- In his brief Foreword to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer takes some time to explain why he was able to write such a comprehensive history of the Reich. He wants us to know that a lot of the research he includes in TRFTR was made possible by the fact that thousands of secret Nazi documents were captured by the Allies after the end of WWII.
- As Shirer tells us, he was able to draw on "confidential archives of the German government and all its branches, including those of the Foreign Office, the Army and Navy, the National Socialist Party and Heinrich Himmler's secret police," and he also had access to "private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference reports and correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversations of the Nazi leaders." (Foreword 2-10)
- That's a pretty impressive trove of documents. What Shirer's saying is that his access to those documents was basically the historian's version of a season ticket to Aladdin's Cave of Wonders. In other words, the documents represented a totally unprecedented wealth of knowledge about the defeated empire.
- In the second half of his Foreword, Shirer wraps things up by discussing his own perspective on Nazi Germany. Because he lived in the Third Reich for many years—he was stationed there as a journalist—he debates the pros and cons of writing about a historical moment that he witnessed firsthand. Too soon?
- Although he admits that some of his own prejudices and biases—Nazism sickened him—are probably present in the book, he emphasizes that he's tried to be objective and let the facts speak for themselves. From this point on, it'll be up to every individual reader to decide just how far he succeeded.