The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich - Success and Acclaim

Success and Acclaim

In the U.S., where it was published 17 October 1960, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sold more than one million hardcover copies, two-thirds via the Book of the Month Club, and more than one million paperback copies. It won the 1961 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Carey-Thomas Award for non-fiction. In 1962, the Reader's Digest magazine serialization reached some 12 million additional readers. 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." The book sold well in Britain, France, Italy, and in West Germany, because of its international recognition, bolstered by German editorial attacks.

Both its recognition by journalists as a great history book and its popular success surprised Shirer and the publisher commissioned a first printing of merely 12,500 copies. More than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, neither anticipated much popular interest in Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) or Nazi Germany (1933–45).