The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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This article is about the book. For the strategy game, see Rise and Decline of the Third Reich.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
National Book Award for Non-Fiction

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a book by American journalist

National Book Award for non-fiction,[2]
but the reception from academic historians was mixed.

The book is based upon captured

British Foreign Office reports, and the author's recollection of his six years in Germany (from 1934 to 1940) as a journalist, reporting on Nazi Germany for newspapers, the United Press International (UPI), and CBS Radio
. The work was written and initially published in four parts, but a larger one-volume edition has become more common.

Content and themes

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is Shirer's comprehensive historical interpretation of the

SS Chief Heinrich Müller afterward joined the NKVD of the USSR
.

Development history

The editor for the book was Joseph Barnes, a foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, a former editor of PM, another New York newspaper, and a former speechwriter for Wendell Willkie. Barnes was an old friend of Shirer. The manuscript was very late and Simon & Schuster threatened to cancel the contract several times; each time Barnes would win a reprieve for Shirer. The original title of the book was Hitler's Nightmare Empire with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as the sub-title. The title and cover had already been sent out in catalogs when Robert Gottlieb decided that both title and cover had to be changed. He also chose to publish the book as a single volume rather than two as originally planned.[9]: 81–82  Nina Bourne decided that they should use the sub-title as the title and art director Frank Metz designed the black jacket bearing the swastika. Initially bookstores across the country protested displaying the swastika and threatened not to stock the book. The controversy soon blew over and the cover shipped with the symbol.[10][page needed]

Success and acclaim

In the U.S., where it was published on October 17, 1960, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sold more than one million hardcover copies, two-thirds via the

Carey–Thomas Award for non-fiction.[11]
In 1962, the
New York Times Book Review, Hugh Trevor-Roper praised it as "a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions."[14]
The book sold well in Britain, France, Italy,[15] and in West Germany, because of its international recognition, bolstered by German editorial attacks.[16]

Both its recognition by journalists as a great history book and its popular success surprised Shirer,[17] as the publisher had commissioned a first printing of merely 12,500 copies. More than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, neither Shirer nor the publisher had anticipated much popular interest in Adolf Hitler or in Nazi Germany.

Criticism

Nearly all journalists praised the book. Many scholars acknowledged Shirer's achievement but some condemned it.

anti-German sentiments in the United States.[18]

Klaus Epstein listed what he contended were "four major failings": a crude understanding of

German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.[17]

Elizabeth Wiskemann concluded in a review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual... which will certainly prove useful."[19]

Nearly 36 years after the book's publication, LGBT activist Peter Tatchell criticized the book's treatment of the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.[20] In the philosopher Jon Stewart's anthology The Hegel Myths and Legends (1996), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is listed as a work that has propagated "myths" about the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.[21]

In 2004, the historian Richard J. Evans, author of The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008), said that Rise and Fall is a "readable general history of Nazi Germany" and that "there are good reasons for [its] success."[22] However, he contended that Shirer worked outside the academic mainstream and that Shirer's account was not informed by the historical scholarship of the time.[22]

Adaptation and publication

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Directed by
David L. Wolper Productions
MGM Television
Original release
NetworkABC
Release1968 (1968)

A television adaptation was broadcast in the United States on the ABC television network in 1968, consisting of a one-hour episode aired each night over three nights.

The book has been reprinted many times since it was published in 1960. The 1990 edition contained an afterword whereby Shirer gave a brief discourse on how his book was received when it was initially published and the future for Germany during German reunification in the atomic age. The 2011 edition contains a new introduction by Ron Rosenbaum. Current[when?] in-print editions are:

  • ISBN 84-7069-368-9
    (Grupo Océano, 1987 SP, hardcover)
  • ISBN 0-671-72868-7 (Simon & Schuster
    , US, 1990 paperback)
  • Arrow Books
    , UK, 1990 paperback)
  • Folio Society edition (2004 hardcover)
  • ISBN 978-1-4516-4259-9 (Simon & Schuster
    , US, 2011 hardcover)
  • ISBN 978-1-4516-5168-3 (Simon & Schuster
    , US, 2011 paperback)

There is also an audiobook version, released in 2010 by Blackstone Audio and read by Grover Gardner.

See also

References

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ "The notion that 'rectitude and authenticity [were] integrally German attributes, in contrast to Roman or Latin influences which were degrading' held to have originated with Luther developed with German Romanticism in the 19th Century, and culminated with National Socialism." Johnson 2001.[page needed]

Citations

  1. ^ "Books Published Today". The New York Times: 26. October 17, 1960.
  2. ^ a b "National Book Awards – 1961". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
  3. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 102.
  4. ^ Shirer (1960). pp. 90–97, 236.
  5. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 101–02.
  6. ^ Evans 2004, p. xxiv.
  7. ^ Shirer, p. 1080.
  8. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 106.
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-1250141057
    .
  10. ISBN 0679456597
    .
  11. ^ a b Rosenfeld 1994, p. 101.
  12. Cedar Rapids Gazette
    , 9 October 1960, p. 47.
  13. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 100–01.
  14. ^ William L. Shirer (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (3rd ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 1146.
  15. ^ Shirer, p. 1145.
  16. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, p. 96.
  17. ^ a b Epstein 1961, p. 230.
  18. ^ Rosenfeld 1994, pp. 95–96, 98.
  19. ^ Wiskemann 1961, pp. 234–35.
  20. ^ Peter Tatchell: No place in History for Gay Victims of Nazism, The Independent, July 2, 1995
  21. ISBN 0-8101-1301-5
    .
  22. ^ a b Evans 2004, pp. xvi–xvii.
  23. ^ "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (TV Movie 1968) - IMDb". IMDb.

Bibliography

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Documentary

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