Ron Rosenbaum: Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.

Nineteen sixty: Only 15 years had passed since the end of World War II. But already one could read an essay describing a “wave of amnesia that has overtaken the West” with regard to the events of 1933 to 1945....

But in 1960, there were two notable developments, two captures: In May, Israeli agents apprehended Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Jerusalem for trial. And in October, William L. Shirer captured something else, both massive and elusive, within the four corners of a book: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option. The issue of a new edition on the 50th anniversary of the book’s winning the National Book Award recalls an important point of inflection in American historical consciousness....

Rereading the book, one sees how subtle Shirer is in shifting between telescope and microscope—even, one might say, stethoscope. Within the grand sweep of his gaze, which reached from the Irish Sea to the steppes beyond the Urals, he gives us Tolstoyan vistas of battle, and yet his intimate close-ups of the key players lay bare the minds and hearts behind the mayhem. Shirer had a remarkable eye for the singular, revealing detail. For example, consider the one Eichmann quote he included in the book, in a footnote written before Eichmann was captured....

Indeed, the foremost object lesson from rereading Shirer’s remarkable work 50 years on might be that the glorification of suicidal martyrdom, its inseparability from delusion and defeat, blinds its adherents to anything but murderous faith—and leads to little more than the slaughter of innocents.

And, yes, perhaps one corollary that almost need not be spelled out: There is danger in giving up our sense of selfhood for the illusory unity of a frenzied mass movement, of devolving from human to herd for some homicidal abstraction. It is a problem we can never be reminded of enough, and for this we will always owe William Shirer a debt of gratitude.