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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH (1,245 pp.)--William L Shirer--Simon & Schusfer ($ 10).

The story of Adolf Hitler and his works is curiously resistant to the historian's approach. Such massive evil can scarcely be conveyed by facts, figures and chronology. What is needed is another Dante with a genius for portraying hell, or a new Wagner who can translate horror into myth and spell out the dread meanings in a Goetterdaemmerung finale. Surrealist imagination, not research, may one day tell the definitive story; in the meantime, there are books.

In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Author William Shirer has undertaken to tell the entire Hitler story in one massive volume. A former reporter and newscaster, Shirer covered Germany and the Nazis from 1925 until the U.S. entered the war, and his bestselling Berlin Diary (TIME, June 23, 1941) was one of the earliest casebooks of Nazi practice. To his huge task Shirer brings only modest writing gifts, but he has an advantage that swamps all shortcomings: his material is horribly fascinating. He has done thorough research in captured documents, in books and in diaries. The result is a panoramic exposure of Naziism in practice that may lack literary stature and new insights, but seizes the reader's interest and holds it to the end.

To the German's Taste. What seems as incredible as ever is that the little Austrian vagabond ever got a political foothold at all. Shirer tries to explain Hitler's success by citing some obvious facts of German history and character: defeat in World War I set the stage for an adventurer who promised to end the shame of the Versailles Treaty; and German distaste for democracy, coupled with a veneration for authority, enabled thugs to make a deal with respectable elements and then terrorize a whole nation. Shirer plainly believes that in Hitler the Germans got a leader to their taste. He points out that the industrialists assumed the debt of the Nazi Party, that most Protestant pastors swore a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, that the average man hardly seemed to notice the loss of his liberties, and quotes Philosopher Oswald Spengler's comment after Hitler's takeover: "It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking."

This seemed true to the end. According to General Guenther Blumentritt, no admirer of Hitler, at least half the civilian population resented the officers' attempt on Hitler's life on June 20, 1944. Says Shirer: "National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country's saviour." But General Blumentritt's remark might be interpreted another way: that up to half of the civilian population had so much of Hitler or of war that they did not resent the attempt to assassinate their country's leader in the midst of war.

From Bluff to Doom. Author Shirer effectively underlines the incredible myopia of France and England in letting Hitler conthem into accepting one conquest after another until even the Chamberlains in both countries could swallow no more. Shirer shows how the German generals feared that every aggressive move of the Fiihrer's would lead them into a war for which they were not ready--only to realize eventually that the "warlord's" successful bluff made their caution seem ridiculous. The big-lie technique, the phony "threats" to Germany from future victims (Austria, Czechoslovakia. Poland) are documented to the hilt. And Shirer argues that until the Russians made their pact with Hitler, the West could have stopped him cold at every point.

Shirer makes the famous case that Hit ler's own mistakes hurt him more in the war's later stages than did his enemies in the field. His attack on Russia, his failure to follow through in North Africa, his preference of annihilation to retreat, and finally his own retreat into a world of pure fantasy brought on his doom. When the end came, he had no wish to spare Germany. After all. "those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed."

On Friday, April 13, 1945. the Russians were in Berlin; the center of the city was aflame. Hitler, a physical ruin, still looked for a miracle, and now Goebbels called the Fuehrer in his deep bunker to tell him the miracle had happened: "My Fuehrer, I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars . . .

It is the turning point!" On the soth, the Russians were just a block away. Hitler had already had his favorite dogs put away, and now he and his new wife Eva Braun went to a room, he to shoot himself, she to take poison. During a lull in the bombardment, their bodies were taken above ground, doused in oil and burned.

Rise and Fall acts as a breezy, journalistic surrogate for many better books on specialized aspects of Naziism. Not its least compelling aspect is that the grisly and familiar ending seems to follow with simple inevitability from everything that has gone before.

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