It was Hitler’s boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Instead it lasted only twelve. But into its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known.

William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. He was also present at the Nuremberg trials. This is his authoritative historical account of the years 1933–45, when the Nazis, under the rule of their despotic leader Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany. They commandeered the Holocaust, one of the most shocking acts of evil in modern history, plunged the world into a second war, and changed the face of modern history and modern Europe forever.

William L. Shirer ranks as one of the greatest of all American foreign correspondents. He lived and worked in Paris, Belin, Vienna, and Rome. But it was above all as correspondent in Germany for the Chicago Tribune and later for the Columbia Broadcasting System in the late 1930s that his reputation was established. He subsequently wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is hailed as a classic, and after World War Two he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. In the post-war years he wrote in a variety of fields, and in his seventies he learned Russian, publishing a biography of Tolstoy at the age of 89. He died in 1994. His Berlin broadcasts were published posthumously by Hutchinson in 1999.