Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Volumes 1, 2, and 3)

Author: William Shirer
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: During the first half of the short life of the Third Reich, where I had lived and worked, I had witnessed Adolf Hitler consolidating his power as the dictator of this great yet bewildered nation, and later guiding it toward 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 Foreign Office, 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. Before this, even when a major power was defeated and its government overthrown by revolution, as Germany and Russia were in 1918, its archives were always kept by itself, with only those documents favorable to the later ruling group being eventually 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 records of telephone conversations of Nazi leaders, which were 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, using the Gebbersberg shorthand method to record not only daily events but also the developments of each hour. To understand the exact situation during the period from August 14, 1939, to September 24, 1942, this is a rare source of information. 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 diaries among German diaries. However, there are also other diaries of great value, including the diaries of the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s close confidant within the party, and General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of Operations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). There are also the diaries of the OKW itself and the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. For example, the 60,000 volumes of German naval archives captured near Tannenberg Castle near Coburg nearly included 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, dating back to the establishment of the modern German Navy in 1868. The 485-ton archives of the German Foreign Office 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 went back to the Weimar Republic period 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 our government showed no interest in opening the boxes to see what historically valuable materials might be inside. It was not until 1955, ten years after the documents were captured, that the files hidden in Alexandria were finally opened, thanks to the initiative of the American Historical Association and the support of some private foundations. A small number of scholars, with limited manpower and tools, managed to review and photograph the files before the government was eager 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 colleagues and secretaries during the war. The former were rescued from the ashes of burned Hitler documents by a spy officer of the U.S. Air Transport Command in Berchtesgaden, while the latter were found in the files of Martin Bormann. During the Nuremberg trials of the main Nazi war criminals, hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi documents were hastily gathered as evidence. While interviewing 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 volumes of English translations of many important documents. Among the 15 volumes of materials published for the 12 later trials in Nuremberg, some other documents were also highly valuable, although many documents and testimonies were edited. In addition to these unprecedentedly rich documents, there were also detailed interrogation records of German officers and party officials, as well as their testimonies taken under oath during subsequent post-war trials, which provided materials that, I believe, have never been obtained from such sources in previous wars. Of course, I did not read all of these astonishingly large documents—something that one person alone could not do. However, I made an effort to review a considerable part of them, though progress was slow due to the lack of proper indexes, which is inevitable for any worker in such a rich field. Those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi period, whether journalists or diplomats, knew very little about what was really happening behind the grand facade of the Third Reich. 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—Hitler’s rise, the Reichstag fire, the bloody purge of the SA, the annexation of Austria, Chamberlain’s surrender in Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, Scandinavia, the West, the Balkans, and Russia, the terror under Nazi occupation and in the concentration camps, the atrocities against the Jews, and so on—was not difficult. But to uncover the major decisions made in secret, the conspiracies, the betrayals, their motives and origins, the roles of the key figures behind the scenes, the extent of the terror they created, and the methods they used to inflict it—all of this, along with many other things, was largely unknown to us before the German secret files came to light. This is the world’s best-selling masterpiece that vividly reflects the history of Nazi Germany. It brilliantly records the entire process of the Third Reich, which Hitler called the "Thousand-Year Reich" but actually existed for only 12 years and 4 months, from its rise to its fall. In just 12 years, the arrogant Third Reich created a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in human history, leaving behind a thrilling and horrifying 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 Office 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.