The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

I recently finished reading this for the second time (not the abridged version). It is huge, around 1100 pages. It took me quite a while to finish. "Why on Earth are you reading this for the second time," you might ask?Well, for several reasons. First, I love reading history, particularly history of the Second World War. Second, I am very interested in WWII Germany. Why did the people cave in to Hitler and his aims? Third, my grandparents were immigrants from Germany; thus, I identify with Germany and ask again, "Why did the people cave in to Hitler and his aims?" As to this identity, one of my childhood traumas was when I went out to play with the neighborhood children in Cincinnati, Ohio (I was probably around 4 years old), they all began to yell at me, "Raus mit ihm! Raus mit ihm! You dirty German! We don't play with dirty Germans." I didn't know what they were getting at until I cried to my mother and she confirmed that I was indeed a dirty German (she didn't say dirty German.) Lastly, one of my real heroes is Dietrich Bonhoeffer because he was not only a theologian, he was German and he didn't fall for Hitler's program. He actually rose above his pacifist believes to enter the plot to kill Hitler. He died for this. 

Shirer was a journalist, not a historian. He also wrote this just a few years after WWII. But he was working in Germany during the thirties as Hitler was coming to power and starting his program of aggression. After the war, he gained access to many of the documents recovered as a result of the Nuremberg trials. This is not a military history of the war. It is part biographical (Hitler), and more of a political history. 

The people of Germany were taken in by Hitler's promise that they would rise a people again. Of course, Germany had been badly beaten down after WWI. They were ripe to fall for the propaganda. I can understand this. What I have a hard time understanding is how so many could give a blind eye to the horrendous events such as the Jewish Holocaust. The longer Hitler was in power, the more irrational he became. As he was in the process of being defeated, he refused surrender. He felt that the people had not lived up to his standards and that they deserved to be destroyed. And they were!

This book is also a warning that we must always be alert. I am continually disturbed by how uninformed the population of the US is. I even have to include myself in this. I am not talking about the fact of political division, even though that is disturbing. I am talking about ignorance. If we are conservative, we listen to and parrot slogans from the right. If we are liberal, we listen to and parrot from the left. We really don't have a clue as to what is happening. We, as a population are ripe for the picking. I do thank God, that for the most part even politicians that we disagree with are basically decent people who want to do the right thing as they see it. I also think that it is the grace of God that we have been protected for so long. But, we must not presume upon that grace. 

I don't know whether this book is great or not, but it is a good read if you are really interested in the history of Germany during that period. It is also an interesting read about how an entire nation can be led so far astray.