Where to Start with William L. Shirer: A Reading Guide
Where to start with William L. Shirer — how to approach The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his monumental eyewitness history of Nazi Germany. A complete reading guide.
By Oliver Kane
William L. Shirer (1904–1993) was an American journalist and CBS Radio correspondent who was stationed in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, reporting on Nazi Germany as it rose to the height of its power, invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, and launched the Second World War. He kept a secret diary throughout his time there — published in 1941 as Berlin Diary — and spent the following decade researching the comprehensive history that became The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). It was an immediate bestseller, sold millions of copies worldwide, and has never gone out of print.
Where to Start: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)
The essential William L. Shirer — and the most comprehensive and readable single-volume history of Nazi Germany ever produced. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is one of those rare works of history that combines the narrative power of a journalist who was present with the documentary depth of a scholar who spent years in the archives. No subsequent single-volume treatment has displaced it.
Shirer’s qualification is unique. He was there. As CBS Radio’s chief correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, he attended the Nuremberg rallies and experienced the spectacle of mass manipulation from within the crowd; he watched German troops march into Vienna; he covered the fall of France and was present at the armistice in the railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, the same carriage in which Germany had signed the armistice ending the First World War. He kept a secret diary — risking arrest to document what he observed — that gives the history an eyewitness texture that no researcher working from archives alone can replicate.
The book opens with Hitler’s origins and early career — the failed Viennese artist, the Great War veteran, the beer-hall putschist — and traces the development of the Nazi ideology with painstaking attention to what was actually said and written. Shirer’s most persistent argument is that Hitler’s intentions were openly stated in Mein Kampf and in hundreds of speeches before he came to power, and that the catastrophe that followed was partly a consequence of the world’s failure to take those stated intentions seriously. The book forces the reader to confront this failure directly, by quoting at length the documents that were available to anyone who chose to read them.
The consolidation of power after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 is covered in granular detail: the Reichstag fire and the emergency decree that suspended civil liberties, the Enabling Act that made Hitler’s dictatorship legal, the Night of the Long Knives that eliminated internal opposition within the Nazi movement, the removal of military leadership that might have resisted. Shirer shows the speed with which democratic institutions were dismantled and the degree to which the institutions’ own representatives facilitated their own destruction.
The Holocaust receives extended and unflinching treatment. Shirer draws on the captured Nazi documents that became available at Nuremberg — the bureaucratic correspondence, the operational orders, the conference minutes — to demonstrate that the genocide was systematic, institutional, and the product of deliberate policy at the highest levels, not the spontaneous excess of individual sadism. Reading this material sixty years after publication, the documentation remains devastating.
The military history sections, covering the campaigns from Poland through the Soviet Union to the collapse in 1945, are both comprehensive and readable — a combination that the operational complexity of the Second World War makes difficult to achieve simultaneously. Shirer does not lose sight of the strategic picture while maintaining the human texture that makes the history intelligible rather than merely comprehensive.
At 1,249 pages, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is the most significant time commitment in any serious reader’s encounter with the Second World War. It rewards that commitment fully.
Reading William L. Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is Shirer’s essential work. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full William L. Shirer bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the William L. Shirer author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with William L. Shirer?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960) is Shirer's essential and defining work — the most comprehensive and readable single-volume history of Nazi Germany ever written. Over 1,200 pages, combining Shirer's firsthand experience as a CBS correspondent in Berlin with the captured Nazi documents that became available after the war. Remains essential reading over sixty years after publication.
What is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich about?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich traces the history of Nazi Germany from Hitler's birth and early political career through the consolidation of power, the war in Europe, the Holocaust, and the Reich's final collapse in 1945. Shirer covers political history, military history, and the Nazi ideological apparatus with equal depth, drawing on the captured Nazi documents from the Nuremberg trials and his own years as an eyewitness journalist in Berlin from 1934 to 1940.
Is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich still the standard history?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published in 1960 and subsequent scholarship has modified some of Shirer's interpretations and supplemented his account with sources that were not available to him. It remains the most comprehensive and readable single-volume account and an essential starting point. Readers who want the most current scholarly consensus will want to supplement it with Ian Kershaw's two-volume Hitler biography (Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis) or Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy.
What should I read after The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?
After The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War) provides the most comprehensive contemporary scholarly treatment with access to sources unavailable to Shirer. For the war itself, Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and Berlin cover the conflict's decisive turning points from both sides. For the Holocaust specifically, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men examines the perpetrators' psychology with disturbing precision.
