I've been chipping away at Shirer's tome on Nazi Germany as bedside reading. I'm just a few hundred pages in, but I'm curious how well it's held up over time. Does it posit noteworthy theories or opinions that are simply debunked now? How do you guys recommend I approach reading it? I chose it because it's historically significant in itself, and I appreciate the ambitiousness of its scope.
Shirer was a reporter, not an academic historian. He lived in and reported on Germany for the period of the rise of the Third Reich. He went back to Germany after the war to report on the Nuremberg Trials.
As he said in his foreword, "This personal experience would not have led me to attempt to write this book had there not occurred at the end of World War II an event unique in history. This was the capture of most of the confidential archives of the German government and all its branches."
Shirer became aware of this through the documents assembled for the Nuremberg trials. He then gained access to literally tons of German Documents (485 tons of German Foreign Office Documents alone) when they were opened by the US government to a small group of scholars in 1955.
Shirer lived through the whole war, and saw a lot of the Reich at first hand (he hated it). He also had early access to more source material than anyone could ever read (all unindexed).
Shirer says, "I found it extremely difficult and not always possible to learn the exact truth about Hitler's Germany. The avalanche of documentary material helped one further along the road to truth than would have seemed possible twenty years ago, but its very vastness could often be confusing. And in all human records and testimony there are bound to be baffling contradictions."
Later scholars have undoubtedly learned more from the vast material. Other scholars have undoubtedly focused more on other aspects of WWII, or on the perspective from other participants or countries.
Still, Shirer gives a good overview of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His book also is well written and readable by the general public (perhaps an advantage of being a journalist rather than an historian?).
On the other hand, there has been a lot more research into archives since Shirer, and academic historians tend to be somewhat dismissive of his book as a 'history', though they tend to value it and quote it a lot as a 'primary source'.
See these previous posts for some previous perspectives on the book from this sub-reddit.