Third Reich Diaries

About the Book

The "Third Reich Diaries" are a unique eyewitness account of the twelve Hitler years by an American with a comprehensive knowledge of European history.  They offer a fascinating, well-informed view of Nazi Germany, based on facts and observations not found in any other book about the Hitler era.

Considering that more than 20,000 books on that subject have been published since the end of WW II, the above statement may sound like an exaggeration.  Many probably feel that, given this mountain of literature, every single fact and facet of the Third Reich must have been recorded and examined, and that no additional information of real importance can be provided by any new book on Nazi Germany.

But then the "Diaries" are not a new book.  They are an unaltered, unamended contemporary account, jotted down by the author at the time and in the place where it all happened.  His notes of the early Hitler years, together with the war-time shorthand diaries, were later used for this book by the author without any hindsight additions.  That he sometimes drew on-the-spot conclusions -- such as that Hitler was ready to go to great lengths to have the 1936 Olympics take place in Berlin -- that were later proved accurate only showed that he was an unusually keen observer.

Before listing the features that make the "Third Reich Diaries" a one-of-a-kind document, a look at the existing publications will provide some idea of how many contributed not only to a better understanding of conditions in the German totalitarian state, but also of the latter's European origins and dimensions.  Roughly 90% of the volumes written about the Third Reich deal with the Holocaust, and they really belong in the yet-to-be-written literature about that horrifying 20th century phenomenon: the mass murders, totaling an estimated 80 million men, women, and children that took place in many countries in different parts of the world.  The bulk of those atrocities were committed by the killer squads of the three major totalitarian dictators: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao-Tse-Tung, but even some small and generally peaceful countries engaged in mass killings.

Although the Holocaust has become the defining feature of the Hitler era, books on the Jewish mass murders cannot contribute anything to a better understanding of the Third Reich's origins or the way average Germans dealt with the conditions imposed upon them by their totalitarian system.  Nor, of course, can those books that attempted a psychoanalytical explanation of Hitler's personality and behavior.

Which leaves the relatively small number of books that look at the Third Reich as a whole from an historical viewpoint.  Although some of them present an impressive number of important facts about their subject, most of them are lacking because the authors, all of them non-Germans, are either outright germanophobes, or at least dislike and distrust the Germans, which renders historical impartiality difficult if not impossible to achieve.  The best-known among those books is William Shirer's massive tome "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," which at its publication was claimed as the "definitive history of the Hitler era."  Yet American historian Klaus Epstein, in his brilliant review of Shirer's book, points out its numerous serious faults, two of them being the author's inability to grasp the true nature of modern totalitarianism, and his contention that the Third Reich was a purely German phenomenon.  He therefore was not able to recognize either National Socialism's general human significance, nor that, in Epstein's words, "the frightening abysses of human nature and the endangered state of our entire current civilization have become evident: the 'Hitler in ourselves,' as Max Picard described what unfortunately is by no means just a German phenomenon."

Almost forty years have passed since Dr. Epstein called for a comprehensive and

About the Author

Henry Simon's adult life began as a student at Oxford, next took him to the California desert on a five-year sojourn that cured the TB he had contracted in Europe, and only then let him marry, settle in California, and raise a family. An extended family visit in Germany took a downturn when the Crash of 1929 left him stranded. He found work as an American consultant for the Zeiss Optical Works; over the following years, he watched in vain for a chance to return to the United States, until in 1939 he was offered a job as the editor of a technical magazine in New York. Before it could be finalized in 1940, he succumbed to a rare case of encephalitis with a dreadful aftermath of post-encephalitic Parkinsonism, which meant he had to stay in Germany. The war years were filled with stress and uncertainty, but it all ended in 1945 when first Americans and then Red Army troops occupied the town. After a year in the Soviet zone, the author, his wife, and his younger daughter Hilda were on their way back to America. Henry Simon, although increasingly crippled, spent his remaining years writing his memoirs, in which he included the "Third Reich Diaries." He died at age seventy-five in 1957.