The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

For the past five months, I’ve been making my way through William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It turned up in my building’s lending library, a hardbound volume, nearly three inches thick. By the time I finished, the top and bottom of the binding were a little rough and the pages sagged just a bit, all on account of my holding it in my hands each night as my bedtime reading.

It’s quite an engaging read. For all its detail, for the span of time it covers, and especially given the events that it describes, the individual moments lead continually from one to the next. Shirer starts with the birth and early life of Adolf Hitler, and while it seemed a bit dull at the time, it played into his larger picture of the man in full.

My own interest in the Third Reich comes not only from a broader interest in history, but in having lived in West Germany in the 1980s. I was a teenager, and we were only two generations away from World War II; a child born during the Third Reich would have been just past middle age. While Germany had moved on in many ways, there were so many reminders, including our purpose for being there. My father was in the US Army and we were part of the American armed forces deployed in southern Germany, which was one of the four sectors split up by the allies in the postwar occupation. West Germany was an ally, but the East was not, and the consequences of the war loomed large.

We lived in Ansbach, about an hour’s drive from Nuremberg, the city where the Nazis held their great rallies. There was an American base there, larger than those in Ansbach, with some of the better shopping available. We celebrated one Fourth of July in the old fairgrounds where the Nazi rallies were held, the very same one that is seen in footage of the Nazi broken cross being demolished after the war.

Now, nearly two generations since my time in Germany, the last generations to have lived through the war are in old age, and memory of the events that led to the Third Reich fade with them. Coincidentally, we're at the century mark of the Great War that preceded it, the outcome of which greatly influenced the conditions that resulted in Hitler's rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich.

The Smithsonian Magazine has a good retrospective of Shirer's work. While reading this book, I also finished the audiobook edition of Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about the Great Powers before the Great War, and, for good measure, season two of "The Man in the High Castle", a show about life in an alternate universe where the Axis powers won World War Two.


The book filled in some gaps in my knowledge of German interwar history. I already knew that a wrecked German economy had, after World War I, struggled to form a new government, was saddled with severe reparations payments, and that the failure of this Weimar Republic had precipitated Hitler’s rise to power. What I didn’t know was that Germany had in fact had a civil war, a revolution that was close in many ways to the Russian revolutions just a few years earlier, and that the Kaiser, the German Emperor, had in fact not been removed from his throne by the Allies, but evicted by the German Army.

In fact, the army was essentially running the country throughout most of the twenties. Rather than assume power directly, they simply kept everyone else in check. Hitler’s early attempts to seize power involved, in various ways, attempts to co-opt or bargain with the army. It’s not difficult to see a similar situation in Egypt now (2017) where the army is so integrated into the political and economic fabric of the country that there’s no independence from it.

Ultimately, the army’s failure was that they thought they could co-opt Hitler, when in fact he used the army to solidify his control of the country once the Nazis were voted into power, and Hitler was given the Chancellorship as leader of the most powerful political party in Germany. While Hitler had tried to take power in his famed Beer Hall Putsch, following that failure he told his followers that they would have to take power by purely legal means, and that is exactly what they did.

From there on I knew the broad strokes: the Reichstag fire, Kristalnacht, the concentration camps, the annexation of Austria and later the Sudetenland (don't forget the Rhineland), and eventually the invasion of Poland, which finally prompted the war. Yet here again, the details resonate with modern times. The Germans sent agents provocateur to attack German facilities in the guise of Polish uniforms; they trained Germans in Poland to rise up against the Poles, and before that, trained Germans in Czechoslovakia to agitate for annexation, and Austrians in Austria to press for Anschluss. It’s not hard to see similar actions by modern Russia in the Crimea and the Ukraine.

Here in the present, as we make our way through the centennial years of the Great War, World War I, Shirer’s detailed accounting of the Great Powers’ response to Hitler casts a more nuanced light on the now-disfavored attempts at appeasement prior to World War II. World War I was so devastating to the Great Powers, to Europe in particular, than no one who was alive then wanted another great war. Well, no one except perhaps Winston Churchill, but he was not in charge until Chamberlain had passed away.

Chamberlain had been a younger man in politics during the Great War. Along with many of his peers, he knew the great toll that the Great War had taken on the entire population of the Commonwealth, England to Scotland, to the Canadian and the ANZAC forces, in all theaters around the world. The French, who had borne the bulk of fighting on their soil, were in no mood to go to war once again to protect the rights of less powerful nations, at cost to their own nation.
In Shirer's accounting, and every other history I have come across, Hitler could have been stopped at the Rhineland and the Sudetenland, and even probably in Austria, though Nazi political agitators there made the issue more complex. But no one did, because no one wanted to risk hundreds of thousands more dead, only a generation after the last slaughter.

 The Great War changed the attitude that the Great Powers and their leaders had of war; it awakened the populace of every nation to the great costs and horrors of war; it created veterans who came home talking not of their heroic exploits, but of muddy disease-ridden trenches, death in the form of motorized and armored cannons and machineguns, death, blindness, and mutilation by toxic gas. Like nuclear weapons a generation later, the scale of destruction in the Great War created a great pause in our self-destructive tendencies.

The invasion of Poland, however, was the last straw. The British and the French finally declared war, and war would rage in Europe for over full two years before the United States was drawn in by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war on the United States – an act which Germany was not committed to until after their erstwhile ally had committed their act.


Shirer's account was taken to task by historians almost from the beginning, in large part because he put forward a thesis that National Socialism and Der Fuhrer were inevitable outcomes of German culture and history. Shirer's account is better understood as post-facto journalism, and his account of Germany prior to his having to leave in 1940 is very much the writing of an American living in-country for an extended period - he was a reporter living in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is therefore more of a primary source, one that reflects the opinions and bias of its writer, but its meticulous attention to detail and breadth of scope make it useful for anyone making a more academic study of the period.

Shirer's biases are not hard to ignore. As with many of his time, when he writes of homosexuality in the Nazi Party, particularly of Rohm's fatal sidelining in the Night of the Long Knives, his own contempt for homosexuality reads, in modern eyes, as different only in degree from the Nazi view. Yet, even there, his higher aim is to demonstrate how Hitler, despite his rhetoric and promises, ultimately was ready to betray anyone in pursuit of his own political power. Rohm and the SA were useful. When they became a problem, he eliminated them.

On the question of moral culpability – for the war, for the Holocaust, for the destruction of Germany – Shirer leaves no room for doubt that Hitler and his lieutenants are to blame. Yet, neither does he let the German military off the hook, and not even the German people. He does lay out when and where specific war crimes were and were not committed – this general did that, this general did not do this. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in his lengthy description of the Stauffenberg plot to murder Hitler, when on the one hand he commends the plotters for committing, finally, to assassinate Hitler and take control of the country from the Nazis, while at the same time, more than once, remarking on how this commitment came too late in the war to be redemptive in a meaningful way.

Yet, all along the way – from the chaos of the interwar and Weimar years, to the Beer Hall Putsch, to the rise of the Nazi party, to Hitler being appointed Chancellor, to the emergency powers granted to him, from which the rise to dictatorship accelerated – there is no clear point where the German people as a whole, explicitly or implicitly, agreed to the entire menu of horror that the Nazis eventually implemented. This, in my view, should be the central lesson of the Third Reich: that fascism and an authoritarian regime do come on like a light switch, but incrementally. The corollary would be that democracy moves at much the same pace; it can't be imposed, all at one, but must developed in stages.

On the other hand, it is clear that, after a certain point, the average citizen knew that terrible acts were being perpetrated offstage. They knew that there were concentration camps, for political prisoners as well as the regular scapegoats of Nazi ideology. Turning a blind eye is a morally complicit act. Other authors have written about this in more detail – Hannah Arendt comes to mind – but Shirer states early on that Germans have a strong cultural preference for a strong leader, and were predisposed to overlook any number of character flaws in order to have that leader.

I think this mistakes a specific moment and place in history for a broader cultural trait. I would say that, human beings, in the absence of what we now call polite or political society, will settle for a strong leader rather than in the messy, time-consuming work of political compromise. Germans had polite society, but it was greatly damaged following the revolution.

In particular, this is a conversation we are having in modern times, as some of the great Western democracies face populist wrath, and second-tier and developing nations unfetter their executive branches. We need look no farther than stalwart American allies like Turkey and the Philippines to see burgeoning dictators, and even in the US, UK, and France, significant political victories are being made by parties whose top focus is on containing minorities and the outside world.

In Germany before the Great War, we had a nation that was still ruled directly by an autocrat. This was not unusual, and even the more democratically-oriented nations of Western Europe had only recently shifted pure autocracy to republican monarchies. The Victorian age was not too distant, Russia was still ruled by an autocrat as well, and France and Germany both had seen serial revolutions in the nineteenth century as rapid technological progress and capitalism resulted in disproportionate economic winners and losers. If your choices in 1885 or 1905 were autocracy, democracy, or anarchy, it would not have been clear that democracy was the best choice.

In the wake of the Great War, then, with the Kaiser forced to abdicate by the German army, and no meaningful tradition of polite society, is it any wonder that Germany struggled politically? Germany had a long history of philosophical and scientific reasoning, but that was no preparation for political fighting between parties vying for control – not to mention the army putting its thumb on the scales now and then.

In the years before the start of World War Two, Hitler displayed an undeniable political genius. After being jailed for his attempted putsch, he realized, and stated openly within the party, that they had to win power legitimately at the polls. He did this, and the Nazi party, with a mix of streetfighting and sloganeering, and providing services to citizens, quickly rose to power.

Why is this important? I can name at least three countries, as of 2017, that are on that same trajectory. Turkey. Egypt. Iraq. Not far behind are Venezuela and Libya. Yet, rather than recognize that these countries are new to democracy and the etiquette required to function, many Americans (and other Westerners) prefer to criticize them as nations filled with extremists, who will never, ever, be fit for democracy.

If there is any more direct complicity to be found, it would be in the army. Following the end of the Great War, the German army essentially told the Kaiser that they could no longer support him. The Germans were already revolting, ground down and war-weary and demanding participatory government. The Kaiser was exiled to the Netherlands, where he lived until about 1940. As Nazi Germany invaded Western Europe, Hitler and his lieutenants could hardly be bothered to say hello as they passed by in the Lower Countries.

Yet, in the period leading up to the war, senior leadership in the army favored Hitler as a means to an end. Hitler was not taken seriously as a leader, but his political ability was useful. He was uniting the country. According to Shirer, many in the army hoped to restore the German monarchy, not to Wilhelm II, but to one of his heirs or another member of the Hollenzollern dynasty. Their thinking seems to have been, to unite the country under Hitler, then rally the people around a new Kaiser.
Hitler was having none of that.

It's true that early on, he had to make compromises. He had to disband his "Sturmabteilung" (SA), the uniformed thugs the Nazis had used to mete out street justice, and execute their leadership; the SA was dissatisfied with the rate of change accomplished by the Nazis, and demanded that the German army be placed in a role subordinate to the SA.

While General von Hindenberg, hero of the Great War, was President, Hitler was kept somewhat in check. It was only on Hindenberg's death, along with some skullduggery by Hitler, that Hitler's role as Chancellor was broadened in scope, and after the Reichstag fire, became dictator in all but name. Even then, several in the army plotted against Hitler, especially as he engineered the annexation first of Austria and then the Sudetenland.

The army knew he was leading them into a war they could not win. Yet, the failure of the Great Powers to stop Hitler early on allowed Hitlier to succeed enough that he was able to consolidate power and strengthen the military to the point where they were winning battles.
Guess what? Generals like winning battles. After that, overthrowing Hitler became a sort of, "eh, after we win a few more".

Even by the end of the war, as far back as the Stauffenberg plot, German military leaders hoped to negotiate with the allies to keep the land they'd taken early on. They expected to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, banking on the capitalist West turning against the communist Soviet Union. While Stalin was treacherous in his own way, it is a tribute to the arrogance of the generals that they could not believe that the alliance fighting through their country from the West, South and East, would hold together.


The so-called Thousand Year Reich only lasted a dozen years. World War II was six of those years, and American involvement less than four. In popular culture, the war lasted a much longer time, and served as a perpetual backdrop to thousands of individual stories. Compared to modern wars and related crises of international relationships, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have each lasted longer. I'd almost say at lower intensity, but I could not look at a Syrian refugee with a straight face and say that the war in Syria was lower in intensity to, say, the bombing of London, or Germany, or the Soviet Union.

When I was growing up, World War Two movies were old enough to play on TV near-constantly, and in the wake of the Vietnam and Korean wars, their subject was the only war in living memory we could feel good about. The cause was noble, with villains so clearly cut that fictional villains of popular films were almost literally cut from the same cloth: the Imperial military of Star Wars, the Wehrmacht and Nazis who fought Indiana Jones. The war was long over. We, the good guys, had won, and now, like so many warring tribes over the centuries, we sat around the campfires while shamans told us stories of great warriors and noble sacrifice.

Reading Shirer's account is to revisit these stories in near-clinical detail. The gauze of memory is removed and at once and every detail is seen clearly, and all the more disturbing for it. The lessons of the period come from knowing what individual human beings did, and failed to do. There's no calling to higher moral purpose, no celebration of good over evil. It's not even a horror story, though events are horrible. The tone is flat, and matter of fact. Attention must be paid.

Clearly, the lessons of "what to do if you want to establish and perpetuate an authoritarian regime" are being studied and applied by various political factions, but what do the rest of us do? Nazis are easy to recognize when they call themselves, "Nazis", or "Nationalists" even, but how do we recognize less familiar forms or fascism or authoritarianism? How do we recognize forces like an army or a political party hoping to use a populist to rally citizens to their cause, or industrial interests supporting a populist in hopes of cracking down on disruptive labor movements?

There is an assumption, in particular from our comfortable perch in well-to-do West, that history inexorably moves forward and that society, as a whole, advances in line with our notions of human kindness, scientific progress, and shared prosperity. This is not a given. Societies have been known to advance greatly and collapse suddenly. They can stagnate. They can be torn apart by infighting. I would not assume that events beyond the borders of my neighborhood will work themselves out satisfactorily in the end.

The "rise" part of the Third Reich illuminated so clearly how a society already on the road to recovery can take a turn for the worse, minor at first but tracking far off course in the long term. The political system at the time pit dozens of parties against each other, and included street fights between parties. The Nazis' SA brigades were basically underemployed men willing to throw and take punches, intimidating others at the polls and in the streets. In the midst of disorder, the Nazis promised order, and drew voters and members from a middle-class that might otherwise not have gone in for their xenophobic messages of hate.

They were abetted by the military and industrial interests who thought they could control or use Hitler to achieve their own ends – restoration of a monarchy, control against labor. They did indeed assume that Hitler was just a showman, a silver-tongued mesmerist who could unite the proletariat for them. But he wasn't. Hitler was a strong-willed leader in his own right, with his own plans, and he was able to achieve them despite underlying opposition from his erstwhile allies.
Globally, today, there are long-term parallels to the period: a global collapse of markets; a loss of faith in government leaders and institutions; multiple conflicts between the major powers in the affairs of smaller nations; nationalist political movements aiming to restore "pride" and "honor" by building up the military and retreating behind tariffs and walls.


The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is comprehensive look at a period of modern history that is relevant to our current times. Technological and political process is not enough to guarantee freedom or fairness among peoples or between nations. Following a global economic depression, with growth in inequality and a corresponding surge in populism, the modern world is not too dissimilar from the world of a century ago.

This isn't to say that any one person today will be the next Hitler. Shirer's book is about the Third Reich, after all. Even without a Hitler, a group of strong leaders, or individual leaders of nations and parties, could lead their people to ruin.

Furthermore, the crimes of the Third Reich were multiple crimes; as terrible as the Holocaust was, plunging the world into a global war following the unlawful invasion and occupation of neighboring nations was criminal. Their treatment of prisoners of war and citizens of occupied nations was criminal enough, before adding the industrialized extermination of entire ethnic groups and political minorities.

We must forever be on the lookout against terrible leaders and the conditions that lead to their rise. I found Shirer's book to be surprising engaging and informative. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history and an interest in what is happening in the world today.