First published in 1960, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is one of the most influential single-volume histories of Nazi Germany ever written. Drawing on his six years as an American correspondent in Berlin during the 1930s, Shirer combines eyewitness memory with a vast documentary record — captured Nazi files, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels and others, and testimony from the Nuremberg trials — to trace the regime from Adolf Hitler's birth in 1889 to the collapse of Germany in 1945.
Organized into six parts, the book follows Hitler's improbable rise, the consolidation of totalitarian power, the road to war, the early conquests and the turning of the tide, and finally the catastrophic fall. Shirer's central argument is deliberately not "Hitler-centric": he insists that the Reich drew on the darkest currents of German history and culture, and he documents the machinery of the state, the war, and the Holocaust in exacting detail.
A National Book Award winner and international bestseller, this is a long, demanding, and unflinching work of narrative history — essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how a modern nation descended into dictatorship, total war, and genocide.