I’m rereading William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the quotes from the New York Times on the back have gotten me thinking
Really. I have to wonder if its still held in such high opinion given that the book is laced with Shirer’s raging homophobia (it seems as if every time Shirer writes “homosexual” it’s prefaced with “perverse”). Any thoughts and anything else out there about the book that I should know about?
It’s an old book. I remember reading it on the bus to high school, so that places it around the mid-1970s. The book attempted to deal with the entire war in one volume, and was a best-seller. I don’t remember any critical issues that came up over it.
Shirer was a journalist who was stationed in Berlin before the outbreak of WWII. I recommend his “Berlin Diary” if you want an idea of what it was like to deal with the Nazis.
If you’re still in the mood to read about WWII, I’d heartily recommend Cornelius Ryan’s books “The Longest Day,” “A Bridge Too Far,” and “The Last Battle.” Recall all this praise for Stephen Ambrose telling stories about “the common soldier”? Ryan did it first and better.
Shirer’s view on homosexuality was common to the day. He did point out the hypocrisy of the Nazi’s. While they ondemned the practice many top officials were themselves gay.
Shirer is of course not objective in his reporting, any more than anyone could be who witnessed first hand the Hitler reign of terror.
In any case, Shirer’s book is an excellent synopsis of the era.
Copyright 1950, so it’s not that old. (At least not to me, most of the books I enjoy reading were written before then.) I’ve read parts of Shirers Berlin Diary and found it interesting.
I am curious about Shirer’s objectivity, though. The book was written by someone who was an eyewitness to some of the history which the book details, yet Shirer is also homophobic, and considering some of the nasty encounters he had with the Nazi’s while a reporter covering the early days of the Third Reich, not to mention Shirer’s own problems with a certain Senator from Wisconsin, I’m wondering if that didn’t color his views on the matter to some degree.
He seems to have a rather bad impression of the Germans as a whole, and takes an almost preverse delight in recounting the darker parts of German history. This is not to say that the Nazi’s weren’t evil, any nation that raises genocide to an industrial process surely counts as evil, but Shirer seems to believe that the whole thrust of German history has been that of breeding a warrior caste bent on world domination. Which strikes me as a little harsh.
Never having heard of the book, I can’t comment, but if the copyright is in the fifties, back then, homophobia was well, let’s just say the rule rather than the exception.
Granted, but Shirer lambasts them in a manner which is totally unnecessary in the book. I mean, I don’t really need to know that every time a particular Nazi is mentioned that he was gay, which Shirer seems intent on doing. Its akin to saying, “The Nazi Adolf Hitler” every time one mentions Hitler.
It may be the standard opinion of people who lived through that period (or there may be some truth to it). The same general opinion was in William Manchester’s The Arms Of Krupp. I’ve read other books that point out the same thing.
A couple factiods:
"The Fuehrer has issued a decree by which members of the SS who violate Article 175 will in future be punished by death. This is a very wholesome decree which will render the elite organization of the Party immune to this cancer.
[Article 175 in the German criminal code deal with homosexuality . . . .]"