Currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time. I’ve wanted to read a book about Nazi Germany for a while now, and tried more “modern” and “updated” books, but IMO they are still pretty inferior to this one. The recent books from historians I looked at were concerned more with an ideological opposition to Great Men theories than factual accuracy, and also simply failed to hold my attention. Newer books are also necessarily written by someone who wasn’t there, and by someone who does not feel comfortable commenting about events from a first person perspective as such.
This book, though, is riveting, and I have to avoid the impulse of looking things up on Wikipedia as I read their names to keep the narrative. There are so many details about the buildup to WW2 here that I was just unaware of going in. I think everybody knows of Chamberlain as the Hitler appeasement guy, and Wikipedia tells you he maybe gets a bad rap in retrospect, but the full extent of his treachery and spinelessness is sickening. I am creating a “highlights from” post based on the book and encourage you guys to read it yourselves if you want to learn more about authoritarianism.
Currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time. I’ve wanted to read a book about Nazi Germany for a while now, and tried more “modern” and “updated” books, but IMO they are still pretty inferior to this one. The recent books from historians I looked at were concerned more with an ideological opposition to Great Men theories than factual accuracy, and also simply failed to hold my attention. Newer books are also necessarily written by someone who wasn’t there, and by someone who does not feel comfortable commenting about events from a first person perspective as such.
This book, though, is riveting, and I have to avoid the impulse of looking things up on Wikipedia as I read their names to keep the narrative. There are so many details about the buildup to WW2 here that I was just unaware of going in. I think everybody knows of Chamberlain as the Hitler appeasement guy, and Wikipedia tells you he maybe gets a bad rap in retrospect, but the full extent of his treachery and spinelessness is sickening. I am creating a “highlights from” post based on the book and encourage you guys to read it yourselves if you want to learn more about authoritarianism.
Looking forward to your post!