Michael: January 30th, 1933. A single day. The German government had just collapsed, again. Rumors of a military coup were flying. And the man everyone underestimated, a man the President had called an 'Austrian corporal,' was about to be handed the keys to the entire country. Kevin: Whoa, that sounds like the opening scene of a political thriller, not a history lesson. The air must have been electric with tension. You can just feel the chaos. Michael: It was the tipping point of the 20th century. And it’s a scene laid out with chilling detail in William L. Shirer's monumental work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book is a giant, over 1,200 pages, and it won the National Book Award for a reason. It’s considered by many to be the definitive popular history of Nazi Germany. Kevin: A 1,200-page book on such a heavy topic sounds intimidating. What makes this one so special? Why this book? Michael: What makes Shirer's account so powerful is that he wasn't just a historian writing from a quiet library decades later. He was a CBS radio correspondent in Berlin, reporting live as the darkness fell. He was one of "Murrow's Boys," right there on the ground. Kevin: He was an eyewitness? Michael: Exactly. And he had to be incredibly clever. There’s this great anecdote that he would use American slang in his broadcasts to get the truth past the ever-watchful Nazi censors. He was literally risking his life to tell the world what was happening. Kevin: That's incredible. It makes you wonder, how did he—or anyone—get the inside story? I mean, dictatorships aren't exactly known for their transparency. How do we know what was happening in those secret meetings that led to that fateful day?

Michael: That is the perfect question, and it leads to one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of this entire history. The story of the Third Reich can be told with such incredible detail because of a historical accident, a perfect storm of German meticulousness and total collapse. Kevin: A historical accident? What do you mean? Michael: When the Third Reich fell in 1945, the Allies didn't just win a war; they captured a paper trail. The Nazis were obsessive record-keepers. We’re talking about the complete archives of the German government, the military, the Nazi Party, even Heinrich Himmler's secret police. Kevin: Okay, so they found some documents. That happens in wars. Michael: Some documents? Kevin, try to imagine 485 tons of records from the German Foreign Office alone. They were found by the U.S. First Army. The German Naval Archives, discovered at a castle near Coburg, contained 60,000 files—every signal, every ship's log, every diary. It was an avalanche of paper. Kevin: Hold on, 485 tons? That's not an archive; that's a forest. How do you even begin to process that? You can't just Google it. Michael: You can't. And that's the story Shirer tells in his foreword. For ten years, a huge portion of these documents—tons of them—were shipped to a U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and just… sat there. Kevin: You're kidding me. They just sat on the secret blueprint for World War II in a warehouse in Virginia for a decade? Michael: For a decade! It wasn't until 1955 that a group of historians finally got the funding and permission to start opening the crates and photographing the documents before they were returned to Germany. It was a race against time. Shirer describes the challenge as monumental. There were no indexes, no guides. It was just a mountain of raw, unfiltered history. Kevin: Wow. So was there a 'golden ticket' in all of that? One document that blew everything wide open? Michael: There were several. One of the most incredible finds was the personal diary of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff. It’s this incredibly concise, day-by-day account of high-level decisions from 1939 to 1942. It’s like finding the secret diary of a top CEO during a massive corporate takeover. Kevin: So you get the official meeting minutes, and then you get the diary entry saying what really happened. Michael: Precisely. And there's more. At Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat, they found the charred remains of his personal papers. Aides had tried to burn them, but they were rescued. From those burnt scraps, they managed to piece together partial transcripts of fifty-one of Hitler's secret military conferences. We can literally read his private conversations with his generals as he planned the invasion of Europe. Kevin: That gives me chills. It’s like we’re a fly on the wall for some of the most evil moments in history. It’s not speculation; it’s documented. Michael: It’s documented. And that’s what gives Shirer’s book its incredible authority. He acknowledges that as a journalist who lived through it, he has his own biases. In fact, some critics have pointed out that his focus on a "German character" or a direct line from Luther to Hitler is a bit outdated by modern historical standards. Kevin: Right, the idea that this was somehow inevitable for Germany. Michael: Yes. But Shirer is very clear about his method. He says he will rely on the documents first and foremost. He quotes the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saying, "I lived through the whole war, being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth." He’s telling us: I was there, but I’m not just relying on my memory. I have the receipts. And those receipts, those captured documents, give us an almost minute-by-minute account of the pivotal moments. Kevin: Which brings us back to that day you mentioned at the start. That one day in January. Michael: None more so than that day. January 30th, 1933. The day the talking stopped and the marching began.

Kevin: Okay, so set the scene for me. We have this mountain of evidence telling us what happened. What was the mood in Berlin on the eve of Hitler's appointment? Was it obvious this was the end of the world as they knew it? Michael: Far from it. The mood was chaos, but it was a familiar chaos. The Weimar Republic was a revolving door of failed governments. The Chancellor just before Hitler, General von Schleicher, had lasted less than two months. The city was buzzing with rumors—that Schleicher was planning a military coup to stop Hitler, that the unions were going to call a general strike to save the Republic, like they had done successfully back in 1920 during the Kapp Putsch. Kevin: So there was hope. People thought the system, or at least some part of it, would hold. Michael: There was hope, and there was deep anxiety. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, wrote in his diary that day, "Our hearts are torn back and forth between doubt, hope, joy and discouragement. We have been disappointed too often for us to believe wholeheartedly in the great miracle." Even the top Nazis weren't sure it was going to happen. Kevin: And what about the man at the center of it all, President Hindenburg? He was this old, revered World War I field marshal. He held all the cards. What was his take on Hitler? Michael: Hindenburg despised him. He was an old-world Prussian aristocrat, and he looked down on Hitler as this vulgar, noisy upstart. Just a few months earlier, Hindenburg had declared he had, and I'm quoting Shirer directly here, "no intention whatsoever of making that Austrian corporal either Minister of Defense or Chancellor of the Reich." Kevin: Okay, but then how does a President go from 'no way, not this guy' to handing him the Chancellery in a matter of days? What on earth changed? Michael: One man's disastrous miscalculation. A conservative politician named Franz von Papen. Papen had been Chancellor before and wanted back in. He cooked up a scheme. He went to Hindenburg and pitched a coalition government with Hitler as Chancellor, but with only a few Nazis in the cabinet. Papen himself would be Vice-Chancellor. Kevin: Let me guess his logic. He thought he could control Hitler? Michael: It was a classic case of political hubris. Papen and the other conservatives believed they could use Hitler's popularity with the masses to stabilize the country, but keep him boxed in. They thought they were the puppet masters. Papen famously boasted to a friend, "We've hired him." He said, "Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak." Kevin: Wow. That has to be one of the most catastrophic political predictions in history. It’s like they built a Trojan Horse, rolled it into the city, and were genuinely shocked when soldiers poured out. Michael: That's the perfect analogy. They thought they were getting a populist figurehead they could manipulate. Instead, they got the German revolution. On the morning of January 30th, Hitler met with Hindenburg. The old man, worn down by his advisors and his own son, finally gave in. Goebbels describes seeing Hitler after the meeting. He writes, "He says nothing, and all of us say nothing, but his eyes are full of tears." Kevin: The emotion of the moment. For them, it was the culmination of a 14-year struggle. But what about for everyone else? What happened next? Michael: What happened next was a masterstroke of propaganda that cemented the new reality in the minds of every German. That night, from dusk until past midnight, a massive torchlight parade of Nazi storm troopers snaked through the streets of Berlin. Kevin: A torchlight parade. That sounds absolutely terrifying. Michael: Imagine it. Tens of thousands of men in uniform, their faces illuminated by the flickering orange glow of torches, marching through the heart of the capital, past the Brandenburg Gate, singing Nazi anthems. Shirer describes Hitler watching from a window in the Chancellery, his face filled with "joy and excitement." Nearby, in the presidential palace, the 86-year-old Hindenburg stood watching, supposedly pleased, tapping his cane to the rhythm of the military marches. Kevin: He was pleased? He was watching the funeral of the Republic he was sworn to protect. Michael: It's a chilling image. And for the Nazis, it was pure ecstasy. Goebbels wrote in his diary that night, "It is almost like a dream... a fairy tale... The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!" And Hitler himself would boast that this Third Reich, born on that day, would last for a thousand years. Kevin: It lasted twelve. But twelve years of unimaginable horror. Michael: Twelve years that changed the world forever. And as the historian Friedrich Meinecke later wrote, it’s one of the greatest examples in history of the "singular and incalculable power of personality."

Kevin: It's just staggering when you put the two pieces together. On one hand, you have this almost miraculous, unprecedented record of a disaster—the tons of documents that let us see every calculation and motive. And on the other hand, you have the play-by-play of the disaster itself. It feels like watching a car crash in slow motion, but with the car's engineering blueprints in your hand. Michael: That's it exactly. Shirer's book isn't just a history; it's a warning. It’s a detailed autopsy of a dead democracy. He makes a fascinating point near the end of his foreword. He quotes Hitler, who said, "I am the last great adventurer-conqueror in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon." Kevin: That’s some serious ego. Michael: Of course. But Shirer agrees, in a way. He argues that the advent of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles has made that kind of large-scale, world-conquering war obsolete. The risk is too great. In that sense, Hitler might have been the last of his kind. Kevin: But that’s not the comforting thought it sounds like. Michael: Not at all. Because the method—that’s the timeless part. The exploitation of social division, the slow, deliberate erosion of democratic norms, the lies becoming truth through repetition, and most of all, the fatal belief among the 'sensible' people that you can control an uncontrollable force for your own benefit. That playbook is eternal. Kevin: The idea that you can "hire" the extremist, use their energy, and then discard them when you're done. But you can't. The fire always burns the one who thinks they can hold it. Michael: It always does. And Shirer’s ultimate message, built on that mountain of evidence, is a testament to that fact. He shows us, in excruciating detail, how a sophisticated, cultured nation chose to hand its fate over to a man whose entire worldview was built on hate, all because a few powerful people thought they were clever enough to manage the monster. Kevin: It really makes you ask a tough question: what 'uncontrollable' forces are we trying to manage today, thinking we have them on a leash? Michael: A heavy question, and one that echoes right from the pages of this book, written over 60 years ago. It’s a conversation that never really ends. We'd love to hear what you think. Join the conversation on our social channels. What parallels, if any, do you see today? Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.