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

Growing up, my parents owned a copy of this book and as a child I would dip into it from time to time. I haven’t seem that copy for a long time. I vaguely assumed that I must have somehow read just about all of it in fits and starts.

When we moved house, about eight months ago, I found another copy of the book while I was clearing out the attic. We have no idea where this copy came from. It’s an old paperback, albeit a paperback which strains the physical limitations of a single volume paperback form.

Cometh the lockdown – cometh the tome. I read it (or re-read it) from floppy cover to floppy cover in 2020.

There’s a lot wrong with this book.

Peter Tatchell has recently highlighted the extensive homophobia in the book. Tatchell is not wrong to do so. Not only is there no mention of the murderous persecution of gay people by the Third Reich and the fact that they were herded into concentration camps on a systematic basis where they experienced unspeakable torture, but Shirer seems to regard same-sex love as some kind of perversion that is symptomatic of the fascist mentality.

This book should not be republished without a new preface that addresses the all pervasive homophobia of the 1950s.

Indeed, as a diagnostician of Fascism, Shirer often comes across as somewhat speculative and amateurish. He makes much of the twin influences of Luther and Hegel in a way that does not really persuade. Personally I am always troubled by the exculpatory implications of such suggestions of cultural determination.

Despite the fact that this book is 1500 pages long, it is strangely apportioned and feels rather less than comprehensive. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the period 1936-1939, which gives a sense of structural imbalance, a sense that this section should have been a separate book. Shirer leans quite heavily on Chief of Staff Franz Halder, a general who survived the war and devoted its aftermath to trying to demonstrate that the Wehrmacht (at least prior to 1942) were reasonable people who had nothing to do with Nazi excesses. Although Shirer properly expresses scepticism, he has nothing really to offer to counter Halder’s version.

If Shirer is correct, then Chamberlain is even more culpable than is generally thought. If Hitler had declared war on Czechoslovakia in 1938, he of course might very well have been defeated. There was no Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in place and the Czech army was far better placed to defend itself than the Polish army. The main caveat with such a counterfactual fantasy might be that such a military setback might not have resulted in regime change in Germany. Halder, however, insists that had Hitler embarked on war in 1938, the General Staff would have taken Hitler out of the equation. We’re left to imagine Germany deNazified, World War II averted, and no Iron Curtain across central Europe. No Holocaust.

On the other hand, Shirer plausibly describes the extraordinary vacillation among the old-school High Command and the fact that various conspirators demanded an impossible choreography of enabling conditions before they were ever prepared to venture very much.

It is harrowing to re-read the detailed account of the Final Solution towards the end of the book, an account that must chill and compel as long as anything like humanity survives, although Shirer’s 1960 estimates are significantly lower than any modern historical consensus would admit. In a footnote to this edition, it is remarked that Eichmann has been found and taken to Israel to stand trial. It is notable that Eichmann himself, who knew more about the overall detailed logistics of genocide than anyone else, talked in terms of 6,000,000 Jews killed. Eichmann on trial may have denied his own criminal responsibility for what had happened, but he never denied the scale of what had happened.

It is a strange book to have been written by a journalist, because so much of the book is top-down military history. There might have been far more about the experience of living in Germany in the 1930s. There might have been far more research and reportage about the various twisted and evil versions of “everyday life” that characterised life in the Reich. In other words, this is a book by a journalist that is not especially good at the things that journalism is supposed to be good at.

So I have now definitely either read or reread this book from cover to cover. This will I think be either the first, the second but also the last time I will have done this.