The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

After the war, Shirer covered the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, where the defendants staked their lives on the claim that they were merely following Hitler’s orders. This raised the question of accountability, a question that runs throughout The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. On one hand, the surviving evidence leaves no doubt that many Germans, including high-ranking officers in the armed forces, detested Hitler and hoped for his downfall. Some of these anti-Hitlerites formed themselves into an actual conspiracy against the Fuehrer. On the other hand, Shirer finds it difficult to explain the conspirators’ general inactivity, which mirrored the apparent docility of the civilian population.

The German generals’ pusillanimity dates to the end of World War I, when they urged an armistice but then failed to provide anything more than lukewarm support for the Weimar Republic that had to govern Germany in the war’s aftermath. Likewise, there is no doubting the German Army’s complicity in Hitler’s early consolidation of personal power. In 1934, for instance, the Army backed Hitler after the Fuehrer promised to suppress the SA, a “political decision” of “historic significance” for the Army, by placing “itself in the unrestrained hands of a megalomaniacal dictator” in fact “was sealing its own fate” (215). On rare occasions when his commanders objected to his bellicose plans, as in the cases of Field Marshal Blomberg and General Fritsch after the meeting of November 5, 1937, when Hitler announced his plans to go to war, the generals were outmaneuvered, cashiered, and “relieved of their opposition” (308). After World War II, some generals claimed that they would have executed a plot to remove Hitler in September 1938 had it not been for the Munich Agreement. Still, when Hitler told his commanders on May 23, 1939, that he intended to attack Poland and that he expected a broader conflict with Britain to ensue, “not a single general or admiral, so far as the record shows, raised his voice to question the wisdom of Hitler’s course” (488). Nor do General Halder’s notes reveal any objections from commanders at the Obersalzberg military conference on August 14. Hitler’s decision to postpone the attack on Poland following the Anglo-Polish agreement of August 25 “caused great jubilation” among the conspirators but did not prompt them to act (558).

After the war began, the opportunities to move against Hitler diminished. Although civilian conspirators maintained contact with the British when possible, the “expanded size” of the armed forces would be a “handicap,” for the “ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis” (648). Furthermore, in the war’s early years, when Hitler’s forces achieved staggering successes, German officials who approached the British with peace feelers, such as Ulrich von Hassell, tried to negotiate from a position of strength that would allow them to keep the territories they conquered while disposing of the Fuehrer. Likewise, Shirer uncovered “no evidence that the generals in the Army’s High Command objected to Hitler’s decision to turn on the Soviet Union” (812). In short, among the anti-Hitler conspirators in the armed forces, enthusiasm for treason appears to have waxed and waned according to their expectations of military success.

When he arrived in Germany in 1934, Shirer observed that many Germans “did not seem to mind” the loss of their freedom, nor did they seem determined to soften, let alone resist, the Nazi regime’s “mindless barbarism” (231). Shirer cites the “gullibility” of the German people in their belief, for instance, that so-called “November criminals” stabbed Germany in the back at the end of World War I (32). Hitler, too, believed this stab-in-the-back myth, but he also knew that the German people were easily hoodwinked. Hence the Nazis “began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors” (149). Shirer notes that in Hitler’s justification for the September 1939 attack on Poland the Fuehrer “could not refrain […] from thundering a few more lies to the gullible German people” (598).

Even as Shirer criticizes the German people for their docility and gullibility, he acknowledges that it is not so easy to affix blame, for “[n]o one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda” (248). At times, the German people showed their opposition in subtle ways. On September 27, 1938, for instance, as Hitler prepared to invade Czechoslovakia, he “ordered a parade of a motorized division through the capital at dusk,” but the parade, which was designed to stoke war fever among the populace, proved “a terrible fiasco” when the people of Berlin, in what Shirer calls “the most striking demonstration against war I have ever seen,” avoided the event altogether (399). Less than a year later, when news of the attack on Poland reached Berlin, the city’s “dazed” residents greeted it with “gray apathy” (597).

Nonetheless, “[b]y a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people,” who “followed him like dumb cattle but also with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation” (1082).