Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
I'm currently re-reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L Shirer. (1960)
I read this more or less non-stop back around 1965, in the Pan Paperback edition, which I still have, much battered about but still, amazingly, holding together despite being over 1400 pages!
Shirer was a US newspaper correspondent based in Berlin until 1940, and who had access to the vast captured German files after the war. He could easily read German, and so didn't have to wait for translations.
This was the first general history of Nazism and the 3rd Reich, and still the easiest to read; Shirer's journalism skill showing through. It is a monumental bit of research.
If you want the whole appalling story in one book, which is not a dry-as-dust historians' approach, and you don't mind that Shirer's justified indignation tends to give it flavour, this is it.
I'd hate to make an e-book out of it. There are well over 1300 source reference in the text, and probably close to 1,000 footnotes. It would be a nightmare sorting that lot out.
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Shirer also wrote
Berlin Diary, a day-by-day of his experiences in Germany from 1934 to 1941. He does acknowledge that he wrote it with the intention to eventually publish it, so you do have to wonder how much editing he was doing as he went along. Still, an interesting outsider's view of Nazi Germany. In the pre-war period.