into the hands of anyone setting out to understand how the twentieth century’s defining catastrophe came to pass — and few who begin it ever put it down unfinished.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — A monumental, vividly written eyewitness history: dated in places and contestable in its central thesis, but still the most gripping single-volume account of Nazi Germany ever written.