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Running at over 57 hours, I listened to the audio version of “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” by William L. Shirer. By covering the history of Germany from the end of the first World War to the end of the second through the peculiar Austrian Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist political party, the book covers two world-shaping parts of history I knew little about. And it does so very comprehensively.

At first, when I started listening to it almost 6 months ago, I was expecting it to focus almost entirely on the millitary aspect of the war, like the History channel used to do so much on cable. Instead, Shirer is a journalist and he focused mostly on the political aspect, following the stories on individual people, mostly Hitler. Also, his focus is almost entirely on Germany, and not the global war that included Mussolini and Japan with the rest of the world. That helped a lot, especially since the scope of the book was already gigantic.

Also, the narration, voiced by Grover Gardner in 2010, was really good at saying all those foreign names properly (not perfectly for French, but close enough). For an audiobook of this magnitude, they could have cut corners with a sup-par recording quality and narration, but I was surprised by the quality, accuracy and un-monotone reading.

One thing that’s special about the history of that war is that not only the author retells some of his experiences as he lived through Nazi Germany as a journalist there, but also that the Nazi’s thorough documentation was almost entirely captured intact at the end of the war. More than that, but the documentation was cross-referenced during the trials that followed. I fear that sadly this will not repeat itself, since secret documents may never be captured (with the rare exception of what Wikileaks achieved), and of course there are no trials of war crimes anymore since they are simply branded “terrorism”.

In the end, I may remember only half of all the facts, names and events presented in the book, but the author successfully captured in a kind of historical microcosm the horrors in which a population can be captured in given the right combination of cultural past, xenophobia, propaganda, and a few insane people with too much power that a population was too much willing to give up for a cause. I can recall Hitler’s meetings to prepare the invasion and killing of millions, done with the same ruthlessness as I would manage writing computer code. It is too easy to lose compassion and humanity given power, and the horrific story of Hitler and his Third Reich will keep reminding me of that.