The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany » (Unabridged)

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 the twentieth 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.

Shirer's unforgettable account of the pivotal characters and events of that critical era benefits from his many years as a reporter and his own personal recollections, as well as from the mass of historical documents retrieved from the German Foreign Office. The result is a brutally objective account of how Hitler wrested political control of Germany and managed to take the country with him on his mad six-year quest for world domination, only to see it go down in flames in the end.

H. R. Trevor-Roper

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