The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany PDF book 1960 by William L. Shirer

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Though I lived and worked in the Third Reich during the first half of its brief life, watching at first hand Adolf Hitler consolidate his power as dictator of this great but baffling nation and then lead it off to war and conquest, this personal experience would not have led me to attempt to write this book had there not occurred at the end of World War II an event unique in history. This was the capture of most of the confidential archives of the German government and all its branches, including those of the Foreign Office, the Army, and Navy, the National Socialist Party and Heinrich Himmler’s secret police.Never before, I believe, has such a vast treasure fallen into the hands of contemporary historians. Hitherto the archives of a great state, even when it was defeated in war and its government overthrown by revolution, as happened to Germany and Russia in 1918, were preserved by it, and only those documents which served the interests of the subsequent ruling regime were ultimately published. The swift collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 resulted in the surrender not only of a vast bulk of its secret papers but of other priceless material such as private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference reports and correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversations of the Nazi leaders tapped by a special office set up by Hermann Goering in the Air Ministry.General Franz Haider, for instance, kept a voluminous diary, jotted down in Gabelsberger shorthand not only from day to day but from hour to hour during the day. It is a unique source of concise information for the period between August 14, 1939, and September 24, 1942, when he was Chief of the Army General Staff and in daily contact with Hitler and the other leaders of Nazi Germany. It is the most revealing of the German diaries, but there are others of great value, including those of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and close party associate of Hitler, and of General Alfred Jodi, Chief of Operations of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). There are diaries of the OKW itself and of the Naval High Command. Indeed the sixty thousand files of the German Naval Archives, which were captured at Schloss Tambach near Coburg, contain practically all the signals, ships’ logs, diaries, memoranda, etc., of the German Navy from April 1945, when they were found, back to 1868, when the modern German Navy was founded.Contents of the book:Foreword ix1. Birth of the Third Reich 3 2. Birth of the Nazi Party 29 3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch 52 4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich 805. The Road to Power: 1925-31 117 6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33 150 7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933-34 188 8. Life in the Third Reich: 1933-37 2319. The First Steps: 1934—37 279 10. Strange, Fateful Interlude: The Fall of Blomberg, Fritsch, Neurath and Schacht 309 11. Anschluss: The Rape of Austria 322 12. The Road to Munich 357 13. Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist 428 14. The Turn of Poland 455 15. The Nazi-Soviet Pact 513 16. The Last Days of Peace 545 17. The Launching of World War II 59718. The Fall of Poland 625 19. Sitzkrieg in the West 633 20. The Conquest of Denmark and Norway 673 21. Victory in the West 713 22. Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain 758 23. Barbarossa: The Turn of Russia 793 24. A Turn of the Tide 853 25. The Turn of the United States 871 26. The Great Turning Point: 1942 — Stalingrad and El Alamein 90327. The New Order 937 28. The Fall of Mussolini 995 29. The Allied Invasion of Western Europe and the Attempt to Kill Hitler in 1014. The Conquest of Germany 1085 3 1. Gotterdammerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich 1107 Notes 1145 Acknowledgments 1179 Bibliography 1181