Shirer served as a newspaper and radio correspondent in Europe during the 1930s and early 1940s. Stationed in Berlin for much of that time, he reported on the rise of Hitler and the events that led to World War II.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich features many of Shirer’s first-hand observations inside Nazi Germany. At first, Shirer did not see the Third Reich for what it was. For one thing, “the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans,” so “a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship” (231). Shirer also confesses to having been personally “misled” at times by the regime’s ceaseless propaganda (248).

Shirer happened to be stationed in Vienna during the Anschluss of March 1938. For weeks afterward, the treatment of the Jews “was worse than anything I had seen in Germany,” as Austrian Nazis indulged in “an orgy of sadism” (351). In September of that year, as Hitler contemplated an invasion of Czechoslovakia, Shirer encountered Czech President Benes and noted that Benes’s “face was grave and that he seemed to be fully aware of the terrible position he was in” (383).