The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Abstract

Fifteen years after the war which brought it into existence, the first German Republic met catastrophe. Fifteen years after the war which led to its formation, the second German Republic seems far from any similar fate, but it is appropriate to ask whether the dark forces of tragedy are only waiting to reassert themselves, as the Communists never tire of insisting, or whether Federal Germany is at last a healthy and viable organism: to ask but not necessarily to expect neat answers. William L. Shirer and Hans Kohn, the journalist and the scholar, have asked the question, each in his own way. Shirer retells the tale of the catastrophe itself, from the first rumblings in the bleak days after 1918 to the violent denouement of 1945. Kohn goes behind the events to probe the German mind. Both accounts supplement each other well. Shirer's story is not new. It has been told over and over before. What he brings to it are the eye and feel of the working reporter who was there and some of the personal touches which only the reporter can provide. He also brings some of the evidence adduced at Nuremberg and some of the staggering mountain of captured documents only lately released by the Defense Department. The amalgam is a fascinating book on the Nazi era now beginning to pass into the perspectives of history. There is an antique quality about the story, set in the old world whose center was Europe and which was blissfully unaware of the eruptions to come in unpronounceable places on continents far away. there is nothing antique about the irrationality of man exposed here. Looking back, Shirer underlines blackly the fact that the Germans gave themselves to their destroyer -the people who would later whine, But I am only ein kleiner ein unpolitischer Mann, the efficient generals who seemed incapable of getting mad enough to risk the courage of their convictions, the intellectual gangsters who give the lie to all who insist fatuously that education and barbarism do not mix. The Nazis lifted the gates and all the nihilism poured forth in a fury which has perhaps only begun to grip our world. Why did they do it? Shirer does not have the answer, and as his almost twelve hundred pages of drama unroll he does not try for it. His concern is that we understand that this was not coercion or trickery; Hitler took over because he spoke to and for something in the German civilization, for all its