Here for the first time is the complete story of Hitler’s empire, one of the most important stories ever told, written by one of the men best equipped to write it.

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed to historians such mountains of evidence about its rise and fall as the Third Reich. The Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced, when the bitter war was over and before the Nazis could destroy their files, an almost hour-to-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolf Hitler.

William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting this documentation. Out of it, and out of his own on-the-spot reporting of Germany and Europe over nearly four decades, he has written the definitive history of a great frightening chapter in the history of mankind.

Here is the story of Hitler himself, his love affairs, his imprisonment, his passion for the arts of war, his suicide, and the maniacal fury which led him to destroy the country he claimed to love so much. Here is the record of the German General Staff, the concentration camps, the brutal terror of anti-Semitism, the degradation of the German people, and the little-known resistance plots against the Nazis. Here are new and sensational details about the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1930, the frame-up of leading German generals, the shabby efforts to appease Hitler, the reasons for Germany’s failure to invade England, Hitler’s secret speeches to his generals, a plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and hundreds of other inside stories of the war.