Germany wasn't always such a nice place...

So I finished The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (by William Shirer) last week, one of the best, if not THEE best, non-fiction book I've ever read. It took me several months to conquer the more than 1100 pages of dense text (not even a single picture - I must be all grownsed up!).

If you were to pick it up, feel its weight, and leaf through the thick pages, it might seem to be a bit of a slog, but I found that actually far from the truth. It was actually hard to put down and probably cost me an extra half hour to hour of sleep on many nights when I should have turned out the light that much earlier.

My prior knowledge of the third Reich, and of World War II in general, comes from a small bit of academics (high school, college maybe a hair), but mostly derives from pop culture - comic books, movies, snippets on the history channel, and of course the board game Axis and Allies. Also Pete, Eryn and I took a "walking tour of the third Reich" while in Munich last January which was flat awesome. The coolest thing about reading the book, a comprehensive look at the whole thing, was that it gave me a thorough start to finish. No more snippets and pearls mixing together in my head, but rather a sturdy time line of what happened when, how one thing led to the next, how it ended, and so on.

To start, the author (Shirer) was an interesting guy. He was an AP correspondent living in Berlin for most of the 1930s until 1942. He was literally present at hundreds of Nazi functions, and heard many, if not all, of Hitler's "big" speeches, covering them in a media capacity back in the day. He was there when France surrendered and his description of the French and German generals meeting up to discuss terms was quite chilling from the first hand account. As an American correspondent, he more or less had a free pass for most of his time there (until the US joined the war and he was kicked out), able to act as an observer on many levels. Also, the guy did his research, pouring through volumes of captured texts and diaries to get at many of the formerly hidden facts.

He also cracked me up in that he was not one to hold his personal opinion back while reporting the facts, often going to his footnotes with comments like "As seen by THIS observer, the ambassador was a cool man and a coward" - stuff like that. It rocked. He really lets the pre-Churchill English (led by Neville Chamberlain) and the French have it for their ceaseless Nazi appeasement in the late 1930's - to read about the extent of it - the Nazi appeasement that is - in hindsight is just crazy.

He also has no love lost for Mussolini, a man he considers a puppet of Hitler's (even though Hitler would have gotten nowhere without appeasing Mussolini in his early days of "claiming terroritory" - like Austria). He paints Mussolini like a total chump; the guy apparently made a pact with Germany, then backed out, then wanted in when he saw how good Germany was doing in the early war. But every time he committed troops somewhere (i.e. Greece), they got worked and had to be saved by Germany. The whole interplay between Hitler and Mussolini was fascinating. First Hitler had to appease the then greater "Duce". Later they were on equal terms and then finally Hitler dominated the guy. All this I had no idea about before.

Reading a book so transfixed on Hitler is fascinating. Clearly he was a shrewd man, a political genius and also completely insane, getting worse year by year, to the point where he was literally twitching and jerking in his final years, especially when angry. Reading the first hand accounts of this by everyone from his generals to his secretaries was an odd combination of comical and scary.

When he was in prison in the 1920's he wrote "Mein Kampf", which according to this book pretty much puts down everything he intended to do right from the start. Take over Europe, expand the German lands, put down the Jews (and Czechs) - all of it. The author even stops to say "Say what you want about Hitler, no one can deny he made a plan early on and stuck to it - no one can argue that they had no idea what he wanted to do".

Similarly, it was odd to read a book about Hitler, knowing what we know about the guy now. It was hard to remember that in the 1920's and 1930's, before his rise to power, he was just another "whacky" politician with his own (albeit insane) agenda. He wasn't thee infamous Adolf Hitler yet. Still, I kept wanting to shout, "Dude, what are you doing? Don't you realize you're talking to f*cking Hitler?!?" whenever reading a passage about leader X or ambassador Y "holding meetings" with the guy in the days before the war.

Other facts, thoughts, and comments:

-Hitler took over Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. He merely bullied and threatened war, and basically just snaked those two, while England and France stepped all over each other to be the first to let him. (Apparently nobody wanted another world war so close to the first one, so they (England and France) would do anything to avoid starting another - eventually this policy led to, obviously, disaster.)

-Poland wouldn't let the same thing happen, so Hitler invaded. Only before he did, he dressed up German prisoners in German military uniforms, had some of his SS dress up as Polish soldiers, and had all the "Germans" shot. Even though he had been building up to the assault on 1 September, 1939 for months, by the time the tanks tore into Poland he had, through his insane propaganda machine - which really was nuts, run by Goebbels - convinced all the German people that Poland had invaded Germany and started the war!

-Something I didn't know was that Russia started the war out on the same side as Germany with a non-aggression pact. Hitler secured this as the last step before invading Poland. Russia actually helped secure the eastern part of Poland for herself, using force and claiming it for her own. Mistrust grew between Stalin and Hitler over the next year (that's a great pairing of warm and fuzzy types, isn't it?), until finally Stalin's territorial grabs in eastern Europe angered Hitler to the point where he went on a full (and ill-fated) offensive against Russia, despite the urging of his generals not to....

-Time and time again it seems like if Hitler had only listened to his generals about this or that, things probably would have gone much differently and Germany may very well have succeeded in conquering and defending all of Europe.


-There were at least a dozen different attempts to kill Hitler, by conspiratorial Germans, during World War II. The set of unlikely coincidences which saved his ass from death at least six times are mind-boggling, from the time bomb that didn't go off (malfunctioned) in one of his planes to the three or four times he changed plans at the last second to avoid death by poison, bomb, or shooting. It was crazy and I had no idea so many such attempts were made.

-The Third Reich technically only lasted about 8 years, but it's odd that even though it's such a small part of overall German history, they are undeniably stamped with its effects for all time. I wonder how many generations it will take before the whole German and Nazi concepts are culturally unmarried...

-On a similar note, it's probably not a good idea to read this book, with a giant swastika adorning its cover, in any public or even semi-private location IN Germany. I may or may not know from experience...

Anyway, that's it - read the book.