The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
1280
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
1280Hardcover(Reissue)
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Overview
The Nazi party was a real life evil empire and this account of their rise and fall is meticulously put together from the crazy amount of evidence they left behind in their surrender. This is a study of what exactly has to go wrong for an empire like that to come to life.
No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.
The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.
Here is the complete story of Hitler's empire, one of the most important stories ever told, written by one of the men best equipped to write it.
This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781451642599 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2011 |
| Edition description: | Reissue |
| Pages: | 1280 |
| Sales rank: | 38,049 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.40(d) |
About the Author
Ron Rosenbaum is the bestselling author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars and has written or edited six other books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He writes a column for Slate and lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
... Germanism and was skeptical of his Roman Catholic clericalism and his loyalty to the Hapsburgs. Had not the old Emperor Franz-Josef twice refused to sanction Lueger's election as burgomaster?
But in the end Hitler was forced to acknowledge the genius of this man who knew how to win the support of the masses, who understood modern social problems and the importance of propaganda and oratory in swaying the multitude. Hitler could not help but admire the way Lueger dealt with the powerful Church — "his policy was fashioned with infinite shrewdness." And, finally, Lueger "was quick to make use of all available means for winning the support of long-established institutions, so as to be able to derive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from those old sources of power."
Here in a nutshell were the ideas and techniques which Hitler was later to use in constructing his own political party and in leading it to power in Germany. His originality lay in his being the only politician of the Right to apply them to the German scene after the First World War. It was then that the Nazi movement, alone among the nationalist and conservative parties, gained a great mass following and, having achieved this, won over the support of the Army, the President of the Republic and the associations of big business — three "long-established institutions" of great power, which led to the chancellorship of Germany. The lessons learned in Vienna proved useful indeed.
Dr. Karl Lueger had been a brilliant orator, but the Pan-German Party had lacked effective public speakers. Hitler took notice of this and in Mein Kampf makes much of the importance of oratory in politics.
The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.
The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes.
Though refraining from actual participation in Austrian party politics, young Hitler already was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences which he found in Vienna's flophouses, soup kitchens and on its street corners. It was to develop into a talent (as this author, who later was to listen to scores of his most important speeches, can testify) more formidable than any other in the Germany between the wars, and it was to contribute in a large measure to his astounding success.
And finally in Hitler's Vienna experience there were the Jews. In Linz, he says, there had been few Jews. "At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father's lifetime." At high school there was a Jewish boy — "but we didn't give the matter any thought...I even took them [the Jews] for Germans."
According to Hitler's boyhood friend, this is not the truth. "When I first met Adolf Hitler," says August Kubizek, recalling their days together in Linz, "his anti-Semitism was already pronounced...Hitler was already a confirmed anti-Semite when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Vienna might have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it."
"Then," says Hitler, "I came to Vienna."
Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions...oppressed by the hardship of my own lot, I gained at first no insight into the inner stratification of the people in this gigantic city. Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them...The Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore on grounds of human tolerance I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently the tone of the Viennese anti-Semitic press seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.
One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. "I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?"
Hitler's answer may be readily guessed. He claims, though, that before answering he decided "to try to relieve my doubts by books." He buried himself in anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at the time. Then he took to the streets to observe the "phenomenon" more closely. "Wherever I went," he says, "I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity...Later I often grew sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers."
Next, he says, he discovered the "moral stain on this 'chosen people'...Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light — a kike!" The Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitution and the white-slave traffic. "When for the first time," he relates, "I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back."
There is a great deal of morbid sexuality in Hitler's ravings about the Jews. This was characteristic of Vienna's anti-Semitic press of the time, as it later was to be of the obscene Nuremberg weekly Der Stuermer, published by one of Hitler's favorite cronies, Julius Streicher, Nazi boss of Franconia, a noted pervert and one of the most unsavory characters in the Third Reich. Mein Kampf is sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouth Jews seducing innocent Christian girls and thus adulterating their blood. Hitler can write of the "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards." As Rudolf Olden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler's anti-Semitism may have been his tortured sexual envy. Though he was in his early twenties, so far as is known he had no relations of any kind with women during his sojourn in Vienna.
"Gradually," Hitler relates, "I began to hate them...For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite."
He was to remain a blind and fanatical one to the bitter end; his last testament, written a few hours before his death, would contain a final blast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing him and the Third Reich. This burning hatred, which was to infect so many Germans in that empire, would lead ultimately to a massacre so horrible and on such a scale as to leave an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as man on earth.
In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond — an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.
Probably he left Austria to escape military service. This was not because he was a coward but because he loathed the idea of serving in the ranks with Jews, Slavs and other minority races of the empire. In Mein Kampf Hitler states that he went to Munich in the spring of 1912, but this is an error. A police register lists him as living in Vienna until May 1913.
His own stated reasons for leaving Austria are quite grandiose.
My inner revulsion toward the Hapsburg State steadily grew...I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity — Jews, and more Jews. To me the giant city seemed the embodiment of racial desecration...The longer I lived in this city the more my hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture...For all these reasons a longing rose stronger and stronger in me to go at last whither since my childhood secret desires and secret love had drawn me.
His destiny in that land he loved so dearly was to be such as not even he, in his wildest dreams, could have then imagined. He was, and would remain until shortly before he became Chancellor, technically a foreigner, an Austrian, in the German Reich. It is only as an Austrian who came of age in the last decade before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, who failed to take root in its civilized capital, who embraced all the preposterous prejudices and hates then rife among its German-speaking extremists and who failed to grasp what was decent and honest and honorable in the vast majority of his fellow citizens, were they Czechs or Jews or Germans, poor or well off, artists or artisans, that Hitler can be understood. It is doubtful if any German from the north, from the Rhineland in the west, from East Prussia or even from Bavaria in the south could have had in his blood and mind out of any possible experience exactly the mixture of ingredients which propelled Adolf Hitler to the heights he eventually reached. To be sure, there was added a liberal touch of unpredictable genius.
But in the spring of 1913 his genius had not yet shown. In Munich, as in Vienna, he remained penniless, friendless and without a regular job. And then in the summer of 1914 the war came, snatching him, like millions of others, into its grim clutches. On August 3 he petitioned King Ludwig Ill of Bavaria for permission to volunteer in a Bavarian regiment and it was granted.
This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond could satisfy not only his passion to serve his beloved adopted country in what he says he believed was a fight for its existence — "to be or not to be" — but he could escape from all the failures and frustrations of his personal life.
"To me," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "those hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. I am not ashamed to say that, carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment, I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live in such a time...For me, as for every German, there now began the most memorable period of my life. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle all the past fell away into oblivion."
For Hitler the past, with all its shabbiness, loneliness and disappointments, was to remain in the shadows, though it shaped his mind and character forever afterward. The war, which now would bring death to so many millions, brought for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life.
Copyright © 1959, 1960 by William L. Shirer
Copyright renewed © 1987, 1988 by William L. Shirer
Afterword copyright © 1990 by William L. Shirer
Table of Contents
| Foreword | vii | |
| Book 1 | The Rise of Adolf Hitler | |
| 1. | Birth of the Third Reich | 17 |
| 2. | Birth of the Nazi Party | 52 |
| 3. | Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch | 83 |
| 4. | The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich | 120 |
| Book 2 | Triumph and Consolidation | |
| 5. | The Road to Power: 1925-31 | 167 |
| 6. | The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 | 211 |
| 7. | The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34 | 263 |
| 8. | Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37 | 320 |
| Book 3 | The Road to War | |
| 9. | The First Steps: 1934-37 | 385 |
| 10. | Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht | 423 |
| 11. | Anschluss: The Rape of Austria | 440 |
| 12. | The Road to Munich | 485 |
| 13. | Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist | 578 |
| 14. | The Turn of Poland | 612 |
| 15. | The Nazi-Soviet Pact | 685 |
| 16. | The Last Days of Peace | 726 |
| 17. | The Launching of World War II | 791 |
| Book 4 | War: Early Victories and the Turning Point | |
| 18. | The Fall of Poland | 827 |
| 19. | Sitzkrieg in the West | 838 |
| 20. | The Conquest of Denmark and Norway | 889 |
| 21. | Victory in the West | 939 |
| 22. | Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain | 996 |
| 23. | Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia | 1040 |
| 24. | A Turn of the Tide | 1117 |
| 25. | The Turn of the United States | 1140 |
| 26. | The Great Turning Point: 1942--Stalingrad and El Alamein | 1180 |
| Book 5 | Beginning of the end | |
| 27. | The New Order | 1223 |
| 28. | The Fall of Mussolini | 1293 |
| 29. | The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler | 1316 |
| Book 6 | The Fall of the Third Reich | |
| 30. | The Conquest of Germany | 1409 |
| 31. | Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich | 1437 |
| A Brief Epilogue | 1480 | |
| Notes | 1487 | |
| Acknowledgements | 1527 | |
| Bibliography | 1533 | |
| Index | 1549 |
