The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William Shirer · 1960
Shirer was a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise and had access to captured German documents most historians didn't. His 1,245-page account of the Nazi regime remains the most thorough narrative history of the Third Reich for general readers: exhaustively sourced, terrifyingly readable.
The case against
Shirer's central explanation, a crooked road from Luther to Hitler baked into the German character, was dubious in 1960 and has not improved with age. Sixty-five years of archives have superseded his sourcing; the Holocaust, the regime's defining crime, gets thin coverage next to diplomatic maneuvering. At 1,245 pages you are reading a monument, not the current scholarship.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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