The deed is done. And it only took me 5 months. Stepping back from the morass of Nazi minutia I've been swimming in, it's a pretty good book overall. Hitler's childhood and family backstory is written very well and sucked me in with its attention to detail. And then that detail was given to the buildup to war and the machinations of war and every. single. conversation. Hitler and his generals had on a daily basis and I wanted to pull my head off from boredom. But I get why all that detail is, you know, vital to the historical record.

The chapters that dealt with Nazi atrocities were very difficult to get through emotionally but I'm glad I read them. We should all have to read them.

I learned a hell of a lot from this book. And I am very glad I am not reading it anymore. ( )

I began reading this tome last year as many began to compare then-candidate Donald Trump to Hitler and referred to him as a Facist. My goal was to understand the parallels and contrasts between the two men.

First, regarding the book itself: it's a terrific detailed account from someone who lived in Nazi Germany and referenced an enormous amount of historical records to produce this work. It was long, and yes occasionally it was a grind, and it was well worth the time to read. Some of it even feels a bit rushed, like there's more to dig into, but then how do you tell the tale of one of the most important events in the history of the Western world from Hitler's youth to the Reich's end in a form that at least approaches a digestible length?

And now, a few words about the comparisons to Donald Trump. The Nazi war machine and its successes at world domination, as well as the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the party and the German people are well out of the reach for comparisons (for now anyway). The sheer level of brutality and devastation leveled by Hitler's Reich stand out as something we need to remember is part of the reason (or maybe the entire reason) why Nazi Germany is so reviled by the World's population. There is no comparison to that in America at this time; we're not at that level.

However, there are several concerning and fair comparisons that can be made between the Nazi leader and the man who is now America's president. One is their intense level of egomania. When Hitler was about to attack Russia and attempted to drive into Moscow, Shirer writes, "... the one-time Vienna waif regarded himself the greatest conqueror the world had ever seen. Egomania, that fatal disease of all conquerors, was taking hold." Trump's outlandish self-centered narcissism boils to a level of egomania unseen at the top of American politics perhaps ever, especially when he tells crowds, "I alone can fix this" and spews his self-aggrandizing midnight tweets.

Shirer also references Hitler's "violent nature following its momentary impulses," and we are all now watching a man driven perhaps entirely by impulse of a violent nature wield the highest power in our republic. Also, both men thrived and came to power by harnessing nationalist and racist emotions in a population that felt it had once been great and was now bitter about the way the rest of the world was treating it.

And lastly, I'm particularly concerned by the stark parallels between Goebbels' propaganda ministry and the Trump team's disregard for truth and facts, preferring instead to spread "Alternative Facts" as Kellyanne Conway put it a few weeks back. In this book, Shirer writes about the headline of a daily paper he bought on a train during the run-up to Hitler's invasion of Poland: "'WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG - UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS!' You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do." The countless lies of Trump the candidate and now Trump the president, and the parroting of these lies by not only his surrogates but average American people, is quite frankly terrifying when compared to the Nazi aptitude for twisting or utterly replacing the truth with what one might call "Alternative Facts."

I hear sales of George Orwell's 1984 are on the rise. For those with the time and patience at this moment in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich should also be on their list. ( )

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This book was a marathon of a read but it was so well-researched and a really informative read. ( )

This is an amazing account of the Third Reich. I cheered when Hitler finally shot himself and ended the the disgusting Third Reich. I'm still stunned that anyone like him could actually take over a western state.
( )

William L. Shirer's classic examination of the Nazi era from its roots in the end of World War I to its (governmental) demise at the end of World War II is simply one of the great works of history. Built both on Shirer's own experiences as a reporter and eyewitness to Hitler's regime and upon the captured documents of the German government, Shirer depicts, brick by brick, how the edifice of Nazism was built and how, ultimately, it collapsed, largely under the weight of Adolf Hitler's hubris. Though I have been a fascinated student of the Second World War and its triggering factors, never before have I felt so completely clear about the progression of events and the force of individual personalities in the creation of the most horrific period of European history. Anyone who is interested in how a nation rose to power while losing its soul, or in how it might so easily happen again, would be well advised to start, or augment, their education with this masterful work. ( )

In one way this book should just be called The Rise of the Third Reich. And that way is my way because I only listened to the first quarter or so of this book (as an audiobook). I got to the point where Hitler was declared Fuhrer and then I stopped listening. I felt that Shirer's account was not entirely reliable, but easy to place in terms of the time it was written and the perspective of the author. I'm more interested in national politics and the challenges of democracy than international relations or war, so I didn't feel the need to read about the build up to WWII or the conduct of the war itself. I am interested in the economic aspects of the war, but I didn't want to wade through the horrors that Hitler committed in his own country to get to that.

The book is clearly written and Shirer's skill as a journalist is on show in his ability to turn each section into a narrative. It has that rather self-satisfied tone of a lot of non-fiction writing from the United States in the mid-20th century, which doesn't really annoy me too much.

I've wanted to read this book for years and was pleased to find it was available on Audible. It took almost two weeks of sporadic listening to finish, but it was worth it. The narrator was excellent. ( )

I've wanted to read this book for years and was pleased to find it was available on Audible. It took almost two weeks of sporadic listening to finish, but it was worth it. The narrator was excellent. ( )

I read this when in high school. It was big and ponderous, but I think I was still finishing every book I started then. I'd like to recall what it said about The Holocaust, but I can't. ( )

Definitive history of Hitler's rise and fall ( )

I really did not know how many stars to give this book. It is a hard read. It is dense and dry but it probably is the definitive work on the third Reich. I learned alot but it glossed past some significant event and went into deep detail on other. It gives you the reader to see wwii from Hitler's and Nazis point of view. It is dated and newer information is now known. ( )

Want to read because James McBride says to the question "What's the best book you've read so far this year," this book "...All 1,100 pages, and I wish there were more. Just finished it. I should've read it years ago." - NYTBR Aug 4 2013

My favourite history book written by a homophobic and germanophobic journalist.

An impeccable narrative though, with precious details from start to finish. ( )

Good insight supported by ample references. ( )

Hard to put down. Very good, but two major weaknesses: in Shirer’s intense hatred for the Nazis he makes them too clownish to have been able to accomplish what they did. Easy to understand, but better if we came to share his feelings through a more dispassionate presentation of facts – they’re more than sufficient. And even near 1200 pages it needs a few more - he sometimes leaves out background that would explain how important situations came to be, especially military and industrial ones. One day Hitler takes a wild gamble against vastly superior French forces by reoccupying the Rhineland; a few months later he has the most powerful military machine in Europe making mincemeat out of Poland overnight. We know the factories were humming in violation of Versailles, but what was produced when and in what numbers isn’t much explained, nor how the army was grown so rapidly. And one day there are no German troops in Italy, then suddenly they’re spread around the peninsula. How they got there and when, where, how many, what types of divisions – are hardly explained. (There are better explanations of these things when Germany confronts Russia in the East and the Allies in the West.)

Shirer also doesn’t explain much about German developments of new military tactics and technologies, which were crucial to the Third Reich’s rapid conquest of Europe (and to modern warfare generally) – these just appear with invasions and battles. Granted this is a history of the Reich, not a military history per se, but the Reich’s history is as much military as anything else (though Shirer does shed interesting light on Germany’s recovery from the Depression under the Nazis).

Both problems are probably partly due to the book’s being written so soon after the events; Shirer seems to assume his reader is an informed person who lived during the war. Valuable as it is, the book’s a reminder of why historians are skeptical of writing recent history. But it’s still a classic and a page-turner at that. Also Shirer, besides having been a journalist in Germany from before Hitler’s rise until 1940 (or ’41?), did an enormous amount of research using a wealth of primary sources. This direct experience and considerable research probably make the book a must-read, but one to be supplemented. ( )

Long but OK history of Nazi Germany. ( )

I didn't get very far before I lost interest. Even skimming through a lot of it, I found it to be too dry, and it seemed like it was not going to be unbiased, although it's pretty hard not to be biased about someone like Hitler or his followers. But I was interested in why people followed him, not a detailed history of his life.

A massive, revealing, if flawed, look at Germany from the birth of the Weimar Republic to the death of the Third Reich by a prominent journalist of the day, William Shirer, it sifts deeply through the minutia of the period and somehow remains focused and engaging throughout. It is packed with the almost day-to-day course of the government actions and peppered with anecdotes about the Reich's cast of amusing, if frightening, characters. The obvious breadth of research into other histories, other journalists' writings, diaries, and confiscated official documents, is mind-blowing. His access to sources in governments and personages of the time, as well as his own reporting from pre-war Germany and the Nuremberg Trials is astounding.

There is an interesting balance of open-mindedness and bias - Shirer works hard to be even-handed with most of the political activities of the other nations of the world in handling of the Nazi regime. At the same time, the closer he gets to the villains of his story - the Nazi leadership, the world leaders that folded to Hitler, other sources of power in the German government, even the whole of the German people, he writes with quite a bit of presumption. I can't fault him for his constant insults for trash like Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Petain, Mussolini, Ribbentrop, and Seyss-Inquart. I feel a little more yanked unwillingly into his viewpoint when ladeling similar insults onto politicians, thinkers, and military personnel at the time who obviously had the bad luck of being in their position during the rise of the Nazis. I was disappointed by his disparagement of the entirety of the German people, neglecting the whole of human history where we have repeatedly allowed leaders such as this to destroy, while blinding ourselves because they are on "our side". However, I understand for a writer intimate with Germany, who watched the horrors of the 30's and 40's, it would be difficult to pass through without rather strong biases. Germany had a hard road of recovery of respect from the world, and Shirer voices this viewpoint. Also, as we live in a world with a stronger bent toward apologism (in some circles), Shirer grander observations may feel a bit heavy-handed.

All-told, it is an an amazing deep-dive into the Third Reich through some sharp eyes of the time, and told with a flare for a story. ( )

The thousand year reich. More like the 10,000 book reich. One of the best single volume histories of the nightmare that was Nazi Germany.

One of the amazing things about this book and most good books about the Third Reich is that if it hadn't actually happened people would consider this a ludicrous piece of fiction. Modern people could not be so goofy, suckered, hateful, self-centered, evil. No real society would let this sort of thing happen. The writer would be laughed off the face of the earth. The fact that it did happen makes so many more possible and actual horrors tangibly real and not just silly fancy. That is the fascination: that the horror can actually happen, so much scarier than all horror writing. Just another sunny summer day in Upper Silesia wandering off to the delousing showers... ( )

This was the choice of our Bancroft 2.0 history book club and this was my fourth (maybe even fifth) and definitely last reading of this classic. It is a great, but not perfect book. Shire could have saved a hundred or more pages by editing his treatment of the political intrigues that preceded Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and the attempted coups in the last year of the war. But the writing is truly incredible, long, lucid, passionate sentences that almost demand being read out lead. And his historical judgments, although made very soon after the fact, are sound. It is impossible not to see the parallels to our recent politics and today Russia has invaded Ukraine. One cannot help but feel that here we go again. The long chapter, The New Order, is in my opinion the best (and most nightmarish) indictment I have ever read and I wish it were on a universal required reading list. It is hard to get one’s head around the cruelty and inhumanity of the leaders of the Third Reich, but I have not the slightest doubt that it could all happen again and it could happen here. ( )

This is my second venture into historical non fiction, the first being The Last Mughal.
I lived through each and every moment of the REICH.
Having pretty inferior knowledge about world politics, I would say it is not a good book to start reading about World War II as it completely focuses on THE THIRD REICH (as expected). However, it served my purpose of knowing Hitler. I won't say the writer is not unbiased , it is after all a victor's tale, but it has highlighted each and every aspect of Hitler.
5 stars for being such an engrossing and amazing read.
The writing style is beautiful, the writer always gives a gist of what is to be expected in the next chapter. It helped me form a beautiful timeline.
Reand and get mesmerized. ( )

Long read, but EXCELLENT and not a moment of boredom! ( )

So this book took me around 6 months to read on audiobook mostly, while driving mostly. I also skipped the equivalent of 2 chapters towards the end. I half read this to prove to myself that I could still finish giant nonfiction books, and half because it was damn interesting. My purpose for reading it was to find insight into how Nazis made decisions and justified them, and I think this goal was not a perfect fit for this book. The initial chapters on Hitler's initial rise were certainly eye opening, but I read those so long ago I barely remember the content. The majority of the book is a surprisingly surface-deep overview of the logistics of the war. I really wish it skipped slightly over being fully comprehensive of every little happening of the war and explored a bunch of actions more fully, but that was obviously not this books aim. I rated it a 4/5 stars because it excels at what it is, which is being the definitive overview of the entire war, however for my uses I wish I had read something different. The first third of the book is definitely the best part, as it focuses on specific people the most. ( )