I recommend this book to everyone. Whether or not you're a fan of the current presidential administration, reading this book will give you valuable insight into Nazi Germany, so next time some 21 year old anarchist is comparing George Bush to Hitler, you can say "That is a pretty stupid comparison."

I have studied two years of German in college for my BS degree. My dad grew up in Nazi Germany. We were not the best of friends. Yet, this was a very fascinating book to me! I bought it because I figured that Hitler was a foreurunner of the Antichrist of the Bible and maybe this book would give me insight into his character. And it did. Yet I found some strange humor in it as well.Both my dad and one of my German professors had used the expression "he ought to be shot!" before as a reference to the frequent use of firing squads in the Third Reich. There is some of that gallows humor in there. Like a description of the quaiity built crematoriums for the death camps-made with the finsest of materials and German craftsmanship! My dad always was big on German craftsmanship and efficiency. I even found myself joking with my therapist about how cool it would be to become a dictator like Hitler where I could put all my enemies into concentarion camps, have them executed and have it filmed as the master had done!
I seemed to know more from that book about Hitler that my dad did. I discovered Hitler was a failed artist. My dad had tought he was a house painter. As my dad had terminal cancer and we visited once a month with him, we could talk about how he was living in Romania when Hitler invaded Russia and when they were repulsed that he and my aunt Margit had been evacuated out of Romania by Hitler. My dad was pretty tight-lipped about his childhood; yet this book actually gave us something to talk about befeore he died. What did we have in common? Quantum Theory? NOt! Bible Prophecy? NOt! We could discuss old "Uncle Adolph" as he had once called him!
So, I did see a twisted sort of humor to it. Just like on a News Radio Station from the Eastern US I had heard about a man who had a custom license plate in Virginia that said ZYKLON B on it. And how the state of Virginia had the plate revoked when they found out what it was. In Shirer's book, I discovered that ZYKLON B was the chemical that IG Farben had produced which Hitler used to carry out the "Final Solution" of the Jewish problem.
This book is jam packed with all kinds of trivia and interesting details. Just like I said, my dad grew up in Hitler Third Reich and did not know some ot these things!
There is an interesting lesson in this book in the life of Hitler. Hitler went to Vienna to study to be a painter. They rejected his application. So, he blamed this on the Jews and made it his ambition to erradicate them from the face of the earth-The Final Solution. Or in more modern times, I had seen on TV how the woman who had prayer banned from the public schools hadd been discriminated against in church; so she did not want to make her kids have to pray in school! Sometimes, discrimination comes back to haunt people!