I should put an explanation on my profile page - both where the articles come from and what my crazy project is all about.
I find all the articles on Microfiche at U.C. Santa Cruz. They have files full of reels for the New York Time, San Francisco Chronicle, L.A. Times, and more. I stick to the NYT because they have the broadest coverage. The microfiche readers are connected to printers that the public can use for no additional charge. (Parking is $6, however.) I can sit and run through the reels for about 6 hours before I get too punchy to continue. That gets me through about one to one-and-a-half months. I take all my copies home and do a cut and tape process to put the articles in 8 1/2 X 11 format for scanning. I upload the images to photobucket and then generate links for posting here. Those I download to Word documents, which I post when the big day comes. I estimate conservatively that I spend about 20 hours to get one month's worth of articles ready to post.
As for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I think it is an amazing eyewitness account by a trained journalist. Shirer was in Europe for all during the thirties (I think) and spent the war years in England. He was in the audience when Hitler made some of his major speeches. On rare occasions Shirer lapses into the first person when he wants to relate his personal memories or relate what was in his diary. Third Reich is really thorough. Shirer might have a left-leaning bias, but it doesn't distort his reporting enough to diminish its value. He is clearly anti-Nazi. I don't recall him showing such hostility to Stalin or the Soviet Union. But the book is not about Stalin so it doesn't bother me. Other freepers may have a different opinion based on more knowledge. Anyhow, the book is 1143 pages of fascinating history.
Thanks.
And thank you HJS for your hard work.
“Shirer might have a left-leaning bias, but it doesn’t distort his reporting enough to diminish its value.”
A good companion to “Rise and Fall” is Speer’s Inside The Third Reich”.
While it doesn’t go in to a lot of detail, it does show that much of the driving factor behind the Nazi leadership was a fear of the Soviets and expansionist International Communism. And that expansion was directed right at them. (Something Shirer conveniently leaves out).
And a LOT of the Anti-Soviet feeling in Germany was driven by the slaughter of so many Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and the Armistace stopping Germany from helping them. Ger. Some sources say up to 1 million were killed by the Communists during the Polish Wars of Independence from 1919-1921.