Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, a substantial amount of confidential archives were captured (literally tons of documents). The members of the German government, as in all advanced countries, documented their activities extensively. The facts found in these documents forms the basis for William Shirer's book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Mr. Shirer was also a correspondent in Germany prior to World War II and lends his own observations when appropriate. The book is remarkable on several accounts. Mainly, Mr. Shirer does an excellent job at presenting a detailed account of historical events in an interesting format while maintaining an arguably neutral position. The book is about twelve hundred pages, and it needed to be. A sense of context, something often lost in an historical account, is provided and perhaps helps the reader to better understand the thinking of the various populations of the period.