The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A Book Review

I am sitting on the deck of our beach house on a clear June day in Norfolk, nursing a bee-sting on my toe from when I unknowingly disturbed a hive earlier in the day. The insistent wavelets are lapping at the warm beach across the dune in the sluggish hours of the afternoon. My young niece clears her throat in front of me expectantly, and I look up. She is waiting for her cousins to go down to the beach with her for the morning to play. She asks, “What are you reading?”

“A book about Germany in the 1930s and 40s,” I say. “Well actually, it’s about the world back then.”

“Really?” she says, awed. “Is it interesting?”

“Yes.”

Her brown eyes narrow on the 1100+ page volume intently, her sundress over her pink bathing suit fluttering in the warm salt breeze. She respectfully tips the front of the book up and sounds out, “By William Shirer.”

I nod gravely, in affirmation.

She runs over to the gate that leads down to the beach, as she hears her cousins tramping over the sand to the shore. “William L. Shirer?” she asks me quirkily, looking back over her shoulder to me for the briefest moment.

“Yes.” I smile.

Satisfied now, she skips out over the flagstones, clutching an orange beach ball.

I am 42 years old, and just now reading this work. In some ways I cannot believe it has taken me this long to get around to it. But in others, I know that my thought life will be divided into two epochs: before I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and after. And I know too that I could not have absorbed much of its import before having the life experience to see what human beings are really capable of.

Among the most daunting obstacles to understanding World War II and the people and events from which it was comprised must surely be the immense volume of information that is required for a student of history to digest. The veiled aspects of the many interactions between world leaders, the subtle clashes in power dynamics, the rise of new technologies for communication and for war, the ponderous slowness of some developments and the rapid pace of others, the underlying international tensions that quickly exploded into unspeakable atrocities, the fascinating interplay of philosophy and art and statesmanship and rhetoric: all these present a most formidable barrier to perception. But ironically, the overwhelming flood of knowledge that became available with the sudden collapse of the Nazi regime was one of the things that prompted Shirer to undertake his monumental project decades before most classical historians would have attempted it. And with that decision (knowingly, as he quotes Thucydides who lived through the war he chronicled) the journalist who witnessed the duping of a nation for the destruction of a world also set pen to paper to tell mankind what had happened.

For the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, and with him the German people, was an unprecedented narrative in the history of mankind. The story begins as it should, in a small town in Austria, with the depiction of a small boy whose life from his earliest years would be characterized by struggle, from the first time his father tried to quench his desire to someday be an artist. And not a Jacobean struggle with God, as his Christian upbringing would perhaps have suggested to him, which would have accepted his weakness and acknowledged his need for a higher power to give him a law to live by, but a Nietzschean struggle with man, which would countenance only victory and would seek the help of a lower power if his ends could be met thereby. Nor was the lower power unwilling. At our most generous, Hitler’s meteoric rise and uncanny sense of destiny cannot but be seen through a Mephistophelian lens. It is much more likely that the man actually was demon-possessed, which view Shirer does not discredit with his many cameos of the Führer’s diabolical rages and alternating moments of uncannily shrewd perception.

There is, perhaps, nothing that contributed to the rise of the Third Reich more than the blindness of many world leaders, which Shirer presents truthfully. And his truthfulness does not end with other people. He humbly admits that his own myopia as a journalist in Germany in the 1930s was just as real. In a stunning counterpoint to the image that is prevalent for most of my generation, he paints for us a picture of the culture that is just as bright and attractive as it was for him. The sun was shining, people were young and strong, money was flowing in the Weimar Republic again, and anyone who spoke against the tide of fortune was simply ignored. And there were those who spoke against it. He recalls those who dimmed the glory of the ascent with their murmurs of abuse and deception, and how they were ostracized and then eventually persecuted. Such is the fate of those who speak truth to power.

For all those who had the courage to speak out against the juggernaut, there were many, many more who saw it but did nothing. Even Churchill with his shrewd historical perspective and mighty rhetoric was caught off guard, as in the invasion of Finland. But he had the humility to realize it and change course. Much of this story is the role that simple virtues had to play in the dreadful conflict with evil: how truth can combat lies, how integrity can combat manipulation, how courage can combat fear.

Accordingly, Shirer takes extreme pains to speak with scrupulous honesty about Hitler’s brilliance in situations like his strategic move into the Rhineland, the negotiations at Munich, and his triumph over the Reichstag and establishment of complete control over the country. But that truth is tempered with frank acknowledgements of his critical mistakes: the fateful invasion of Poland, the hesitation that cost him the victory at Dunkirk and the delusional pride he shared with Goering that fueled it, his failure to realize the stern resolve of the British people, his complete inability to reckon with America and the role she would play.

He has a deeply engaging style: highly academic, painstaking & thorough, cuttingly sarcastic at times, yet conversational & lucid. He paints brilliant, sparkling portraits of men who stepped forward when their time was right, to speak and to act with a courage that has been vindicated by the ages. You can tell when his heart is breaking at the atrocities that were committed upon the helpless, taking his mind back to when the world realized there was a demon loose in Europe.

Somehow with his careful steps he achieves a stirring epic that provides a 40,000-foot view of the movements of nations through the fog of war, while giving a blow-by-blow account of the conflicts and developments throughout. Some of the best historical analysis is the acknowledgement of things that happened according to predictable course, such as Hitler manipulating and bluffing his way into Czechoslovakia, vs. noting things that do not really scan at all, such as Hitler continuing in his support of Mussolini even though the Italian leader was too weak and indecisive for him to make much use of. All these details tell the truth about the brilliance and foolishness of the young corporal destined for meteoric ascent and decline.

Irony is the most common echo in this narrative. The thwarted Austrian who never realized his dream of being an artist became one of the greatest manipulators and stage actors in the history of modern times, as he pleaded and threatened and cajoled and stormed against his dread captives who were also his audience. Perhaps the greatest irony of all was this: The military strategy and technology and will that belonged to the greatest army of its day thus far, thwarted by something so very simple as the 20-mile barrier of the English Channel, defended really by not much more than the indomitable will of the English people. The Germans knew how to achieve brilliant victories on land, but they knew nothing of the sea or of how to prevail upon it. There was no Fatherland for them beyond the water’s edge. They who could outthink and outmaneuver just about anyone (except Patton) within a Panzer’s reach of their little corner of Europe had no concept of global warfare. And out of this first event in the history of the Third Reich – a failure of one of Hitler’s strategic initiatives – arose the second great error of its kind: Hitler began in his supreme frustration to think again about the conquest of Russia.

Second only to that paradox must have been Hitler’s complete inability, for all his uncanny military and political shrewdness, to conceive of what America would bring to the table, when their willingness to come to the aid of the valiant Britons was coupled with the totally unforeseen (by the Axis as well as the Allies) attack on Pearl Harbor. The three-quarter million tons of American and British shipping a month his U-boats were sinking, at a pace faster than Allied shipyards could then replace, would serve only as a catalyst to the inferno that grew in the hearts of those for whom a just war was cause enough to lay down their lives for their country. This inability of the Führer’s was ironic because through it he systematically rejected the advice of his High Command as it was predicated on that most basic of the sciences for which Germany has so long and rightly been known: basic mathematics. Goering told him to stick to destroying the RAF fields around Britain and they wouldn’t have any left; Hitler insisted on focusing on bombing London, and the city was able to hold out against him. Brauchitsch told him if he waited four weeks to invade Russia he would be stuck in the same trap that thwarted Napoleon and Charles XII; Hitler insisted, and missed his opportunity to avoid the deadly subzero Soviet winter and Zhukov’s counterattack by almost exactly four weeks. Rommel told him he did not have the resources to do what he needed to in Africa; Hitler told him to go on sick leave, and allowed Patton and Montgomery to gain a foothold that lost Germany control of the Mediterranean. The cold calculation that had served him so well in his ascendancy left him vulnerable when he was at fever’s pitch. And his generals were kept so busy trying to avoid disaster that none of them forced him to do the math on what the US was capable of when provoked.

The pinnacle of Hitler’s achievements was certainly at Compiègne, at the armistice with France. All the difficulty and pain and humiliation of the German people for the last twenty-two years were embodied in one person, in his hatred and contempt and burning desire for revenge. And he achieved that revenge. Was it worth it for Adolf Hitler? No-one can tell, except when with Shirer we somberly watch his final hours, aged and desolated by the ruin of an anguished fire raging within him, together with the one person who had never questioned or “betrayed” him, ending with the crack of a pistol shot that signaled the true end of an era. With him, perhaps, died the greatest scourge the world has ever known; and it was not the Flagellum Dei.

In the wreckage of a great civilization, then, looking into people’s eyes as they slowly reckon with the fact that their Führer was not the Messiah they supposed, quailing at the stern rebuke in the American and British troops’ martial law, despairing at the cold vengefulness burning in the Soviets’ retaliation, our hearts are once again broken for mankind. For the Germans were people too. Duped and cajoled into a terrifying vision of military greatness, they lost sight of something so beautiful as a young girl in a pink sundress with an orange beach ball. Something so simple and poignant as a niece talking with her uncle on a sunny day at the beach. Something so eternal as a God who rules over us with grace and mercy, bestowing common (that word that will never again be the same for those who have known deep terror and loss) grace on us with infinite care. The kingdoms of the earth rise and fall, but His Word will never pass away.

JV