Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (3 Volumes) (3 Volumes)

Author: (American) Schiller
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-05-01
Features: During the first half of the short life of the Third Reich, I had lived and worked there, witnessed firsthand how Adolf Hitler consolidated his power as the dictator of this great yet bewildered nation, and later how he led the nation into war and conquest. However, it was not until a historically unprecedented event occurred at the end of World War II that my personal experiences would have compelled me to attempt writing this book. This unprecedented event was the capture of most of the secret archives of the German government and all its departments, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Army and Navy, the Nazi Party, and the secret police of Heinrich Himmler. I believe that such a vast collection of valuable materials falling into the hands of contemporary historians has never happened before. Prior to this, even when a major country was defeated or its government overthrown by revolution—as Germany and Russia encountered in 1918—the archives were always kept by the country itself, with only those documents favorable to the subsequent ruling group eventually being made public. In the spring of 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed rapidly, not only were its vast quantities of secret documents captured but also many other invaluable materials, such as private diaries, highly confidential speech records, meeting reports, and correspondence, even including recordings of telephone conversations of Nazi leaders, which had been intercepted and recorded by a special agency set up by Hermann G?ring in the Aviation Ministry. For example, General Franz Halder kept a diary without interruption, recording not only daily events but also the developments of each hour. To understand the precise situation during the period from August 14, 1939, to September 24, 1942, this is a rare and valuable source. At that time, he served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Army, in daily contact with Hitler and other leaders of Nazi Germany. His diary is one of the most informative among German diaries. However, other diaries also hold immense value, including those of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Hitler’s close confidant within the party, and General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of the Operations Staff of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). There were also the diaries of the OKW itself and the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. For instance, the 60,000 volumes of German naval archives captured near Tannenberg Castle near Coburg nearly covered all signals, ship’s navigational logs, personal diaries, memoranda, and other documents of the German Navy from the time of their capture in April 1945 back to the establishment of the modernized German Navy in 1868. The 485-ton archives of the German Foreign Ministry were hidden in various castles and mines in the Harz Mountains and were captured by the U.S. Army just as they were about to be burned on orders from Berlin. These archives not only covered the Third Reich period but also extended back to the Weimar Republic and even to the time of Bismarck’s second empire. For many years after the war, tons of Nazi documents were stored in a large U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and the U.S. government showed no interest in opening the crates to see what historically valuable materials might be inside. It was not until 1955, ten years after the documents were captured, that thanks to the initiative of the American Historical Association and the support of several private foundations, the files stored in Alexandria were finally opened. A small group of scholars, working with limited resources and tools, managed to review and photograph the documents before the government impatiently sought to return them to Germany. The result was a rich harvest. Other documents were similarly valuable, such as the partial stenographic records of the 51 "Führer Conferences" held daily by Hitler’s headquarters to study and discuss military situations, as well as more complete records of the after-dinner conversations of this Nazi war criminal with his party comrades and secretaries during the war. The former were rescued from the ashes of burned Hitler documents by a U.S. Army intelligence officer of the 101st Airborne Division in Berchtesgaden, while the latter were found in the files of Martin Bormann. During the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi documents were hastily gathered as evidence. While covering the first half of the trials, I collected bundles of mimeographed copies and later published 42 volumes of testimonies and documents, as well as 10-volume English translations of many important files. Among the 15 volumes of materials published for the subsequent 12 Nuremberg trials, some other documents were also highly valuable, although many documents and testimonies were edited or omitted. In addition to these unprecedentedly rich documents, there were also detailed interrogation records of German officers and party officials, as well as their testimonies sworn under oath during subsequent post-war trials, which I believe provided materials that had never been obtained from such sources in previous wars. Of course, I did not read all of these astonishingly vast documents—such a task is beyond the capacity of a single person. However, I made an effort to review a considerable portion of them, though progress was slow due to the lack of proper indexes, which is an inevitable challenge for any worker in such a rich field. Those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi era, whether as journalists or diplomats, knew very little about what was really happening behind the Third Reich’s grand facade. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, must operate in extreme secrecy. And it knows how to keep such secrets from prying eyes. To record or describe the naked, horrifying, and often repulsive facts of the Third Reich’s internal affairs—the rise of Hitler, the Reichstag fire, the bloody purge of the SA, the annexation of Austria, Chamberlain’s surrender at Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, Scandinavia, the West, the Balkans, and Russia, the terror under Nazi occupation and in concentration camps, and the atrocities against the Jews, etc.—is not difficult. But to uncover the secret decisions made behind closed doors, the conspiracies, the betrayals, their motives and origins, the roles of key figures in the shadows, the extent of the terror they unleashed, and the methods they used to create it—all of this, along with many other aspects, was largely unknown to us before the German secret files came to light. This book is a best-selling and monumental work reflecting the history of Nazi Germany, brilliantly documenting the entire process of the Third Reich, which Hitler called the "Thousand-Year Reich" but which actually existed for only 12 years and 4 months, from its rise to its fall. In just 12 years, the once invincible Third Reich inflicted unimaginable disasters on human history, leaving behind a thrilling and harrowing legacy. With the rapid collapse of the Third Reich, a vast number of secret documents were captured, including private diaries, speech records, and telephone recordings of Nazi party leaders. The 485-ton archives of the German Foreign Ministry were then stored in U.S. military warehouses, and the secrets and criminal activities of an extreme totalitarian regime were fully exposed to the world at the same time as its downfall. This is the abundant and authentic source material for this book.