The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“No one could say he had not given ample warning, in writing, from the very beginning.”

In a general sense, this statement applies to all of Hitler’s writings. This particular quotation, however, refers to the first official program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In a speech delivered on February 24, 1920, Hitler identified 25 Nazi Party principles and objectives. Some of these he later ignored, but most, including calls for a Greater German Reich and the destruction of the semi-autonomous states, he carried into effect almost immediately upon taking office in 1933.

“Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but the logical continuation of German history.”

Shirer argues that the roots of Nazi totalitarianism lay deep in the German past, supporting the theme of Nazism as the Logical Continuation of German History. He traces Germans’ antisemitic ideas and anti-democratic habits to Martin Luther, follows them through the disastrous 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and finally to the Prussian militarists who, led by Bismarck, unified Germany under the Second Reich in 1871. It is a sweeping and controversial argument.

“The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried. Most Germans one met—politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors, students, businessmen, labor leaders—struck you as being democratic, liberal, even pacifist.”

Here Shirer describes his impression of the German people in the late 1920s, when the hyper-inflation and misery of the post-war years gave way to a brief period of peace and optimism. Shirer does not say whether he regards this first impression as authentic. Either way, it appears to conflict with his broader interpretation of German history and the German people as uniquely conditioned to authoritarianism.

“The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.”

On March 23, 1933, by a vote of 441-84, the Reichstag voted to approve the Enabling Act, which, under the guise of a public emergency, transferred all parliamentary powers to Chancellor Hitler. These included the power to make laws and approve budgets. By this time, Hitler already had won the support of the upper classes and the Army, who approved of the swiftness with which he had suppressed the Communists. By the summer of 1933, the Center parties also had capitulated to the Nazi dictator.

“Adolf Hitler had come a long way from the gutters of Vienna. He was only forty-five, and this was just the beginning. Even one returning to Germany for the first time since the death of the Republic could see that, whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up in the German people. To what purpose, he had already made clear in the pages of Mein Kampf and in a hundred speeches which had gone unnoticed or unheeded or been ridiculed by so many—by almost everyone—within and especially without the Third Reich.”

This is the final passage of Chapter 7, which describes Hitler’s swift and ruthless consolidation of power in the 18 months following his appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933. In this single quotation, Shirer highlights several of the book’s recurring themes: Hitler’s improbable ascent to power, Shirer’s own first-hand observations of the Third Reich, the violent passions rooted deep in the German psyche and in German history, and the world’s failure to take Hitler’s threats seriously until it was too late.

“Swindled though he was in this instance and in many others, reduced, as we have seen, to a sort of industrial serfdom on subsistence wages, and less prone than any other segment of German society to subscribe to Nazism or to be taken in by its ceaseless propaganda, the German worker, it is only fair to say, did not appear to resent very bitterly his inferior status in the Third Reich.”

The “instance” here refers to a scheme by which the Nazi government defrauded German workers. On the promise that they would receive a brand-new Volkswagen, German workers paid installments out of their wages, and yet no such vehicles were ever delivered. Shirer notes that in spite of this swindle and “many others,” the German worker did not complain. Furthermore, German workers, as a group, had no ideological predisposition toward Nazism; in fact, they were far more likely to support trade unions and collective bargaining. Still, they appeared docile. Later in this same paragraph, and elsewhere in the book, Shirer suggests that “centuries of regimentation” had fitted the German character for this kind of submission.

“It was this writer’s impression in Berlin from that moment until the end that had Chamberlain frankly told Hitler that Britain would do what it ultimately did in the face of Nazi aggression, the Fuehrer would never have embarked on the adventures which brought on the Second World War—an impression which has been immensely strengthened by the study of the secret German documents. This was the well-meaning Prime Minister’s fatal mistake.”

In May 1938, in response to German troops’ movements, the British and French governments for the first time employed “strenuous and persistent diplomatic pressure” on the Nazis, “warning Germany that aggression against Czechoslovakia meant a European war” (364). Based on his close-up view of the Nazi regime and especially his post-war access to captured German records, Shirer suggests that this diplomatic pressure, had it been maintained throughout the year, likely would have kept Hitler at bay. Prime Minister Chamberlain, however, could not bring himself to guarantee Czechoslovakia’s independence with an ironclad promise of British military intervention. Hitler correctly interpreted this as a sign that Britain would go to great lengths to avoid war, even if it meant surrendering Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

“But the British and French were in no mood to allow such a matter as the sanctity of treaties to interfere with the course they had set.”

In 1938, the “course” the British and French “had set” required that Czechoslovakia, for the sake of averting a broader European conflict, yield to Hitler’s territorial demands. This course violated several existing treaties, including the 1925 German-Czech Treaty, which allowed for arbitration in cases of territorial dispute.

“Whatever blame may be heaped on the archappeasers in London and Paris, and great it undoubtedly is, the fact remains that the German generals themselves, and their civilian coconspirators, failed at an opportune moment to act on their own.”

The most “opportune moment” to depose Hitler—a moment that would never again present itself—came in the summer of 1938, when German generals knew that Hitler was determined to plunge them into a war they could not win. Years later, after World War II, some German generals and other conspirators insisted that in 1938 they had planned to arrest Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, and they would have made the attempt had it not been for the failures of Britain and France to stand up to the dictator. After the Munich Conference, Hitler’s prestige soared to such heights that it would have been impossible to contemplate any internal uprising short of assassination.

“Germany was ready to divide up Eastern Europe, including Poland, with the Soviet Union.”

In light of the ferocity that later characterized Nazi Germany’s war on the Soviet Union, it is easy to forget that in the summer of 1939 Hitler needed assurances of Soviet neutrality before he could attack Poland with confidence. Stalin, the ruthless Soviet dictator, leaped at the chance to strike a deal with Hitler that would bring eastern Poland plus the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia into the Soviet sphere. For reasons that defy comprehension, Stalin seems to have been genuinely surprised when, two years later, Hitler hurled his armies against the Soviet Union.

“It was rarely easy, as readers who have got this far in this book are aware, to penetrate the strange and fantastic workings of Hitler’s fevered mind.”

In general, this quotation applies to most of Hitler’s words and actions. In this specific instance, it refers to Hitler’s offer of August 25, 1939, to “guarantee the British Empire” in exchange for British neutrality in Germany’s impending war on Poland. Shirer notes that Hitler made this absurd offer merely hours before his armies were set to attack (news of an Anglo-Polish treaty arrived that same evening and made Hitler pause, which delayed the assault for six days).

“Despite all my experience in the Third Reich I asked such a naive question!”

In his diary entry for August 31, 1939, the day before Hitler attacked Poland, Shirer noted that everyone he met in Berlin that day seemed to be against war. Shirer then wrote, “How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?” This is the “naive question,” which reveals a great deal about Hitler’s success. If Shirer, who spent years inside the Third Reich and observed its high officials up-close, could ask such a question about a totalitarian regime, then it is small wonder that so many world leaders also failed to understand that regime until it was too late.

“Chamberlain was not fated to live to see that day. He died, a broken man—though still a member of the cabinet—on November 9, 1940.”

The name of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who orchestrated the Munich capitulation that abandoned Czechoslovakia to Nazi terror in October 1938, has come down through history as synonymous with pusillanimous appeasement. In a speech to the House of Commons on September 3, 1939, however, Chamberlain expressed hope that he would “live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-established.” In fact, he lived only long enough to see Luftwaffe bombs terrorize London from above. Throughout the book, Shirer is highly critical of Chamberlain, but Shirer also inserts a generous tribute from Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, who noted on November 12, 1940, that the late prime minister had sincerely pursued peace only to be “deceived and cheated by a wicked man” (619).

“It is not without significance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I.G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.”

The “death camp” in question was Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi extermination facilities in Poland where SS fanatics carried out the Holocaust. Shortly after the camp opened on June 14, 1940, the IG Farben directors built on-site a synthetic coal-oil and rubber plant, which benefited from forced labor. IG Farben also held the patent on Zyklon-B, the chemical used to murder millions of Jewish people in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Shirer cites IG Farben as an example of broader German complicity in Hitler’s crimes.

“The demonic Nazi dictator had obtained a settlement in the East ‘in favor of Germany’ by armed aggression; the good German conspirators wanted the same thing handed to them by the British with the Pope’s blessings.”

In February 1940, anti-Hitler conspirator Ulrich von Hassell, a German diplomat and former Ambassador to Rome, met with an unofficial British agent to propose peace and promise that the conspirators would overthrow Hitler but only if the British would agree to preserve German territorial gains since the start of the war. Hassell even suggested that the Pope would be willing to mediate between Britain and Germany provided the Eastern question settled “in favor of Germany.”

“A deliverance Dunkirk was to the British.”

Dunkirk, where British vessels successfully evacuated more than 300,000 trapped Allied soldiers in May and June 1940, illustrates one of Hitler’s fatal weaknesses. On May 24, for political reasons, Hitler ordered his advancing panzers to halt to allow Goering’s Luftwaffe a share in the glory of wiping out the retreating Allies. The two-day delay allowed for reinforcements, fortifications, and the eventual evacuation of thousands who would live to fight the Nazis another day. The Dunkirk “halt” order shows Hitler’s tendency toward megalomaniac micromanagement of military affairs, which would cost him dearly in future campaigns.

“All that stood between him and German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military machine the world had ever seen.”

In the summer of 1940, following his swift victories in Belgium, Holland, and France, Hitler controlled nearly the entire European continent. At this moment, he once again made public professions of peace, and many Germans seem to have believed that the British would give up the fight, which, at that moment, would have seemed hopeless to any impartial observer. Churchill, however, rallied the British people and, in one of the most stirring speeches ever made, promised that they would “never surrender” (738). Although ruthless and deceitful as always, Hitler, here and elsewhere, appears to have been genuinely perplexed by the British.

“Thus was the so-called ‘Commissar Order’ issued; it was to be much discussed at the Nuremberg trial when the great moral question was posed to the German generals whether they should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences.”

In March 1941, Hitler informed his commanders that the coming war against the Soviet Union would be carried out with special brutality. It would be an ideological and a racial war. Hence the Soviet commissars, political officials whom Hitler called “bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism,” would be “liquidated” (830). Although this particular order applied to Soviet prisoners-of-war, the Nazis applied its barbaric principles to all the peoples of Eastern Europe.

“Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? In all the memoranda concerning the German directives for the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting—as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order.”

As they prepared to invade the Soviet Union, the Nazi leadership’s most enthusiastic murderers—Hitler, Goering, Himmler, etc.—made it clear to the commanders of the armed forces that German plunder of conquered lands would cause millions to die of starvation. Unlike the Commissar Order (see previous quotation), which demanded the execution of fellow officers on the battlefield, this planned starvation of Russian civilians did not compel German generals to lodge a protest, let alone take action against the barbaric Nazi leaders. Examples such as this fuel Shirer’s skepticism of some generals’ post-war claims to have resisted Hitler’s reign of terror.

“Before the postwar trials in Germany it had been generally believed that the mass killings were exclusively the work of a relatively few fanatical S.S. leaders. But the records of the courts leave no doubt of the complicity of a number of German businessmen, not only the Krupps and the directors of the I.G. Farben chemical trust but smaller entrepreneurs who outwardly must have seemed to be the most prosaic and decent of men, pillars—like good businessmen everywhere—of their communities.”

IG Farben held the patent on Zyklon-B, the chemical used to commit mass murder in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The fact that even “smaller entrepreneurs” profited from the Holocaust raises the question of how seemingly “ordinary” people can carry out the worst atrocities.

“There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.”

The Holocaust death toll of “nearly” five million “[b]y any estimate” refers to several studies in the 1950s that placed the final total around 4.5 million—ghastly enough but well short of the now-generally-accepted figure of 6 million. Shirer traces the Holocaust to dark prejudices Hitler developed as a young man in multi-ethnic Vienna. At the same time, Shirer acknowledges questions that can never really be answered with satisfaction: Did the totalitarian dictator impress his bigotry on the people who supported him? Or did that same evil, accompanied by the desire to act on it, already exist in his supporters?

“It was at this dark moment in their affairs that Hitler and his lieutenants began to clutch at a straw of hope: that the Allies would fall out, that Britain and America would become frightened of the prospect of the Red armies overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the old Continent from Bolshevism.”

The Nazi leaders’ “dark moment” came in September 1943, when Hitler and Goebbels discussed declining war fortunes and what might be done to revive them. The idea that Britain and America would “join” the Nazis to stave off a Soviet advance was preposterous. As postwar events showed, however, the Western democracies eventually did view a vanquished-yet-rebuilding West Germany as a bulwark against Soviet communism. Hitler often demonstrated ignorance of the United States, but, in this instance, his assessment of US geopolitical objectives was at least half correct.

“They were terribly late.”

This is Shirer’s understated assessment of the anti-Hitler conspirators’ decision to finally kill Hitler. “Better late than never,” Shirer concludes (1047). The conspirators made the decision at Claus von Stauffenberg’s home on July 16, 1944. Four days later, Stauffenberg himself detonated the bomb at Hitler’s headquarters that injured but did not kill the Fuehrer and brought bloody reprisals against the conspirators, along with thousands of others.