The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

William Shirer did not write this book from memory alone. He was an American correspondent in Berlin between 1934 and 1940, hired by CBS Radio, and he closely followed the rallies, the speeches and the fear that took over the streets year after year. That is different from a historian who studies the period decades later: he watched the process move in real time.

What sets the book apart is that it joins that lived experience to a pile of documents that only became available after the war: the German government archives, seized by the Allies and used as evidence at Nuremberg. Meeting minutes, telegrams, military orders, diaries of party leaders. Shirer spent years inside that material before publishing the book in 1960, fifteen years after the war ended, combining eyewitness testimony with documentary proof.

The story does not begin with Hitler in power. It begins with Germany defeated in the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, took territory from the country, limited its army and imposed heavy war reparations. For many Germans at the time, it was read as humiliation signed on paper.

In the early 1920s came the hyperinflation: in 1923 a basket of basic groceries could cost billions of marks, and people with savings watched their money turn to dust within months. Anyone who has heard a grandparent tell what it was like to buy bread with bills that lost value by the hour understands that trauma firsthand.

With the crash of 1929, Germany sank again: around 1932 the country had about six million unemployed. It was on that fertile ground, among people with no steady paycheck and no hope for the next month, that a simple promise of order and national pride restored found an audience willing to listen.

Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, tried to make it as a painter without success, and served as a corporal in the German army in the First World War, where he was wounded and decorated. After the defeat, he went back to Munich and, working for the army itself as an informant, began attending the meetings of a small nationalist party, the DAP, which would become the Nazi party.

There he discovered a talent: speaking to a beer hall crowd and pulling people along behind a simple explanation for a complicated crisis. In 1923 he tried to seize power in Munich by force, in the episode known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It failed, he was arrested and served about a year of a five-year sentence.

In prison he dictated Mein Kampf to a cellmate, putting in writing the project of hatred and expansion that would come later, although almost nobody took it seriously at the time. The lesson he took from prison was to trade the armed coup for the slower road of ballots and institutions.