Book description
Into the short period of twelve years, which were the life-span of the Third Reich, was packed the most cataclismic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known. Presiding over them all was one man, Adolf Hitler. For no one who reads Mr Shirer’s utterly absorbing book can doubt that, evil though he was, Hitler was that rare phenomenon in world history, a genius.
So inevitably Hitler dominates this book. But though there have been other "Lives of Hitler" — notably Alan Bullock’s brilliant study — none the less The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is unique. For Mr Shirer has examined and illumines every link in the vast chain of events and personalities that, beginning, as he so convincingly shows, in the dim past with the words and deeds of Martin Luther, led up inexorably, tragically, to the Gotterdammerung climax in the Berlin Bunker on May 1st, 1945.
