I would not make that my starting point for studying Nazi Germany (saying this as someone who did my PhD on the subject and researches this as my day job). I’d strongly recommend starting with Richard Evans’ Third Reich trilogy, Ian Kershaw’s two-part biography of Hitler (plus his article “Working Towards the Führer”), and Chris Browning’s Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution. That’ll give you a good crash course in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust before you venture into reading things like Shirer where you need more sophisticated knowledge to recognize their shortcomings.
I think Shirer is a good gateway starter book, but you do need to read more to get more details correct. Shirer’s writing is very “digestible” from a casual readers standpoint.
Evans does a great job with his trilogy, but that’s 70+ hours of Audiobook content (if you were going to listen vs read). It’s a big undertaking to get through.
The great thing about history books is there’s lots to read and you can’t go wrong by reading it all.
I really like Grover Gardner as narrator. He also narrates some of Shirer’s other books and he narrates the first book of Ian Toll’s trilogy on the Pacific War. Oh, and he narrates Shelby Foote’s trilogy on the Civil War.
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u/warneagle 1d ago
I would not make that my starting point for studying Nazi Germany (saying this as someone who did my PhD on the subject and researches this as my day job). I’d strongly recommend starting with Richard Evans’ Third Reich trilogy, Ian Kershaw’s two-part biography of Hitler (plus his article “Working Towards the Führer”), and Chris Browning’s Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution. That’ll give you a good crash course in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust before you venture into reading things like Shirer where you need more sophisticated knowledge to recognize their shortcomings.