Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

The definitive biography of one of the darkest times in modern history; the twelve years when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army ruled over Germany. This is an eyewitness account of the meteoric rise and fall of the Nazi empire, including the earth-shattering events of World War Two and the Holocaust.

The standard work by which all others on the subject are still measured . . . Erudite, comprehensive and detailed, always lively and readable, it is the model of what a popular narrative history should be.

One of the most important works of history of our time.

In this political season, William L. Shirer’s mammoth history of Hitler’s Germany seems a useful guide to how a skilled demagogue can seize and destroy a great nation.

A splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions.

A remarkably successful effort to write a major history of Nazi Germany. A serious work of scholarship.

William L. Shirer ranks as one of the greatest of all American foreign correspondents. He lived and worked in Paris, Belin, Vienna, and Rome. But it was above all as correspondent in Germany for the Chicago Tribune and later for the Columbia Broadcasting System in the late 1930s that his reputation was established. He subsequently wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is hailed as a classic, and after World War Two he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. In the post-war years he wrote in a variety of fields, and in his seventies he learned Russian, publishing a biography of Tolstoy at the age of 89. He died in 1994. His Berlin broadcasts were published posthumously by Hutchinson in 1999.

It was Hitler’s boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Instead it lasted only twelve. But into its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known. 
 
William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. He was also present at the Nuremberg trials. 
 
First published sixty years ago, Shirer’s account of the years 1933–45, when the Nazis, under the rule of their despotic leader Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany is held up as a classic of its time. Some of his views have not stood the test of time but in this book Shirer explores how the Nazis commandeered the Holocaust, one of the most shocking acts of evil in modern history, plunged the world into a second war, and changed the face of modern history and modern Europe forever. 
 
‘One of the most important works of history of our time.’ New York Times 
 
‘I can think of no book which I would rather put in the hands of anyone who wanted to find out what happened in Germany between 1930 and 1945, and why the history of those years should never be forgotten’ Alan Bullock

William L Shirer

Before Britain and Germany went to war in 1939, Ed Murrow of CBS sent his star reporter William Shirer to report from Berlin on what was really happening in Hitler's Germany.  And there Shirer stayed until December 1940, reporting on the war from within the Reich, battling against the censors and revealing to American and British audiences how Hitler, the SS, and his armed forces were conducting the war, and what it meant to live in a Nazi state.  All through the campaigns leading to the fall of France, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, Shirer provided a unique and dramatic by-line on history as it happened, and now his writings have been gathered together for the first time into a vivid, compelling and urgent narrative, one of the great first-hand documents of the Second World War.

William L Shirer

Books by William L Shirer

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