I was in McKay’s outside Nashville recently and picked up a copy of Shirer’s 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I know probably too much about the Second World War, but I haven’t read many of the one-stop-shop accounts – and for 1960, it’s excellent.
What about 2023, though?
Well, after reading Shirer’s archival account of Hitler’s rise, one might be less than sanguine about the prospects of German absolution, much less reunification, but here we are. Still, several theses hold up well:
First, Shirer is adamant that all the senior Nazi leaders and their adjutants knew exactly what they were doing. No “banality of evil” nonsense is allowed. University professors, captains of industry, concentration camp guards – none get a pass. Hitler seduced them, sure, but they wanted to be seduced, many to the level that they believed the lies, and they seized the dark opportunities for power that were offered them with full responsibility.
Second, Hitler’s rhetorical power is acknowledged. As a reporter in prewar Germany, Shirer was present at many key speeches and witnessed their power over the crowd and over radio. His description of Goebbels’s evil talents at propaganda are also acute. Shirer is not as deft as Kenneth Burke at describing exactly how Hitler’s rhetoric works, but he does a fine job of outlining the cumulative effects on the German populace of the Nazi Party’s constant lying, Hitler’s fixation and reliance on the perceived humiliation of Versailles, and how fascistic antisemitism became the Reich’s state religion.
Third, Shirer does an excellent job of depicting the people around Hitler as an enabling pack of cunning lowlifes and shitheels, as well as the extent of his eventual mental and physical deterioration. No Nazi comes off well; even the many conspirators against Hitler in the army are roundly criticized for their repeated cowardice and incompetence.
I would give a more mixed appraisal of Shirer’s focus on diplomatic maneuvering. He is keen to work in every shifty conversation or telegram, German, Russian, British, or French, no matter how irrelevant it might have been to the outcome of, say, the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty. I would forgive him for this, given the “first draft of history” feel; better to include than exclude. One of the benefits of the abundance is a good sense of the timing of events – Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini/Chamberlain are often waiting for a telegram before they make a move, and a tactical delay here and there seems to have shaped events more than I would have thought.
The emphasis on military history is strangely variable and mostly from an eagle’s-eye view. Shirer examines Hitler’s mistakes-in-hindsight, mostly – the delay before Dunkirk, the following collapse of Operation Sea Lion, the neglect of North Africa, and the absolute disaster of Barbarossa that drove the final nail into the coffin. Overall, the message is that Hitler’s political cunning and ruthlessness was good for a military head start against the Allies, but there was no vision, industry, or luck that would have allow winning a long multi-front war against much larger nations, much less when a paranoid maniac was running the strategy. His uninformed assumptions about American resolve and industrial capacity proved particularly fatal.
The chapter on the Final Solution is brutal. It comes relatively late, serving as something of a flashback as the mechanisms were all in place well before 1939 or even 1936. Scattering it to and fro, however, would have done the subject a disservice. Better to foreshadow broadly and then hit the reader with a shovel. Again, Shirer is relentless. They knew what they were doing.
But back to 2023. I found it extremely difficult to not think about January 6, 2021 when reading Shirer’s account of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. There are important differences – the Nazis were trying first for Munich, not Berlin and the Reichstag; they were better organized and had something resembling a workable plan, though Hitler was not smart enough then to have firm army support; and the Munich police ended it with a strong show of force. Jan. 6 was slightly more spontaneous, and right at the Capitol during a critical vote with minimal police protection that just barely held. But the rhetoric, down to the “make Germany great again” language (Shirer offers just that translated snippet from one of Hitler’s speeches), is the same. They are the enemy – take back your country.
Trump was never quite a fascist, though – more fascist wannabe, fascist-adjacent, fascist-fanboy. Fascism requires the use (and worship) of military force as the primary function of the state. Trump failed to annex or conquer Mexico, North Korea, Germany, Syria, or any other country that bugged him; his fascination with the U.S. military’s power and how dictators can wield it more brazenly was about bragging rights.
He didn’t really have a choice, though. Hitler eventually won over his generals and made them do his twisted bidding out of sunk-cost fallacy self-interest. The Wiemar Republic’s professional holdovers from the monarchy were profoundly different from the constitution-oriented, nonpolitical officer core of the U.S. military. Indeed, the Pentagon’s visible and non-visible efforts to keep Trump out of trouble for four years largely worked (apparently it was sometimes as simple as just sitting on a crazy order until he forgot about it); Shirer is at pains to show that Hitler’s generals, most of which were blamed and purged after Barbarossa, could never really stand up to him.
The final images of the book are the pitiful leftovers of Hitler’s inner circle at Nuremberg – stripped of their scary uniforms and authority, they are nothing more than guilty old men. There is little to be done with them save hang them, and yet the book, with its unsparing accounts of Nazi atrocities, serves as a possible answer to the existential problem of the 20th century: how can we prevent another Nazi Germany, another Holocaust? Shirer, by beginning with Hitler’s early political life, sits firmly in the camp of understanding how it formed: seemingly, out of sheer rhetorical cunning and the willingness of a fair amount of Germans to believe lies and half-truths that made them feel better about themselves. Ultimately, Hitler gave them the hate that they wanted to feel.
With the right mix of political conditions and a skilled public speaker without scruples, decency, or limits, it could happen anywhere.