The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
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.
It predates decades of archival material, especially the Soviet-bloc archives that opened long after 1960. A specific complaint recurs: Shirer repeatedly labels Röhm with a slur for his homosexuality while barely covering the regime's own persecution of gay people. Coverage is “relatively weak on the Holocaust” next to how much space everything else gets. The underlying thesis explains Nazism by an authoritarian German national character, and the “extremely biased pro-American perspective” flattens the leadership into “cartoonish version of evil,” a “sweeping certainty” that “sometimes leaves less room for ambiguity.” And “a lack of maps” means readers cannot follow the campaigns.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
