The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.

He had invented and used with staggering success a new strategy and technique of political warfare, which made actual war unnecessary.

Polish government, Premier Daladier, according

there might not have been any war at all if Hitler had known he must take on Russia as well as Poland, England and France.

Step by step, the two Western democracies had retreated: when Hitler defied them by declaring conscription in 1935, when he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when he took Austria in 1938 and in the same year demanded and got the Sudetenland; and they had sat by weakly when he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich.

Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines. They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.

Perhaps no one has left a more grisly—and authoritative—account of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion than the proud S.S. officer who put it down.* This German individual was Juergen Stroop, S.S. Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police. His eloquent official report, bound in leather, profusely illustrated and typed on seventy-five pages of elegant heavy bond paper has survived.† It is entitled The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More.69