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

abdoll: The author maintains a sense f real time urgency as he accuratelt describes each scene. Very enjoyable read. Thanks, Mr. Shorter

United States on Oct 08, 2023

aketekt: There are so many details surrounding this time period that have been methodically memorialized by a writer who was there and took the time to search through thousands of pages of records to accurately recount them. While this book was not a “fast read” it is definitely one of the most intriguing I’ve read.

United States on Sep 03, 2023

truman jones 7: This is a classic book made into a great TV miniseries I also recommend in early 80s.

Shirer was a US journalist in Germany in 1930s and also that period 1939-40 when Britain was at war and being bombed by the USA was neutral, and so many Americans there until late 1940 anyway. Remember the USA not in the war until December 1941 over 2 years late...

Some wonderful facts esp about how unlikely it was that the Reich could have invaded England in summer 1940. The barge that Shirer goes to see was shot up from the English coast.

Hitler's BIG mistake was not listening to his generals and instead putting his 'lived experience' of war first and deciding not to go on and take the 330,000 soldiers at Dunkirk prisoner (he wanted to save his troops for Paris).

If that had happened, Britain may well have had to come to terms, then the USA would never have entered the war and maybe Stalin would have been defeated. If if if...

United Kingdom on Aug 29, 2023

Schvenn: I thought I knew a lot about WWII, but I was wrong. There were so many aspects of it that I knew nothing about until I listened to this audiobook. It was so fascinating, enraging and interesting that I had to buy the hardcover when I was done.

Canada on Aug 28, 2023

William Austin Smith: Though there are more in-depth and nuanced books on Nazism, Hitler and WWII, I consider this to be essential reading for anyone who is interested in the subject. Whether beginner or professor, it’s important to know what’s in this book because all the serious WWII readers will have read it. Whether everyone agrees with the legitimacy of the content, everyone knows the content, and it’s a good starting point for speaking the same language among the enthusiast community.

A couple of my other WWII favorites:
-“Hitler” by Joachim Fest
-“The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes

United States on Aug 19, 2023

brunobv: Ao contrário dos demais livros sobre o tema, como a trilogia de Richard E. Evans, esta obra é escrita por uma testemunha ocular dos fatos. Willian Shriver foi correspondente jornalística na Alemanha durante o entre guerras, e narra fatos históricos com riquezas de detalhes que somente quem esteve presente aos eventos seria capaz de capturar. Todavia, não é uma obra enciclopédica. É um instantâneo riquíssimo em detalhes e costurado de forma magistral, uma leitura muito agradável e informativa, ainda que, de certa forma, já esteja datado por alguns conceitos hoje ultrapassados.

Brazil on Aug 19, 2023

Mr. John Frank Herbert: I'm surmising that many people would take one glance and consider this book of 1180 pages a monumental study in boredom.
How wrong they would be!

With the retrieval of thousands of documents after the war, Shirer has managed to incorporate samples of these in such a clever way, that these notes, letters and instructions gives the reader the feeling of actually being there, like a fly on the wall.

Of course it's still an uncanny phenomenon that one man could so hypnotise an entire nation, and in so doing, encouraging a minority of them into committing the most horrendous atrocities against humanity. I must confess that reading about those atrocities in these pages, the callous attitude towards the lives of millions of people across Europe, at times beggared belief.

As a fly on the wall I felt that I was actually there as the drama across a beleaguered Europe unfolded.
As the countries fell endlessly under the jackboot, the impending storm must have brought great trepidation to the British people. But they didn't recognise defeat when it was staring them in the face, and virtually unarmed, they were about to confront the greatest military machine in the...

United Kingdom on Feb 14, 2014

Clem: One of the most well known historical pieces of work from the latter half of the twentieth century, and for good reason. I confess I've always been intimidated by this book. Simply the shear size of this volume (over 1200 pages) was always scary - and no pictures to boot! Well, for those who know how owning an Amazon Kindle works, you know that from time to time, you can find great bargains to add to your library. So when this one was advertised at $1.99 for a period of time time, who could pass that up? Certainly not me. It always helps when Amazon has a large number of positive customer reviews as well of a particular piece. Of course, I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy the volume, nor if I would even have the tenacity to finish such a formidable body of work.

One of the ways I can tell when I have thoroughly enjoyed a historical piece, is when, upon finishing the book, I want more. Such was the case here. For starters, the most appealing factor of this book, is it was written by journalist William Shirer, who was actually there in Germany, covering the stories, as they happened. The book is so well written, that it was very easy for me to forget that the book was...

United States on Sep 21, 2013

Les: This review is not of the excellent scholarly work of William Shirer but of the Kindle version of this book. Clearly the book was converted electronically without even cursory proofreading. Problems that I encountered include, but are not limited to:
* Readability is impaired by the incorrect placement of commas instead of periods and apparent random insertion of periods in the middle sentences, usually due to incorrect interpretation of a comma but in some cases this appears to be random insertion.
* There are many instances of random incorrect capitalization of words within a sentence.
* Many words are not correctly recognized. For example "Uve" is printed in the Kindle conversion when the correct word would have been "Live" or the conversion interpreted "attack" to be "a tack" with the apparent two spaces between the two incorrect words.
* Since this was a conversion from the original printed book most, if not all, of the hyphenation that was used for word wrapping now appears in the middle of a line instead of being combined into the correct single word.
* Footnote hyperlinks are often misplaced and in one chapter the footnote links were not even present. The...

United States on Apr 05, 2012

D. Halliday: The book is a political history of the Third Reich; it's very light on legal, social, economic and military aspects. It could equally be titled as a biography of Adolf Hitler since almost all of the book revolves around this central person. Few other people are covered in as much depth as their importance would warrant - with exceptions of course. Franz Halder and some high placed plotters against Hitler are given good coverage.

It's very long but although it could benefit from further editing, it's very readable. Shirer has a flowing style and is not at all dry. It's certainly not an academic text. It's full of the author's opinions, many of them superfluous and fatuous (do we really need half a page to tell us the Nazi leaders didn't look like the conquerors of Europe while dressed in shabby clothes in the dock at Nuremburg?).

Shirer is scathing of just about everybody involved, even such people as Birger Dahlerus who did everything he possibly could to avoid a war despite his very limited means. Shirer seems to throw around words like stupid, naive, dim-witted and cowardly quite lightly considering he's often describing highly intelligent people who worked their...

United Kingdom on Jun 05, 2008