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This is a fascinating book. William Shirer was working as a radio journalist in Germany at the start of the Second World War. He is most famous for his great work of history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one of the best general histories of the war.
This book contains the scripts for his radio broadcasts from Germany. The result is a most unusual view of the early part of the war. Shirer was exposed to the German propaganda, and had little or no access to other points of view. His short visits to Switzerland made him realise just how biased and inaccurate the German news was. Towards the end of the book, the situation has become so bad that Shirer no longer felt he was doing anything useful by remaining in Germany.
The second great feature of this book is that we really get to watch events unroll as they were reported at the time. There are no glances forward, no explanations of what was really happening. As the tension builds in the summer of 1939 we see what the German public saw. If you want to get an understanding of how a totalitarian regime can mislead its people, then this is an invaluable book.
Author: William L. Shirer
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 478
Publisher: Overlook
Year: 2002 reprint