Nicholas Moryl's Reviews > The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Absolutely one of the best books I've read about Nazi Germany. Shirer dissects internal Nazi party politics in extraordinary detail and places key events in appropriate historical context to illustrate why and how the party was able to achieve the power it did. (It's not a coincidence I'm reading this during election season, and watching Trump warily.)

I'm giving it 4 stars rather than 5 because more than a handful of descriptions are peppered with subjective judgment--e.g. he calls certain Nazi party officials dumb, dim-witted, slow, etc., which may well be true but the specific language subtly weakens the credibility of his narrative. It always made me wonder if his characterizations could only be made with omniscience & knowledge of the future. That's a bad way to write history, because it's not how people make decisions (if I had perfect future knowledge I'd quit my job and play the stock market). And there's no doubt in my mind that they did make the wrong tactical/strategic choices, at times, even with the knowledge they had (leaving aside all the unimaginably horrific things they did; you can be crazy, or you can be crazy like a fox, and sometimes they were the former and sometimes they were the latter). I think the reason that it bothers me is that such descriptions are superfluous: it's clear through their actions that Nazi leaders were vain, egomaniacal, sociopathic, and worse. Schoolyard name-calling doesn't make that clearer to the reader, but lowers the author in the reader's estimation.

To be clear, that's a nit-pick. This book is exceptional and amongst the best books about World War II, politics, and power I've read.