Authors: William L. Shirer
ISBN-13: 9780671728687, ISBN-10: 0671728687
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: November 1990
Edition: 1ST. TOUCH
William L. Shirer has had a distinguished career as foreign correspondent, news commentator, and historian of the contemporary world. He reported from Berlin for the Universal News Service and for CBS on the rise of the Nazis and he covered their all as a war correspondent. Out of these reports grew his best-sellers Berlin Diary and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has sold more copies for the Book-of-the-Month Club than any other book in the club's history.
Shirer is the author of many other best-selling books, including The Collapse of the Third Republic and an autobiography, Twentieth Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times, composed of three volumes -- The Start: 1904-1930, The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940, and A Native's Return: 1945-1988. He is at work on a new book about the last two weeks of Tolstoy's life.
Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer's monumental study of Hitler's German Empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of this century's blackest hours. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic.
How can we even look objectively on the Third Reich? It was the greatest, most horrible phenomenon of the twentieth century...Now, as never before, the living witnesses can converge with the historical truth. All they need is a historian. In William L. Shirer they have found him. Books of the Century, The New York Times review, October, 1960
Foreword | vii | |
Book 1 | The Rise of Adolf Hitler | |
1. | Birth of the Third Reich | 17 |
2. | Birth of the Nazi Party | 52 |
3. | Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch | 83 |
4. | The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich | 120 |
Book 2 | Triumph and Consolidation | |
5. | The Road to Power: 1925-31 | 167 |
6. | The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 | 211 |
7. | The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34 | 263 |
8. | Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37 | 320 |
Book 3 | The Road to War | |
9. | The First Steps: 1934-37 | 385 |
10. | Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht | 423 |
11. | Anschluss: The Rape of Austria | 440 |
12. | The Road to Munich | 485 |
13. | Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist | 578 |
14. | The Turn of Poland | 612 |
15. | The Nazi-Soviet Pact | 685 |
16. | The Last Days of Peace | 726 |
17. | The Launching of World War II | 791 |
Book 4 | War: Early Victories and the Turning Point | |
18. | The Fall of Poland | 827 |
19. | Sitzkrieg in the West | 838 |
20. | The Conquest of Denmark and Norway | 889 |
21. | Victory in the West | 939 |
22. | Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain | 996 |
23. | Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia | 1040 |
24. | A Turn of the Tide | 1117 |
25. | The Turn of the United States | 1140 |
26. | The Great Turning Point: 1942--Stalingrad and El Alamein | 1180 |
Book 5 | Beginning of the end | |
27. | The New Order | 1223 |
28. | The Fall of Mussolini | 1293 |
29. | The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler | 1316 |
Book 6 | The Fall of the Third Reich | |
30. | The Conquest of Germany | 1409 |
31. | Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich | 1437 |
A Brief Epilogue | 1480 | |
Notes | 1487 | |
Acknowledgements | 1527 | |
Bibliography | 1533 | |
Index | 1549 |