The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Shirer was a correspondent in Germany from 1934 to 1940 and broadcast from Berlin under censorship until he left. He witnessed the rallies, the annexations and the early war.

He then had access to a documentary windfall: the German state and military archives captured intact, including diaries, minutes and orders, which had never been available to a historian writing about a regime so soon after its fall.

He watched it happen and then read the captured archives, which no historian of a recent regime had been able to do.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Over a thousand pages covering the origins, the seizure of power, the consolidation, the road to war, the war itself and the collapse.

The narrative is chronological and detailed, and its strength is the integration of documentary evidence into a continuous story. Long quotations from Nazi officials' own records do much of the work.

His account of 1933: the Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act, the elimination of other parties, and the Night of the Long Knives.

His treatment of how quickly a constitutional state was dismantled — largely through legal instruments, with the cooperation of conservative elites who believed they could control Hitler — is the most instructive section for a modern reader.

His recurring theme in the early chapters: the army, the industrialists and the traditional right supported or tolerated the Nazis believing they were using them.

His documentation of this from their own papers is among the book's most valuable contributions, and it is the part of the history that has been most frequently invoked since.

His detailed account of the remilitarisation, the Anschluss, Munich, and the Polish crisis, drawing on the German records of what was intended at each stage.

The value of the archives here is decisive: he can show what Hitler was telling his own commanders while negotiating, which resolves questions that would otherwise be matters of inference.

His chapters on the persecution and extermination, written at a time when the historiography was in its earliest stages.

He documented it seriously and at length when some general histories did not, which was significant. The subsequent scholarship is far more developed, and a reader should not use this book as their account of the Holocaust.

The most substantial criticism concerns his Sonderweg thesis — that Nazism grew out of a distinctively German historical path running through Luther, Prussian militarism and nineteenth-century nationalism.

Specialist historians have largely rejected this as deterministic and as explaining too much: it makes the outcome seem inevitable and cannot account for why it happened when it did rather than earlier.

The German-national-character explanation makes the outcome look inevitable, which is precisely what it cannot explain.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Shirer was not a trained historian and the book shows it in both directions. It is exceptionally readable, vivid and well paced, and it is weaker on structural, economic and social analysis.

Professional historians at the time were dismissive; the book nonetheless sold in enormous numbers and shaped general understanding of the period for decades.

The narrative and documentary spine remain useful. The interpretation has been superseded by a large body of scholarship on the regime's polycratic structure, on its economic policy, and on the mechanics of popular consent.

A reader wanting current scholarship should go to Richard Evans or Ian Kershaw. A reader wanting the account of someone who was in the room should read this.

The eyewitness passages are irreplaceable. His descriptions of the Nuremberg rallies, of the atmosphere in Berlin, and of the reaction to Munich are primary source material embedded in a secondary work.

And the first third — the destruction of a constitutional order by legal means, with elite cooperation — remains the clearest narrative account of that process available to a general reader.