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

What can be said about this book?

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.

The Storm of War, by Andrew Roberts

"The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi."  (That may be the best final sentence in any book I've ever read.)  It was, in short, the shortcomings of Nazi ideology which led to Hitler's stupidest decisions of the War.  These would include Hitler's belief that his soldiers were racially superior to the slavic foes they would face in the East, and the anti-semitism which led his nation's brightest Jewish scientists to defect to and assist the West during the conflict.

I've always wondered about the central paradox of WWII.  In fighting to free Western Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, why did we ally with another totalitarian dictatorship, and allow that dictatorship to take over Eastern Europe?  This book's anglo-centric, and therefore euro-centric, view of the war went a long way to helping me understand the whys and the wherefores that led to that particular outcome.  The Soviets suffered 90% of the Allied casualties, and inflicted the vast majority of the casualties suffered by the Germans, during the war.  In short, the Allied Nations couldn't have won WWII without Hitler forcing the Soviets' involvement by launching a premature and ill-fated invasion of that nation, whose citizens suffered terribly under Nazi siege, and whose soldiers would ultimately avenge that suffering in terrible acts of retribution against the women of East Berlin.  (Plenty of war crimes to go around in this, at times, extremely depressing read.)  At the end of WWII, who would have wanted to suffer the same fate the Germans had just suffered by launching a war against the Russian empire?  Better to contain and hold them at bay as best we could for another 60 years of cold war. 

This was an amazing book about a subject that we can never do enough to understand: the costliest and bloodiest conflict in all of human history.

Completed: 2012
Rating: 8/10

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it." Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

I've never had as much positive feedback from a book I've recommended to friends and family as I have with this one. I've told a few people I was reading it and how much I was enjoying it and the result has been overwhelming. People come up to me at church and show me their copies or tell me how many days they let their life go to pot because they couldn't put it down. My family members are all reading it. Everybody seems to love this book. And why not? It reads like a novel, but one which would be deemed too lacking in credibility if it were fiction. For athletes, it's an amazing story of what long distance track and field was like when runners were some of the biggest names in sports, before the 4 minute mile had been broken, when collegians would intentionally spike a competitor to keep him out of a race, and when the voyage to the Olympic Games was more fun than being there. For aviation buffs, it's a story of what it was like to fly the planes America might have rushed into production a little too quickly to really ensure they were all airworthy. For WWII historians, it details what it was like to be sitting in a POW Camp in Japan (where 37% of American soldiers would perish, as opposed to only 1% held prisoner in Germany), under unspeakable conditions, but take hope in the realization of how well the war must be going by the sheer number of Flying Fortresses which began to sail unimpeded across the Japanese skies. For people of faith, it contains one of the most dramatic Christian conversion and turnaround stories committed to print since Saul was waylaid on the road to Damascus, as the book's hero recovers from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and remembers a promise he made in the middle of the Pacific, to turn his life over to God.

This book has so many natural readers, it will likely become more than just a bestseller, but a phenomenon, and an inevitable movie, with the name Louis Zamperini becoming a household name. And deservedly so. I want all of my children to read it. They need to know this history, and this man's story.