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

by William L. Shirer

  * The children and their ages were: Hela, 12; Hilda, 11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 7; Hedda, 5; Heide, 3.

  * The bones were never found, and this gave rise to rumors after the war that Hitler had survived. But the separate interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British and American intelligence officers leaves no doubt about the matter. Kempka has given a plausible explanation as to why the charred bones were never found. “The traces were wiped out,” he told his interrogators, “by the uninterrupted Russian artillery fire.”

  * Not Marshal Zhukov, as most accounts have had it.

  † May I was the traditional Labor Day in Europe.

  A BRIEF EPILOGUE

  I WENT BACK that autumn to the once proud land, where I had spent most of the brief years of the Third Reich. It was difficult to recognize. I have described that return in another place.29 It remains here merely to record the fate of the remaining characters who have figured prominently in these pages.

  Doenitz’s rump government, which had been set up at Flensburg on the Danish border, was dissolved by the Allies on May 23, 1945, and all its members were arrested. Heinrich Himmler had been dismissed from the government on May 6, on the eve of the surrender at Reims, in a move which the Admiral calculated might win him favor with the Allies. The former S.S. chief, who had held so long the power of life and death over Europe’s millions, and who had often exercised it, wandered about in the vicinity of Flensburg until May 21, when he set out with eleven S.S. officers to try to pass through the British and American lines to his native Bavaria. Himmler—it must have galled him—had shaved off his mustache, tied a black patch over his left eye and donned an Army private’s uniform. The party was stopped the first day at a British control point between Hamburg and Bremerhaven. After questioning, Himmler confessed his identity to a British Army captain, who hauled him away to Second Army headquarters at Lueneburg. There he was stripped and searched and made to change into a British Army uniform to avert any possibility that he might be concealing poison in his clothes. But the search was not thorough. Himmler kept his vial of potassium cyanide concealed in a cavity of his gums. When a second British intelligence officer arrived from Montgomery’s headquarters on May 23 and instructed a medical officer to examine the prisoner’s mouth, Himmler bit on his vial and was dead in twelve minutes, despite frantic efforts to keep him alive by pumping his stomach and administering emetics.

  The remaining intimate collaborators of Hitler lived a bit longer. I went down to Nuremberg to see them. I had often watched them in their hour of glory and power at the annual party rallies in this town. In the dock before the International Military Tribunal they looked different. There had been quite a metamorphosis. Attired in rather shabby clothes, slumped in their seats fidgeting nervously, they no longer resembled the arrogant leaders of old. They seemed to be a drab assortment of mediocrities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last you had seen them, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could conquer a great nation and most of Europe.

  There were twenty-one of them* in the dock: Goering, eighty pounds lighter than when last I had seen him, in a faded Luftwaffe uniform without insignia and obviously pleased that he had been given the Number One place in the dock—a sort of belated recognition of his place in the Nazi hierarchy now that Hitler was dead; Rudolf Hess, who had been the Number Three man before his flight to England, his face now emaciated, his deep-set eyes staring vacantly into space, feigning amnesia but leaving no doubt that he was a broken man; Ribbentrop, at last shorn of his arrogance and his pompousness, looking pale, bent and beaten; Keitel, who had lost his jauntiness; Rosenberg, the muddled party “philosopher,” whom the events which had brought him to this place appeared to have awakened to reality at last.

  Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter of Nuremberg, was there. This sadist and pornographer, whom I had once seen striding through the streets of the old town brandishing a whip, seemed to have wilted. A bald, decrepit-looking old man, he sat perspiring profusely, glaring at the judges and convincing himself—so a guard later told me—that they were all Jews. There was Fritz Sauckel, the boss of slave labor in the Third Reich, his narrow little slit eyes giving him a porcine appearance. He seemed nervous, swaying to and fro. Next to him was Baldur von Schirach, the first Hitler Youth Leader and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more American by blood than German and looking like a contrite college boy who has been kicked out of school for some folly. There was Walther Funk, the shifty-eyed nonentity who had succeeded Schacht. And there was Dr. Schacht himself, who had spent the last months of the Third Reich as a prisoner of his once revered Fuehrer in a concentration camp, fearing execution any day, and who now bristled with indignation that the Allies should try him as a war criminal. Franz von Papen, more responsible than any other individual in Germany for Hitler’s coming to power, had been rounded up and made a defendant. He seemed much aged, but the look of the old fox, who had escaped from so many tight fixes, was still imprinted on his wizened face.

  Neurath, Hitler’s first Foreign Minister, a German of the old school, with few convictions and little integrity, seemed utterly broken. Not Speer, who made the most straightforward impression of all and who during the long trial spoke honestly and with no attempt to shirk his responsibility and his guilt. Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian quisling, was in the dock, as were Jodl and the two Grand Admirals, Raeder and Doenitz—the latter, the successor to the Fuehrer, looking in his store suit for all the world like a shoe clerk. There was Kaltenbrunner, the bloody successor of “Hangman Heydrich,” who on the stand would deny all his crimes; and Hans Frank, the Nazi Inquisitor in Poland, who would admit some of his, having become in the end contrite and, as he said, having rediscovered God, whose forgiveness he begged; and Frick, as colorless on the brink of death as he had been in life. And finally Hans Fritzsche, who had made a career as a radio commentator because his voice resembled that of Goebbels, who had made him an official in the Propaganda Ministry. No one in the courtroom, including Fritzsche, seemed to know why he was there—he was too small a fry—unless it were as a ghost for Goebbels, and he was acquitted.

  So were Schacht and Papen. All three later drew stiff prison sentences from German denazification courts though, in the end, they served very little time.

  Seven defendants at Nuremberg drew prison sentences: Hess, Raeder and Funk for life, Speer and Schirach for twenty years, Neurath for fifteen, Doenitz for ten. The others were sentenced to death.

  At eleven minutes past 1 A.M. on October 16, 1946, Ribbentrop mounted the gallows in the execution chamber of the Nuremberg prison, and he was followed at short intervals by Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Sauckel and Jodl.

  But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

  * Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Arbeitsfront, who was to have been a defendant, had hanged himself in his cell before the trial began. He had made a noose from rags torn from a towel, which he had tied to a toilet pipe.

  AFTERWORD

  This book had a surprising reception.

  No one—not my publisher, my editor, my agent, my friends—believed that the public would buy a book so long, so full of footnotes, so expensive, and on such a subject. My lecture agent had told me there was no more interest in Hitler and the Third Reich and that I would have to talk about something else. My publisher printed only 12,500 copies in advance.

  The fact that the book started at once to attract considerable readership was therefore a pleasant surprise to us all. I never kept track of the sales myself—either of the hardcover edition brought out by Simon and Schuster or the mass-market paperback edition brought out by Fawcett. I was surpris
ed to hear two or three years ago that the Book-of-the-Month Club had sold more copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than of any other book in its history. But how many copies, I have no idea. The book also did well abroad—in Britain, France, and Italy, though less well in Germany.

  The reviews of the book, except in Germany, were much more perceptive than I had expected. And though the academic historians, on the whole, were cool to the book and to me (as if I were a usurper with no right to invade their field—to write good history, they said, you had to teach it), there were notable exceptions.

  H. R. Trevor-Roper, for instance. I felt some trepidation when I first heard that the Sunday New York Times Book Review had given him the book to review. He was a prestigious historian at Oxford whom I much admired—I had found his book The Last Days of Hitler very valuable. But British book reviewers at that time had been rather hard on American authors, and besides, as an eminent academic, Trevor-Roper might share, I thought, the disdain of his American colleagues for journalists who try to write history. So I concluded I would probably be clobbered in the publication that was most important for American writers and their books.

  But Trevor-Roper too surprised. The headline above his page-one review gave a hint as to what he would have to say:

  LIGHT ON OUR CENTURY’S DARKEST NIGHT

  The Awful Story of Hitler’s Germany

  Is Movingly Told in Masterly Study

  “In ordinary circumstances,” Trevor-Roper began, “it would be impossible, only half a generation after its end … to write its history. But with the Third Reich, nothing was ordinary, not even its end. In that total annihilation all the secrets of [Hitler’s] rule were broken open, all the archives captured….

  “Now, as never before, the living witnesses can converge with the historical truth. All they need is a historian. In William L. Shirer they have found one….”

  This was heady stuff, and at the very beginning of the review. It almost took my breath away. The concluding lines were almost as breathtaking. “This is a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions.”

  I was brought down to earth by the front-page review in the rival New York Herald-Tribune Book Review. Its author, Gordon A. Craig, then a historian at Princeton, did not agree at all with his Oxford colleague that the Third Reich had found its historian in me. By no means! He thought the book was too long and “out of balance.” He regretted that I had not read the book of an obscure German historian. The fact that the book was based not on what other historians had written but on original sources—captured secret German documents—did not impress him, if he noticed it.

  In Germany, to put it mildly, the book did not fare very well with the reviewers. The Germans simply could not face up to their past. Led by the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, the book was furiously attacked and the author maligned. “A German-hater!” Adenauer called me. Since the book dealt objectively with Nazi Germany and the crimes the Germans committed against the human spirit and against their neighbors and against the Jews of Europe, and since I allowed the documented facts to speak for themselves, I was somewhat taken back by the vehemence of the German reaction, but not entirely surprised.

  And now, as the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall goes to press, the world is suddenly confronted with a new reunification of Germany. Soon, united, Germany will be strong again economically and, if it wishes, militarily, as it was in the time of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. And Europe will be faced again with the German problem. If the past is any guide, the outlook is not very promising for Germany’s neighbors, who twice in my lifetime have been invaded by the Teutonic armies. The last time, under Hitler, as the readers of this book are reminded, the German behavior was a horror in its barbarism.

  People ask now: Have the Germans changed? Many in the West appear to believe so. I myself am not so sure, my view no doubt clouded by the personal experience of having lived and worked in Germany in the Nazi time. The truth is that no one really knows the answer to that crucial question. And quite understandably the nations that were former victims of German conquest do not want to take any chances again.

  Is there a solution to the German problem? Perhaps. It lies in enmeshing reunited Germany in a European security system out of which it could never break loose to pursue its past policies of aggression.

  In one fundamental sense, the situation has changed since the fall of the Third Reich. The development of the hydrogen bomb, as I mentioned at the end of my Foreword, written in 1959, has rendered an old-fashioned conqueror like Adolf Hitler obsolete. If ever a new adventurer such as Hitler tried to lead the Germans to new conquests, he would be repelled by a nuclear response. That would put a quick end to German aggression. But, unfortunately, it would put an end to the world too.

  So maybe the H-bomb and the rockets and planes and submarines designed to deliver it, horrible threat though they are to the survival of the planet, will, ironically, help, at least, to solve the German problem. No more bloody conquests by the Germans, or by anyone else.

  Perhaps it will help too if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.

  William L. Shirer

  May 1990

  NOTES

  Abbreviations used in these notes:

  DBrFP—Documents on British Foreign Policy. Files of the British Foreign Office.

  DDI—I Documenti diplomatica italiani. Files of the Italian government.

  DGFP—Documents on German Foreign Policy. Files of the German Foreign Office.

  FCNA—Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs. Summary records of Hitler’s conferences with the Commander in Chief of the German Navy.

  NCA—Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Part of the Nuremberg documents.

  N.D.—Nuremberg document.

  NSR—Nazi–Soviet Relations. From the files of the German Foreign Office.

  TMWC—Trial of the Major War Criminals. Nuremberg documents and testimony.

  TWC—Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. The Hammerstein memorandum, cited by Wheeler-Bennett in his The Nemesis of Power, p. 285. The memorandum was written for Wheeler-Bennett by Dr. Kunrath von Hammerstein, son of the General, and was based on his father’s notes and diaries. It is entitled “Schleicher, Hammerstein and the Seizure of Power.”

  2. Joseph Goebbels, Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei, p. 251.

  3. Hammerstein memorandum, cited by Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 280.

  4. Goebbels, op. cit., p. 250.

  5. Ibid., p. 252.

  6. Ibid., p. 252.

  7. André François-Poncet, The Fateful Years, p. 48. He was French ambassador in Berlin 1930–38.

  8. Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 251–54.

  9. Proclamation of Sept. 5, 1934, at Nuremberg.

  10. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe,

  11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, American edition (Boston, 1943), In a good number of quotations from this book I have altered the English translation somewhat to bring it closer to the original text in German.

  12. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, All who write on the Third Reich are indebted to Heiden for material on the early life of Hitler.

  13. Ibid., p. 41.

  14. Ibid., p. 43.

  15. Ibid., p. 43.

  16. Mein Kampf, p. 6.

  17. Ibid., p. 8.

  18. Ibid., pp. 8–10.

  19. Ibid., p. 10.

  20. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–44, p. 287.

  21. Ibid., p. 346.

  22. Ibid., p. 547.

  23. Ibid., pp. 566–67

  24. August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 50.

  25. Ibid., p. 49.

  26. Mein Kampf, pp. 14–15.
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  27. Kubizek, op. cit., p. 52, and Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 567.

  28. Kubizek, op. cit., p. 44.

  29. Mein Kampf, p. 18.

  30. Ibid., p. 21.

  31. Kubizek, op. cit., p. 59.

  32. lbid., p. 76.

  33. Ibid., pp. 54–55.

  34. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 52.

  35. Mein Kampf, p. 20.

  36. Ibid., p. 18.

  37. Ibid., p. 18.

  38. Ibid., p. 21.

  39. Ibid., pp. 21–22.

  40. Ibid., p. 34.

  41. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 54.