Books: Again, G

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH (1,245 pp.)—William L Shirer—Simon & Schusfer ($ 10).

The story of Adolf Hitler and his works is curiously resistant to the historian's approach. Such massive evil can scarcely be conveyed by facts, figures and chronology. What is needed is another Dante with a genius for portraying hell, or a new Wagner who can translate horror into myth and spell out the dread meanings in a Götterdämmerung finale. Surrealist imagination, not research, may one day tell the definitive story; in the meantime, there are books.

In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Author William Shirer has undertaken to tell the entire Hitler story in one massive volume. A former reporter and newscaster, Shirer covered Germany and the Nazis from 1925 until the U.S. entered the war, and his bestselling Berlin Diary (TIME, June 23, 1941) was one of the earliest casebooks of Nazi practice. To his huge task Shirer brings only modest writing gifts, but he has an advantage that swamps all shortcomings: his material is horribly fascinating. He has done thorough research in captured documents, in books and in diaries. The result is a panoramic exposure of Naziism in practice that may lack literary stature and new insights, but seizes the reader's interest and holds it to the end.

To the German's Taste. What seems as incredible as ever is that the little Austrian vagabond ever got a political foothold at all. Shirer tries to explain Hitler's success by citing some obvious facts of German history and character: defeat in World War I set the stage for an adventurer who promised to end the shame of the Versailles Treaty; and German distaste for democracy, coupled with a veneration for authority, enabled thugs to make a deal with respectable elements and then terrorize a whole nation. Shirer plainly believes that in Hitler the Germans got a leader to their taste. He points out that the industrialists assumed the debt of the Nazi Party, that most Protestant pastors swore a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, that the average man hardly seemed to notice the loss of his liberties, and quotes Philosopher Oswald Spengler's comment after Hitler's takeover: "It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking."

This seemed true to the end. According to General Guenther Blumentritt, no admirer of Hitler, at least half the civilian population resented the officers' attempt on Hitler's life on June 20, 1944. Says Shirer: "National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country's saviour." But General Blumentritt's remark might be interpreted another way: that up to half of the civilian population had so much of Hitler or of war that they did not resent the attempt to assassinate their country's leader in the midst of war.