It deals with some of the most important subjects a person can study in this lifetime: (a) the causes of WWII, in simple numerical terms, the single most catastrophic event in human history, causing the death of 60 million people, more than any other plague, war, or catastrophe on record; (b) the attempted, and almost successful, genocide of the Jewish people in the world's most horrifyingly bureaucratic holocaust; (c) the simply incredible methods and means by which, in one of Western Civilization's great stronghold's, a government and a ruler who were dedicated, wholly and openly and overtly, to monomaniacal evil, came, through bluff, aggression, and dark luck, to seize and then maintain absolute power over an enthralled populace; (d) the equally incredible methods and means by which that government and that ruler, aided and abetted at every turn by its own neighbors' greedy participation, or war-wary appeasement, took control over a large section of central Europe without having to fire a single shot, in a series of coups which could have been turned back at any time by a single act of intestinal fortitude on the part of France or Britain, had they been willing to exercise it; (e) the waging of a total and complete war, for the purpose of killing off and/or enslaving the "lesser" Slavic peoples of Europe; (f) the abject ruination of the lands and people of Poland and other Eastern European states as they were first divvied up by the Germans and the Russians, and then used as their battlefields; (f) the nature of totalitarian government; (e) the setting of the scene for the establishment of the iron curtain and the beginning of the cold war.
The book tells this story from a very focused perspective. We don't learn much about what is going on in the U.S. or in Britain or the Soviet Union during these years, except as they relate to events in or caused by Germany. It is Germany's history we are learning, but not from a friendly source. William Shirer does not pretend to be writing a detached, objective, or academic history. He is telling an amazing story and doing so as accurately and as compellingly as he can. That's not to say he is sloppy or breaks any rules. If the specifics of an event are disputed, he'll give us more than one account and tell us the sources and offer his own take on which version may be the most accurate and why. But he is not interested in academic debates about economic or philosophical causes and effects. He is a working journalist, who was living in and writing from Berlin during most of these events, and he is willing to relate his own personal reactions, and to describe his perception of the German people's moods and responses. He takes sides. He despairs at the stupidity of the allies at certain key moments. He is appalled by the Germans. (When translated, the book was not well received in Germany. Its author was accused of being anti-German by West Germany's prime minister. The book clearly discomfited the German people, who wanted to believe that Nazi-ism was a phenomenon which could arise among any people, given the right conditions, and was not a peculiarly German evil. The German people may have been right about this -- that is an argument for another day. But the point here is that Shirer tells a great story, because he isn't afraid to call it like he sees it.)
Most importantly, Shirer did his homework. He dug through the Nazi journals, diaries, and official but secret histories in the archives which the allies seized at the end of WWII, rifled through briefly for the trials at Nuremberg, and then stuck in a warehouse somewhere until Shirer, Indiana-Jones-like, came along to dig in and find their treasures. We know what key German leaders were thinking before and after the major events. But our narrator, having lived also through these events, can still get us emotional about them. It is the best of both worlds: a personal account, with footnotes. The book is a page-turner.
Yes. It's very, very, long. Any given chapter could have been made, with a few more paragraphs, into its own short book, which would have stood as one of the most detailed accounts ever published of any particular portion of this history. Yes, even though it was always a compelling page-turning read, I set it aside for a few months at least twice to read other books that were of more immediate interest to me in a particular time period, and then came back to finish it later. But that may have had more to do with the book's subject matter than its length. The book deals with a great deal of darkness. Sometimes I just needed to read something else for a while, instead of a book that made me want to puke.
There are some books that I feel each of my children should read. Some books that I think it would be wonderful if every American could read. This is a book that everyone on the planet ought to read, at some point in their lives. It's that important to know what happened here and to come to terms with it.
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