The book is based upon captured Nazi documents, the available diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, of General Franz Halder, and of the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, evidence and testimony from the Nuremberg trials, British Foreign Office reports, and the author's recollection of his six years in Germany (from 1934 to 1940) as a journalist, reporting on Nazi Germany for newspapers, the United Press International (UPI), and CBS Radio.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is Shirer's comprehensive historical interpretation of the Nazi era, positing that German history logically proceeded from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler;[3][a][page needed] and that Hitler's accession to power was an expression of German national character, not of totalitarianism as an ideology that was internationally fashionable in the 1930s.
[8] The book also includes (identified) speculation, such as the theory that SS Chief Heinrich Müller afterward joined the NKVD of the USSR.
[10]: 81–82 Nina Bourne decided that they should use the sub-title as the title and art director Frank Metz designed the black jacket bearing the swastika.
[13][14] In a New York Times Book Review, Hugh Trevor-Roper praised it as "a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions.
"[15] The book sold well in Britain, France, Italy,[16] and in West Germany, because of its international recognition, bolstered by German editorial attacks.
[17] Both its recognition by journalists as a great history book and its popular success surprised Shirer,[18] as the publisher had commissioned a first printing of merely 12,500 copies.
More than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, neither Shirer nor the publisher had anticipated much popular interest in Adolf Hitler or in Nazi Germany.
In West Germany, the Sonderweg interpretation was almost universally rejected in favor of the view that Nazism was simply one instance of totalitarianism that arose in various countries.
The 1990 edition contained an afterword in which Shirer briefly described how his book was received when it was initially published and predicted the future of Germany during German reunification in the Atomic Age.