The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
File:TheRiseandFalloftheThirdReich.jpg
First edition
Author William L. Shirer
Country United States
Language English
Subject Nazi Germany
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date
 1960
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 1,245
ISBN 0-671-72868-7 (1990 paperback)
OCLC 22888118

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a non-fiction book by William L. Shirer chronicling the rise and fall of Nazi Germany from the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889 to the end of World War II in 1945. It was first published in 1960, by Simon & Schuster in the United States, where it won a National Book Award.[1] It was a bestseller in both the U.S. and Europe, and a critical success outside Germany; in Germany, criticism of the book stimulated sales. Academic historians were generally critical, perhaps because Shirer was a journalist rather than an historian and recounted the history of The Third Reich in a journalistic style.

Rise and Fall is based upon captured Nazi documents, the available diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, General Franz Halder, and of the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, evidence and testimony from the Nuremberg trials, British Foreign Office reports, and the author's recollection of six years reporting on Nazi Germany for newspapers, the United Press International (UPI), and CBS Radio —terminated by Nazi Party censorship in 1940.[2]

Content and themes

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a comprehensive historical interpretation of the Nazi era, positing that German history logically proceeded from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler;[3][lower-alpha 1][page needed] that Hitler’s ascension to power was an expression of German national character, not of totalitarianism as an ideology that was internationally fashionable in the 1930s.[4][5][6] Author William L. Shirer summarised his perspective: "[T]he course of German history ... made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man, and put a premium on servility."[7] This reportorial perspective[clarification needed], the Sonderweg interpretation of German history (special path or unique course) was then common in American scholarship. Yet, despite extensive footnotes and references, some academic critics consider its interpretation of Nazism flawed.[8] The book also includes (identified) speculation, such as the theory that SS Chief Heinrich Müller afterward joined the NKVD of the USSR.

Book One: The Rise of Adolf Hitler

  • Chapter 1. Birth of the Third Reich
  • Chapter 2. Birth of the Nazi Party
  • Chapter 3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch
  • Chapter 4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich

Book Two: Triumph and Consolidation

  • Chapter 5. The Road to Power: 1925-31
  • Chapter 6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33
  • Chapter 7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34
  • Chapter 8. Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37

Book Three: The Road to War

  • Chapter 9. The First Steps: 1934-37
  • Chapter 10. Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht
  • Chapter 11. Anschluss: The Rape of Austria
  • Chapter 12. The Road to Munich
  • Chapter 13. Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist
  • Chapter 14. The Turn of Poland
  • Chapter 15. The Nazi-Soviet Pact
  • Chapter 16. The Last Days of Peace
  • Chapter 17. The Launching of World War II

Book Four: War: Early Victories and the Turning Point

  • Chapter 18. The Fall of Poland
  • Chapter 19. Sitzkrieg in the West
  • Chapter 20. The Conquest of Denmark and Norway
  • Chapter 21. Victory in the West
  • Chapter 22. Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain
  • Chapter 23. Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia
  • Chapter 24. A Turn of the Tide
  • Chapter 25. The Turn of the United States
  • Chapter 26. The Great Turning Point: 1942 - Stalingrad and El Alamein

Book Five: Beginning of the End

  • Chapter 27. The New Order
  • Chapter 28. The Fall of Mussolini
  • Chapter 29. The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler

Book Six: The Fall of the Third Reich

  • Chapter 30. The Conquest of Germany
  • Chapter 31. Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich

Development history

The editor for the book was Joseph Barnes, a foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, a former editor of PM, another New York newspaper, and a former speechwriter for Wendell Wilkie. Barnes was an old friend of Shirer. The manuscript was very late and Simon & Schuster threatened to cancel the contract several times; each time Barnes would win a reprieve for Shirer. The original title of the book was Hitler's Nightmare Empire with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as the sub-title. The title and cover had already been sent out in catalogs when Robert Gottlieb decided that both title and cover had to go. Nina Bourne decided that they should use the sub-title as the title and art director Frank Metz designed the black jacket bearing the swastika. Initially bookstores across the country protested displaying the swastika and threatened not to stock the book. The controversy soon blew over and the cover shipped with the symbol.[9]

Success and acclaim

In the U.S., where it was published on October 17, 1960, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sold more than one million hardcover copies, two-thirds via the Book of the Month Club, and more than one million paperback copies. It won the 1961 National Book Award for Nonfiction[1] and the Carey-Thomas Award for non-fiction.[10] In 1962, the Reader's Digest magazine serialization reached some 12 million additional readers.[11][12] In a New York Times Book Review, Hugh Trevor-Roper praised it as "a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions."[13] The book sold well in Britain, France, Italy,[14] and in West Germany, because of its international recognition, bolstered by German editorial attacks.[15]

Both its recognition by journalists as a great history book and its popular success surprised Shirer[16] as the publisher commissioned a first printing of merely 12,500 copies. More than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, neither Shirer nor the publisher anticipated much popular interest in Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) or Nazi Germany (1933–45).

Criticism

Whereas nearly all American journalists praised the book, scholars were split. Some acknowledged Shirer's achievement but some condemned it.[10] The harshest criticism came from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis. In West Germany, the Sonderweg interpretation was almost universally rejected in favor of the view that Nazism was simply one instance of totalitarianism that arose in various countries. Gavriel Rosenfeld asserted in 1994 that Rise and Fall had been unanimously condemned by German historians in the 1960s, and considered dangerous to relations between America and West Germany, as it might inflame anti-German sentiments in the United States.[17]

Klaus Epstein listed what he contended were "four major failings": a crude understanding of German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.[16]

Elizabeth Wiskemann concluded in a review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual... which will certainly prove useful."[18]

Decades later, LGBT activist Peter Tatchell criticized Shirer's attitude toward homosexuality, which he repeatedly describes as a perversion, and called for revisions to be made to the book's language and for mention to be made of the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.[19]

Forty years later, historian Richard J. Evans, author of The Third Reich Trilogy (2003 to 2008), conceded that Rise and Fall is a "readable general history of Nazi Germany" and that "there are good reasons for [its] success." Evans contended that Shirer worked outside of the academic mainstream and that Shirer's account was not informed by the historical scholarship of the time (1960).[20]

Publication and adaptation

A film adaptation was broadcast by the U.S. ABC television network in 1968, one hour a night over three nights.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Directed by Jack Kaufman
Narrated by Richard Basehart
Theme music composer Lalo Schifrin
Production
Producer(s) Mel Stuart (executive producer)
Editor(s) John Soh
Running time 180 minutes (counting the commercials)
Release
Original release 1968

The book has been reprinted many times (but not updated) since it was published in 1960. Current[when?] in-print editions are:

There is also an audiobook version, released in 2010 by Blackstone Audio and read by Grover Gardner.

See also

References

Explanatory notes

  1. ↑ "The notion that 'rectitude and authenticity [were] integrally German attributes, in contrast to Roman or Latin influences which were degrading' held to have originated with Luther developed with German Romanticism in the 19th Century, and culminated with National Socialism." Johnson 2001.[page needed]

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "National Book Awards – 1961". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
  2. ↑ Evans 2004, p. xvi.
  3. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 102.
  4. ↑ Shirer p. 236.
  5. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 101–02.
  6. ↑ Evans 2004, p. xxiv.
  7. ↑ Shirer, p. 1080.
  8. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 106.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Rosenfeld 1994, p. 101.
  11. ↑ Cedar Rapids Gazette, 9 October 1960, p. 47.
  12. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 100–01.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Shirer, p. 1145.
  15. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 96.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Epstein 1961, p. 230.
  17. ↑ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 95–96, 98.
  18. ↑ Wiskemann 1961, pp. 234–35.
  19. ↑ Peter Tatchell: No place in History for Gay Victims of Nazism, The Independent, July 2, 1995
  20. ↑ Evans 2004, pp. xvi–xvii.

Bibliography

External links

Documentary

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