Nazi Germany Out of Focus:

...He also dips into some of the diaries which have been published by men involved, though here the selection is rather conventional...

...Viewed as a military feat, for example, the march of German troops into the heart of Russia dwarfs the epic of Napoleon...

...Somewhere in a book about the Third Reich there should be a little tombstone in their honor...

...President, American Council on Germany Nazism viewed as history-dyed with melodrama and occasionally even tragedy though it be-corrodes printer's ink...

...Shirer is far too fond of the little adjectives-the ones which stick pins in people-and too aloof from the pertinent phrases which concentrate good and wickedness in vials...

...It is a docile people...

...With all this no one would wish to quarrel...

...I do not wish to suggest that his book has a hero, unless one thinks in terms of Macbeth or Priam...

...I often think that Hitler as I came to know him was really captured best by a painter of genius, Leo Samberger, who sketched and painted his likeness after having seen him pass by at close range a few times...

...But he has no gift for the chronicles of war...

...But what magnetic force was it that assembled in Munich Klee, Marc and Kandinsky at one time...

...For here is the portrait of a kind of genius into whom all that was warped in Europe and Germany after the holocaust of World War I was somehow embedded...

...Quite apart from the imaginativeness, reliance on original research and effective style which characterize it, Nemesis of Power has a theme rich in tragedy and unmistakable importance...

...Nazism itself is meaningless, in a macabre sense ridiculous...

...To begin with, Shirer's portrait of Hitler is not convincing...

...If one compares the relatively few pages in which de Gaulle describes the failure of the French Army to contain the German advance, one will see clearly what a first-rate writer can do...

...And so all the good books deal with victims of the system, from John Hersey's The Wall to Michelet's Rue de la Libert...

...Shirer's difficulty, I think, is that he has been captivated by the non-splendid sickness of American academic historians-an illness which prevents one from saying a word which is peculiarly one's own because there are so many other people in the world who have used words...

...By comparison The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is like a kind of diary of what its author has read about Nazism...

...Shirer's obsession with Eva Braun leads to the appearance of that fair lady at the most unexpected moments, and Geli Raubal, the ill-fated niece, gets pages which might well have been devoted to someone else...

...It unfortunately appeared shortly after the publication of John Wheeler-Bennett's Nemesis of Power, which, though it has its faults, is one of the most masterly works in contemporary history to have been published in a long while...

...But it is about something one can be interested in because human strength and weakness are always interesting...

...The major fault, however, is born of inability to see the German people and the German culture clearly as they were...

...Yet, even so, anybody who wishes to watch a procession of facts and comments, big and little, grey or red, will still find this a useful book...

...But it will not do to say that he was not possessed of genius...

...Everyone is entitled to his views and even his prejudices, but the task of the historian is to weigh the opposing forces in history and give each his due...

...But it is nevertheless possible to avoid trying to drag everything along and thus repeat what has already been said to the point of satiety...

...Novels about Nazism are all horror stories, and the reflection it induces summons to mind by way of contrast Plato's Georgias or the language of Isaiah...

...The reading is in itself of course highly commendable...

...When he puts his mind to it, Shirer can write a good straightforward narrative, as when he tells the story of how the Stalin-Hitler Pact came to be...

...The sources have been multiplied far beyond the ability of anyone to cope with them, and we are still so close to the events described that memories of this or that detail loom up out of all proportion to their intrinsic significance...

...No one will argue against the fact that the great mass of Germans followed along obediently saying "Heil Hitler" and working industriously the while...

...But there were very many who tried to keep the light of their country's best tradition alive...

...Writing about it becomes either a sort of Mickey Spillane murder yarn written against a background so grim, shoddy and blood-stained that the imagination cannot take it in, or an essay in abnormal psychology...

...Oddly enough the research done here on some crucial aspects of his character and the formation of his ideas is incomplete...

...William L. Shirer's book does not live these handicaps down...

...Land Commissioner for Bavaria...

...But these merit careful study, and will then be found to lie beyond Nietzsche, Gobineau and Chamberlain...

...WheelerBennett tells the story of the German Army, of the struggle it waged and lost against Hitler, and of the fate which as a result was meted out to it...

...Yet there is a malign mystery in the man, too-the mystery with which Fritz von Unruh wrestled bravely if unsuccessfully in the best of his novels...

...In one brief passage Shirer dismisses German art as not having been significant after "Durer and Cranach" while making a bow to the Bauhaus...

...Shirer has erected none...

...And anybody who might wish to consider what is now known about the genesis of Hitler's anti-Semitism will not find it here, nor will he be led behind the scenes of Bavarian politics to see how it was that a talkative anti-Communist organizer could make such a place for himself in Munich...

...The evil that was in this man was, it is true, not wholly the product of evil ideas...

...Shirer uses a great deal of the documentary material made available by the capture of German archives and by the Nuremberg trials...

...I mention this detail because it is significant...