Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

Now is the time to read William Shirer’s “Rise & Fall of the Third Reich” if you haven’t before.

If you have read it before, READ IT AGAIN. 📖

Much of it will sound familiar…

smithsonianmag.com/history/revisi…

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is more than just a chronicle of what Bill witnessed in Berlin.

He searches for a deeper “why”: Was the Third Reich a unique, one-time phenomenon, or do humans possess some ever-present receptivity to the appeal of primal, herd-like hatred?

On my desk again today…

https://twitter.com/RealLoriSpencer/status/1613820487196360704

This was the book that helped our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents find an understanding of the trauma and horrors they still struggled to cope with 15 years after the war they fought ended.

It reminded them why they fought — and why we must prepare to fight again.

Writing The Rise and Fall was an extraordinary act of daring, especially for a correspondent in 1930’s Berlin. Shirer was risking his life with every dispatch.

It remains an awe-inspiring achievement that he could capture that terrain of horror in ONLY 1,250 pages. 📖

Shirer was there to document the Rise firsthand — and he documented the Fall from primary sources.

After the #Nazis defeat, he studied warehouses full of captured German documents—the Pentagon Papers/WikiLeaks of their time—enabling Shirer to see the war from the other side.

Shirer had 15 years to think about what he’d seen, 15 years to distance himself and then to write.

He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers; indeed, one of the most admirable attributes of his work is his willingness to admit to mystery and inexplicability when he finds it.

“Third Reich” was not a term of #Hitler’s invention; it was concocted in 1922 by a German nationalist crank named Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who believed in the divine destiny of a German history.

You’ll find echoes of this in the nationalists of #Ukraine today.

Shirer sought scrupulously to trace these traits not to genetics but to a shared intellectual tradition, or perhaps “delusion” might be a better word.

He tries to trace what you might call the intellectual DNA of the Third Reich, as opposed to its ethnic chromosomal code.

Few ideas were more stupid and evil than Hitler’s notion of his own divine destiny, forbidding even tactical retreats.

“This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril was to lead to Stalingrad and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.”

Indeed, the foremost lesson from rereading Shirer’s work 63 years on might be that the glorification of suicidal martyrdom, its inseparability from delusion and defeat, blinds its adherents to anything but murderous faith—and leads to little more than the slaughter of innocents.

You will see many parallels between the last days of #WWII in Europe and what’s happening right now — as we speak — on the battlefields of #Donbas, and in the bloodbath of #Bahkmut.

#Zelensky is throwing a generation of Ukrainians into the meat grinder, just as #Hitler did.

There is danger in giving up our sense of selfhood for the illusory unity of a frenzied mass movement, of devolving from human to herd for some homicidal urge.

It is a problem we can never be reminded of enough, and for this we will always owe William Shirer a debt of gratitude.