William
Shirer based his book on six years working as a reporter of the Third
Reich, captured documents – including diaries of people like the
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the Italian Foreign Minister
Galeazzo Ciano ‒ as well as British Foreign Office reports and
testimony from the Nuremberg trials. All 1143 pages of the resulting
basically neutral account of NAZI Germany from 1932 to 1945 (add
another 100 pages for the index) are amazing, even though the book
does not always escape an American interpretation of German
history.
Nevertheless, when weighed against the monumental
undertaking of chronicling this period in minute detail, such
personal interpretations are possibly neither here nor there and can
be either accepted or rejected by a discerning reader. The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a book, which, at the
same time as it is a historical record, is also a great page-turner.
It gives a thoughtful understanding of these eventful years, not only
in relation to Germany but also to the rest of world, and is worth
reading.
