Character Clues
Character Analysis
Physical Appearances
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich may not be a novel, but like any good novelist Shirer knows how to turn a man's physical appearance into a sign of his deeper character.
He was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914 […]. (1.2.43)
How could someone like this be anything other than cruel and untrustworthy?
More than any other man who appears in TRFTR—other than Hitler himself, of course—Shirer uses Goering as a figurative representation of the greed, corruption, and insatiable appetite of the Third Reich. How does he do it? By emphasizing Goering's expanding waistline.
By Book Five of TRFTR, Shirer is getting his digs in wherever he can, referring to Goering as "[t]he corpulent Reich Marshal" (5.27.58) and "the fat one" (5.27.64). Elsewhere, he quotes from the diary of Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister and son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, where Goering is described as being "bloated and overbearing" (4.26.32).
In a longer diary entry, Ciano writes of having dinner with Goering in January 1942:
We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and during the dinner Goering talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, he had some beautiful rings on his fingers... on the way to the station he wore a great sable coat, something between what automobile drivers wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera. (4.26.32-33)
Shirer adds his own two cents to Ciano's evaluation when he writes: "The corruption and corrosion of the Number Two man in the Third Reich was making steady progress" (4.26.34). Here, we readers can begin to see the connections that Shirer will later draw between Goering's physical girth and his insatiable appetite for wealth. He became one of the primary thieves of the artwork and other property of murdered Jews and enemies of the Reich.
Students of body politics could mount a damning case against the fat-shaming that Shirer engages in throughout TRFTR, but it's clear that, for Shirer, Goering's growing girth is an apt symbol—not only for Goering's personal greed and "opulence," but for the bottomless stomach of the Third Reich on the whole. In this way, Goering's physical appearance isn't just an illustration of his own inner nature, but is also representative of the broader Nazi Empire that he helped to build.
Speech and Dialogue
As Shirer notes repeatedly throughout his book, Hitler's early rise to power depended in large part on his fierce oratorical skills. Describing the first public speaking engagement that Hitler ever took part in, Shirer writes: "This was the beginning of a talent that was to make him easily the most effective orator in Germany, with a magic power, after he took to radio, to sway millions by his voice" (1.2.26).
Shirer draws on dozens of public and secret records of speeches made by Hitler during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. In this way, he uses the Fuehrer's own words as some of the strongest possible tools of characterization.
Take this excerpt from the speech that Hitler delivered in the Reichstag in April 1939, as a Nazi invasion of Poland began to seem like a strong possibility:
I have regretted this incomprehensible attitude of the Polish Government... the worst is that now Poland, like Czechoslovakia a year ago, believes, under pressure of a lying international campaign, that it must call up troops, although Germany has not called up a single man and had not thought of proceeding in any way against Poland. This is in itself very regrettable, and posterity will one day decide whether it was really right to refuse this suggestion, made this once by me... a truly unique compromise... (3.14.100)
Shirer says of the speech that, "[i]n many ways, especially in the power of its appeal to Germans and to the friends of Nazi Germany abroad, it was probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm, and hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again" (3.14.96).
Shirer has no trouble recognizing the paradoxical implications of Hitler's "magic power" with words. On the one hand, the fanatical Fuehrer's oratorical talents were objectively impressive; on the other, Hitler used them duplicitously, attempting—and often succeeding—to disguise blatant lies, bigotry, hypocrisy, and madness as powerful truths. As Shirer suggests, Hitler's poisonous yet intoxicating words were indicative of the true nature of the man who spoke them.
As Hitler's physical and mental conditions deteriorate in the last days of the Reich, Shirer draws on an eyewitness account from Hanna Reitsch about his paranoid rant after hearing that Goering was panning to succeed him:
An ultimatum! A crass ultimatum! Now nothing remains. Nothing is spared me. No allegiances are kept, no honor lived up to, no disappointments that I have not had, no betrayals that I have not experienced, and now this above all else! Nothing remains. Every wrong has already been done me. (6.31.116)
Can't say the tyrant didn't have a flair for the dramatic, even when he was at his most demented.
Direct Characterization
Many a good writer will tell you that the secret to strong characterization is to "show, not tell." That is, rather than telling readers that a character called Katniss Everdeen truly loves her little sister, Prim, a good novelist will create a scene in which Katniss's love can be demonstrated by her actions—say, by her willingness to take her sister's place in a dystopian murder championship run by a tyrannical regime.
For instance.
Showing, not telling may work well for novelists, but for the journalistic accounts and historical analyses that Shirer produces in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a different course was called for. If it helps, think of TRFTR as a novel's negative image (in the photographic sense). History has already shown us the actions of the people in the book. Shirer's task—or one of them, at least—is to tell us what those actions prove about the essential character strengths and weaknesses of those who carried them out.
For this reason, Shirer uses direct characterization frequently throughout TRFTR. Here's a good example of one of his snarkier "tellings," in which he introduces us to the young Paul Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the powerful Propaganda Minister of the Nazi Reich:
Goebbels was not, as most people believed, born with a club foot. At the age of seven he had suffered an attack of osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone marrow. An operation on his left thigh was not successful and the left leg remained shorter than the right and somewhat withered. This handicap, which forced him to walk with a noticeable limp, riled him all the days of his life and was one of the causes of his early embitterment. In desperation, during his university days and during the brief period when he was an agitator against the French in the Ruhr, he often passed himself off as a wounded war veteran. (2.5.31)
Not only does Shirer make free with the "telling" in direct characterizations like this one, but he also takes the liberty of describing the deeply personal motivations and emotions of the people he discusses. In this passage, as in many others throughout TRFTR, Shirer represents himself as a confident authority on the people of the Third Reich—one who can describe not only their actions, but their innermost thoughts and feelings too.