The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer

     I decided to read William H. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany – first published fifteen years after the World War II’s end, then republished in 1974, 1990, 1991, 1998, 2010 and 2011 – while listening to Lowell Green’s lively Ottawa weekday morning talk radio program sometime in 2013. One of Green’s callers, a regular woman participant who always has interesting information and opinions to contribute, mentioned that she had read the book and therefore knew how dangerous anti-Semitism could be. My late mother’s dog-eared copy – with the torn spine and too many loose pages – had been eerily sitting up high on my living room shelf – dusted but not read – for almost 30 years. So I finally took it down and started on a terrifying, educational journey into the evil genius and reign of one of the twentieth centuries most demonic tyrants.
The 1961 non-fiction winner of the prestigious National Book Award (NBA) for the 1142-page tome, Shirer – who lived in Berlin from 1934 until he was forced to leave in 1940 – had picked and combed his way through “more than 485 tons (emphasis added) of records from the German Foreign Office, captured by the U.S. First Army covering as far back as Bismarck and the Weimar years,” explains Neil Baldwin, executive director of the NBA Classics section of the NBA Foundation. 
     When first published – “a cautious 12,500 copies” – the book was heavily criticized for focusing on a black period in human history that everyone supposedly wanted to forget. Despite the immeasurable amount of research organized and explained in Shirer’s book, reviewers were stingy with their praise. “The scholarly community reacted with disdain,” says Baldwin, “because of the author's propensity for anecdotal accounting and his preference for raw documentary material rather than 'historiographically-correct' reference to previously-published works.” Once the NBA was bestowed, however, the book went on to become a “mass-market runaway success; it is still the best-selling title in the history of the Book of the Month Club.”
     At first I was surprised how much the author relied on captured documents, including letters, diaries, memos, and reports of every kind. Not accustomed to pouring over such dense non-fiction, it was difficult reading in the beginning, exacerbated by the fact that, in my 1960 edition, the difference in the font sizes between the regular text and the quoted text is infinitesimal. But beside the quoted and somewhat clinical documents, Shirer’s writing style and analysis are addictive and mesmerizing. I quickly found the classic history of the third Reich hard to put down. And, to help with Europe’s intricate geography, the maps at the front and back of the book were invaluable.
     Hitler took a circuitous rise to power. His unlikely ascent succeeded: after his being a poor student in high school, and never graduating; after dreaming of being an artist; even after his four-year vagabond existence in Vienna. Once he led the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria, though, his ambitions only grew, and he later wrote the despicable Mein Kampf while he was imprisoned for assault.
     Hitler may never have achieved his bloody pre-eminence except for an early fluke.  By an incredible twist of fate – specifically, by the uncharacteristic behaviour of his grandfather toward a bastard son – Hitler was not born Adolf Schicklgruber. “There may not be much or anything in a name,” wrote Shirer, “but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber.” Just try to imagine, if you will, rallies of the frenetic German masses with their deafening heils crying “Schicklgruber!” Then imagine the endless “Heil Schicklgruber” of each inferior peon as they passed him in the halls, met with him or spoke with him on the phone. Hitler himself is reported to have said to his only boyhood friend that nothing pleased him more than his changed surname. Too bad for the free world.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.