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Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Recently reissued, William L. Shirer's seminal 1960 history of Nazi Germany is still important reading

  • By Ron Rosenbaum
  • Smithsonian magazine, February 2012, Subscribe
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Nazi rally in Nuremberg William L. Shirer, who witnessed a 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, would link the criminality of individuals to communal frenzy.

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

    by William L. Shirer
    Simon & Schuster, 2011
    (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition)

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    Nineteen sixty: Only 15 years had passed since the end of World War II. But already one could read an essay describing a “wave of amnesia that has overtaken the West” with regard to the events of 1933 to 1945.

    At the time, there was no Spielberg-produced HBO “Band of Brothers” and no Greatest Generation celebration; there were no Holocaust museums in the United States. There was, instead, the beginning of a kind of willed forgetfulness of the horror of those years.

    No wonder. It was not merely the Second World War, it was war to the second power, exponentially more horrific. Not merely in degree and quantity—in death toll and geographic reach—but also in consequences, if one considered Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

    But in 1960, there were two notable developments, two captures: In May, Israeli agents apprehended Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Jerusalem for trial. And in October, William L. Shirer captured something else, both massive and elusive, within the four corners of a book: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option. The issue of a new edition on the 50th anniversary of the book’s winning the National Book Award recalls an important point of inflection in American historical consciousness.

    The arrest of Eichmann, chief operating officer of the Final Solution, reawakened the question Why? Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?

    Why? William Shirer offered a 1,250-page answer.

    It wasn’t a final answer—even now, after tens of thousands of pages from scores of historians, there is no final answer—but Shirer reminded the world of “what”: what happened to civilization and humanity in those years. That in itself was a major contribution to a postwar generation that came of age in the ’60s, many of whom read Shirer as their parents’ Book of the Month Club selection and have told me of the unforgettable impact it had on them.

    Shirer was only 21 when he arrived in France from the Midwest in 1925. Initially, he planned to make the Hemingway-like transition from newsman to novelist, but events overtook him. One of his first big assignments, covering Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, introduced him to the mass hysteria of hero worship, and he soon found himself covering an even more profoundly charismatic figure: Mahatma Gandhi. But nothing prepared him for the demonic, spellbinding charisma he witnessed when he took up residence in Berlin in 1934 for the Hearst newspapers (and, later, for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio broadcasts) and began to chronicle the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.


    Nineteen sixty: Only 15 years had passed since the end of World War II. But already one could read an essay describing a “wave of amnesia that has overtaken the West” with regard to the events of 1933 to 1945.

    At the time, there was no Spielberg-produced HBO “Band of Brothers” and no Greatest Generation celebration; there were no Holocaust museums in the United States. There was, instead, the beginning of a kind of willed forgetfulness of the horror of those years.

    No wonder. It was not merely the Second World War, it was war to the second power, exponentially more horrific. Not merely in degree and quantity—in death toll and geographic reach—but also in consequences, if one considered Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

    But in 1960, there were two notable developments, two captures: In May, Israeli agents apprehended Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Jerusalem for trial. And in October, William L. Shirer captured something else, both massive and elusive, within the four corners of a book: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option. The issue of a new edition on the 50th anniversary of the book’s winning the National Book Award recalls an important point of inflection in American historical consciousness.

    The arrest of Eichmann, chief operating officer of the Final Solution, reawakened the question Why? Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?

    Why? William Shirer offered a 1,250-page answer.

    It wasn’t a final answer—even now, after tens of thousands of pages from scores of historians, there is no final answer—but Shirer reminded the world of “what”: what happened to civilization and humanity in those years. That in itself was a major contribution to a postwar generation that came of age in the ’60s, many of whom read Shirer as their parents’ Book of the Month Club selection and have told me of the unforgettable impact it had on them.

    Shirer was only 21 when he arrived in France from the Midwest in 1925. Initially, he planned to make the Hemingway-like transition from newsman to novelist, but events overtook him. One of his first big assignments, covering Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, introduced him to the mass hysteria of hero worship, and he soon found himself covering an even more profoundly charismatic figure: Mahatma Gandhi. But nothing prepared him for the demonic, spellbinding charisma he witnessed when he took up residence in Berlin in 1934 for the Hearst newspapers (and, later, for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS radio broadcasts) and began to chronicle the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.

    He was one of a number of courageous American reporters who filed copy under the threat of censorship and expulsion, a threat that sought to prevent them from detailing the worst excesses, including the murder of Hitler’s opponents, the beginnings of the Final Solution and the explicit preparations for upcoming war. After war broke out, he covered the savagery of the German invasion of Poland and followed the Wehrmacht as it fought its way into Paris before he was forced to leave in December 1940.

    The following year—before the United States went to war—he published Berlin Diary, which laid out in visceral terms his response to the rise of the Reich. Witnessing a Hitler harangue in person for the first time, he wrote:

    “We are strong and will get stronger,” Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loudspeakers. And there in the flood-lit night, massed together like sardines in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.

    Shirer’s contempt here is palpable, physical, immediate and personal. His contempt is not for Hitler so much as for the “little men of Germany”—for the culture that acceded to Hitler and Nazism so readily. In Shirer one can see an evolution: If in Berlin Diary his emphasis on the Germanic character is visceral, in The Rise and Fall his critique is ideological. Other authors have sought to chronicle the war or to explain Hitler, but Shirer made it his mission to take on the entire might and scope of the Reich, the fusion of people and state that Hitler forged. In The Rise and Fall he searches for a deeper “why”: Was the Third Reich a unique, one-time phenomenon, or do humans possess some ever-present receptivity to the appeal of primal, herd-like hatred?

    Writing The Rise and Fall was an extraordinary act of daring, one might almost say an act of literary-historical generalship—to conquer a veritable con­­tinent of information. It remains an awe-inspiring achievement that he could capture that terrain of horror in a mere 1,250 pages.

    If Shirer was present at the rise, he was also distant from the fall—and he turned both circumstances to his advantage. Like Thucydides, he had firsthand experience of war and then sought to adopt the analytic distance of the historian. Unlike Thucydides, Shirer had access to the kind of treasure previous historians always sought but mostly failed to find. After the German defeat, the Allies made available warehouses full of captured German military and diplomatic documents—the Pentagon Papers/WikiLeaks of their time—which enabled Shirer to see the war from the other side. He also had access to the remarkably candid interviews with German generals conducted after the surrender by B.H. Liddell-Hart, the British strategic thinker who has been credited with developing the concept of lightning offensive warfare (which the Germans adopted and called “blitzkrieg”).

    And by 1960, Shirer also had those 15 years of distance—15 years to think about what he’d seen, 15 years to distance himself and then to return from that distance. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers; indeed, one of the most admirable attributes of his work is his willingness to admit to mystery and inexplicability when he finds it. Later historians had access—as Shirer did not—to knowledge of the Enigma machine, the British code-breaking apparatus that gave the Allies the advantage of anticipating the movements of German forces—an advantage that changed the course of the war.

    Rereading the book, one sees how subtle Shirer is in shifting between telescope and microscope—even, one might say, stethoscope. Within the grand sweep of his gaze, which reached from the Irish Sea to the steppes beyond the Urals, he gives us Tolstoyan vistas of battle, and yet his intimate close-ups of the key players lay bare the minds and hearts behind the mayhem. Shirer had a remarkable eye for the singular, revealing detail. For example, consider the one Eichmann quote he included in the book, in a footnote written before Eichmann was captured.

    In Chapter 27, “The New Order” (whose title was intended as an ironic echo of Hitler’s original grandiose phrase), Shirer takes up the question of the actual number of Jews murdered in what was not yet widely called the Holocaust and tells us: “According to two S.S. witnesses at Nuremberg the total was put at between five and six millions by one of the great Nazi experts on the subject, Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish office of the Gestapo, who carried out the ‘final solution.’” (He uses Eichmann’s first name, not the middle name that would soon become inseparable from him: Adolf.)

    And here is the footnote that corresponds with that passage:

    “Eichmann, according to one of his henchmen, said just before the German collapse that ‘he would leap laughing into his grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’”

    Clearly this footnote, mined from mountains of postwar testimony, was intended not merely to substantiate the number of five million dead, but also to illustrate Eichmann’s attitude toward the mass murder he was administering. Shirer had a sense that this question would become important, although he could not have imagined the worldwide controversy it would stir. For Shirer, Eichmann was no bloodless paper pusher, a middle manager just following orders, as Eichmann and his defense lawyer sought to convince the world. He was not an emblem of “the banality of evil,” as the political theorist Hannah Arendt portrayed him. He was an eager, bloodthirsty killer. Shirer will not countenance the exculpation of individual moral responsibility in the “just following orders” defense.

    In fact, Shirer had a more encompassing objective, which was to link the obscene criminality of individuals to what was a communal frenzy—the hatred that drove an entire nation, the Reich itself. What distinguishes his book is its insistence that Hitler and his exterminationist drive were a distillation of the Reich, a quintessence brewed from the darkest elements of German history, an entire culture. He did not title his book The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (although he did a version for young adults by that title), but The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

    It was a bold decision: He wanted to challenge the “Hitler-centric” point of view of previous treatments of the war. Hitler may have been a quintessential distillation of centuries of German culture and philosophy, but Shirer was careful not to let him or that heritage become an excuse for his accomplices.

    “Third Reich” was not a term of Hitler’s invention; it was concocted in a book written in 1922 by a German nationalist crank named Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who believed in the divine destiny of a German history that could be divided into three momentous acts. There was Charlemagne’s First Reich. That was followed by the Second Reich, the one resurrected by Bismarck with his Prussian “blood and iron”—but then betrayed by the “stab in the back,” the supposed treachery of Jews and socialists on the home front that brought the noble German Army defeat just as it was on the verge of victory in November 1918. And thus all Germany was awaiting the savior who would arise to restore, with a Third Reich, the destiny that was theirs.

    Here Shirer opened himself to charges of exchanging Hitler-centrism for German-centrism as the source of the horror. But it doesn’t strike me that he attributes the malevolent aspect of the “Germanic” to an ethnic or racial trait—the mirror image of how Hitler saw the Jews. Rather, he sought scrupulously to trace these traits not to genetics but to a shared intellectual tradition, or perhaps “delusion” might be a better word. He tries to trace what you might call the intellectual DNA of the Third Reich, as opposed to its ethnic chromosomal code.

    And so in tracing the formation of Hitler’s mind and the Third Reich, Shirer’s magnum opus focuses valuable attention on the lasting impact of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s feverish series of nationalist speeches beginning in 1807 after the German defeat at Jena (speeches that “stirred and rallied a divided and defeated people,” in Shirer’s words). Hitler was still a youth when he came under the spell of one of his teachers at Linz, Leopold Poetsch, and Shirer brings forth from the shadows of amnesia this nearly forgotten figure, an acolyte of the Pan-German League, who may have been the most decisive in shaping—distorting—the pliant young Adolf Hitler with his “dazzling eloquence,” which “carr[ied] us away with him,” as Hitler describes Poetsch’s effect in Mein Kampf. It was undoubtedly Poetsch, the miserable little schoolteacher, who foisted Fichte on Hitler. Thus, Shirer shows us, fanatical pro-Germanism took its place beside fanatical anti-Semitism in the young man’s mind.

    Shirer does not condemn Germans as Germans. He’s faithful to the idea that all men are created equal, but he won’t accede to the relativistic notion that all ideas are equal as well, and in bringing Fichte and Poetsch to the fore, he forces our attention on how stupid and evil ideas played a crucial role in Hitler’s development.

    Of course, few ideas were more stupid and evil than Hitler’s notion of his own divine destiny, forbidding, for instance, even tactical retreats. “This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril,” Shirer writes, “...was to lead to Stalingrad and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.”

    Indeed, the foremost object lesson from rereading Shirer’s remarkable work 50 years on might be that the glorification of suicidal martyrdom, its inseparability from delusion and defeat, blinds its adherents to anything but murderous faith—and leads to little more than the slaughter of innocents.

    And, yes, perhaps one corollary that almost need not be spelled out: There is danger in giving up our sense of selfhood for the illusory unity of a frenzied mass movement, of devolving from human to herd for some homicidal abstraction. It is a problem we can never be reminded of enough, and for this we will always owe William Shirer a debt of gratitude.

    Ron Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.

    Adapted from Ron Rosenbaum's introduction to the new edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Copyright © Ron Rosenbaum. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster.


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    Comments (42)

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    Re:Ron Rosenbaum's article "Explaining Evil"
    After reading Ron Rosenbaum's superb review of Wm Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", I'm wondering if it's necessary to read the book. To quote Mr Rosenbaum "It ("The Rise and Fall") remains an awe- inspiring achievement that he (Shirer) could capture the terrain of horror in a mere 1250 pages." Mr. Rosenbaum appears to have done it in SIX pages! Every single paragraph of the review is informative and even profound in explaining, or trying to explain the national psychosis that was Germany. The one concept that most impacts on me is that it wasn't Hitler's Germany- It was Germany. As Rosenbaum said, the " little men of Germany" This concept is almost never addressed,except,perhaps in Daniel Goldhagen's book, "Hitler's Willing excecutioners", namely, that many, many Germans knew! I've observed that on most TV military channels, reference is frequently made to NAZI Germany, not Germany. This is like calling the US -Republican US or Democrat US. Nazi Germany is redundant!Germany without the prefix "NAZI" was collectively guilty, and that fact should forever be remembered!

    Posted by Richard Fitterman,DDS on February 13,2012 | 08:17 PM

    "or do humans possess some ever-present receptivity to the appeal of primal, herd-like hatred?"

    In my opinion Shirer misses the reason completely. Nazi: National Socialism grew for the same reason that socialism has grown in Europe, and now even the U.S today, because of class warfare. Also remember that hindsight is 20/20 (or blind in Shirer's case, when you have a preconceived idea of what you want to prove happened). When the 3rd Reich rose, the so-called hate didn't exist, that only happened when the leaders corrupted the power they were given and turned it into something bad. One more reason to avoid large government in favor of small and limited government.

    Posted by Doug Bauman on February 8,2012 | 03:14 PM

    In "Explaining Evil" Ron Rosenbaum's juxtaposittion of Auschwitz and Hiroshima is beyond bizarre. Auschwits was indeed the epitome of all that is evil. In stark contrast, the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used in the hope of ending the bloodshed of World War II.

    The results of the atomic bombs were horrific, but the day after the second bomb was dropped, the war was over.

    A little perspective please. The paths to Auschwitz and Hiroshima could not be more different.

    Posted by Sarah Vickery on February 8,2012 | 01:05 PM

    This was such a great book. I took it from my father’s library just recently where I remember how it effected him greatly when he read it in the 1960’s. But before I read it, I looked it up on the internet to get a heads up, and there, got the impression that Shirer was only a journalist, not a historian. The work was written too recently after the war to have a real perspective, it said.
    I took that with me as I read the book and in the end, felt lucky I didn’t see it as just another history book. I was more of a living journal. Much more powerful.
    I remember that era of the 1950’ very well. I remember the denial. My relatives and neighbors who experienced the war were obviously distressed by it, but seldom, if ever, talked about it. There was a sort of collective numbness, a faint state of confusion and quiet anger. It was a horror beyond description, and there was no name for it back then. Naming it to remembered it can run the risk of taming it, but Shirer never falls into this trap. He explains it, coldly, in a way that never loses horror or its humanity.

    Posted by david owens on February 7,2012 | 02:29 PM

    Timely and necessary reminders, when all around us are those who would willingly forsake liberty for security or a government handout. The only flaw I perceive in Rosenbaum's essay is his failure to equate the German state socialism with the COMINTERN variety, both of which are rivals to claim the honor of most evil.

    Posted by Papa Kilo on February 4,2012 | 01:04 PM

    "He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option." And who will do that for the torture, warrantless domestic wiretapping and assassination of U.S. citizens without charge or trial of the current era? Jane Mayer? Sy Hersh? Someone yet to leave government? Whoever it is, and, dear God, I hope it's *somebody*, would do well to use Shirer's work as a guide.

    Posted by Lex on February 2,2012 | 01:25 PM

    I had to read this book in high school in1976 and it contained so much I was overwhelled with info.

    Posted by roger hunt on January 29,2012 | 12:05 PM

    Thank you for sharing this illuminating, detailed book review of a classic tome that I have only dipped into and found overwhelmingly depressingly. Reading this article on Holocaust Remembrance Day adds to the poignancy of the insightful review.

    One paragraph, in particular, seems crucial in our current cultural environment. "Shirer does not condemn Germans as Germans. He’s faithful to the idea that all men are created equal, but he won’t accede to the relativistic notion that all ideas are equal as well, and in bringing Fichte and Poetsch to the fore, he forces our attention on how stupid and evil ideas played a crucial role in Hitler’s development."

    Let's remember that stupid and evil ideas both exist, and need to be clearly identified as stupid and evil.

    Posted by Eric Roth on January 28,2012 | 10:03 AM

    In his peaen to William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", Ron Rosenbaum notes accurately that Shirer could shift between the "telescope" and "microscope-even, one might say, stethoscope." What is missing from his justified admiration for Shirer is a focus on the "psychoscope" in his examination of the mass mind.

    Shame and pride are referenced in Shirer's description of Hitler's "... mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril" and in the object lesson of the glorification of suicidal martyrdom (Explaining Evil. Smithsonian Feb 2012). What is missing is an examination of the role played by the national shame of an erstwhile proud culture. The work of Donald L. Nathanson, M.D. on the psychology of shame and violence will cast much light on what was going on in Weimar Germany at that time: it will suggest why the rest of Europe was seen as an enemy and why the Jews were used as scapegoats.

    Posted by John Brodsky, M.D. on January 27,2012 | 02:12 PM

    I've read, re-read, and recommended this book many times over the years. While it is a masterly personal account of these times--Shirer knew these Nazis personally and tells what Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and their compatriots were like as individuals; something I've never found anywhere else--it is more important as a universal lesson on how to lose freedom. Goering says that gaining power over a democracy is simple: just make people scared. Since I first read this book, I've seen budding Third Reichs everywhere. Radio talk show hosts are all potential Hitlers, for example, whether they know it or not. All it takes is an audience which is scared enough. We have dodged the evil flower which bloomed in Nazi Germany many times in our history, I think. The ground wasn't quite fertile enough, or, hopefully, people of all levels--paupers to politicians--decided it wasn't a growth that was healthy and plucked it up. Reading this book will keep you eyeing the shoots of modern elections with a cautious glance. That, to me, is its finest quality: "there but for the grace of God" can go us all.

    Posted by steve jordan on January 26,2012 | 01:57 AM

    "Later historians had access—as Shirer did not—to knowledge of the Enigma machine, the British code-breaking apparatus that gave the Allies the advantage of anticipating the movements of German forces—an advantage that changed the course of the war."

    The Enigma was a german machine used to encode transcriptions. Not a british code-breaking apparatus.

    2ndly for those saying that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki were justified because it made the japanese surrender: a. the Japanese tried to surrender conditionally months earlier. b. they didn't actually surrender until the 15th of August, 6 days after Nagasaki, and 9 after Hiroshima, and it very well could have been Russia entering the war against Japan on the 8th of August that finally convinced them there was no hope.
    How do you justify the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo?

    Posted by james soper on January 26,2012 | 08:47 PM

    I'm glad to hear of the reissuing of Shirer's book, as definitive as any about that horrible period. The depth and breadth of his research is impressive to this day (especially since written in the pre-googling era). His book included the murder of my mother's first husband, Dr. Willi Schmid, on the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934), relatively early in Hitler's regime. That night, when at least 90 people were killed, signified the end of the rule of law in Germany and tragically was an indication of atrocities to come. Having just published my own book, "Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America," Shirer's book makes me appreciate his magnum opus even more. And it serves as a reminder (among more obvious horrors) of how quickly and disastrously civil rights can be eroded, thuggery can take over and basic decency abandoned.

    Posted by bettina hoerlin on January 26,2012 | 06:42 PM

    A good review. I have just a small issue: When Shirer writes about "the little men of Germany", a German speaker would interpret this as a translation of "die kleinen Leute" or even "die Kleinbuerger", which would be a sociological describption - it refers to the lower middle class. The review treats it as an emotional statement, but that might not be entirely the case. Shirer was well aware that the prototypical Nazis were frustrated lower middle class people (incidentally the class most prone to follow fanatical ideologies in most societies). The review talks about character and culture only, and this might miss the point to some extent.

    Posted by Siegfried Herzog on January 26,2012 | 03:22 AM

    There is an unfortunate failure among many younger Americans to read or study history, including the reasonings and motivations of past leaders and followers. As a former resident of Los Alamos, NM, where the atom bomb was developed by an extraordinary community of talented and hardworking people, I learned to hold my temper when visitors mourned Hiroshima. Mr. Rosenbaum has written an excellent review of Shirer's book; I wish there were a comparable study of the Japanese imperial aggression. There seems to be no one speaking for the victims of the Japanese, comparable to Holocaust survivors speaking up to challenge the revisionists. First, this review has inspired me to read The Third Reich and to seek ways to support more and better teaching of history in the U.S.

    Posted by K. Replogle Sullivan on January 25,2012 | 02:56 PM

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