I'm reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. What should I watch out for?

Antony Beevor launched a book which covers the whole war. It is interesting not only because he has good writing skills, but also because he had access to British secret documents that were not available during 20th century.

As others note, it's a creditable effort from a journalist who actually lived for a time in the Third Reich, but is far from a historian's masterwork.

Shirer was limited especially in his primary sources, I think. Many leading Nazis such as Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Bohrmann, Hitler himself, and others, didn't survive the war, or at least not for long (Goering died in 1946).

However, many important figures did, and they proved invaluable sources for historians, though one must always take caution about taking their utterances at face value. A great example of that is Canaris, the biography of the head of one of the Third Reich's secret intelligence services, by Heinz Hoehne. Hoehne had great access to several important figures (although he also seemed to have been seduced by them into judging Canaris as harshly as the people he interviewed did).

As time has gone by, those historical figures have died or become harder to interview, but at the same time, what other documentary sources there are have become more available. A really magisterial work is Cambridge Professor Richard Evans' trilogy of books (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War). He gives you a ton of detail on the whole regime, with a great balance between person-on-the-street diaries, internal Nazi hierarchy machinations, and the regime's interaction with other nations, during both war- and peacetime. He lacks a little of Shirer's natural talent for dramatization, but not too much; I was happy to read each of these large-ish books from cover to cover. Happy studying!

As a World War II buff, I was "weaned" on Shirer. But there is one glaring limitation to his book, and that is, it is "Eurocentric." And specifically "Germanocentric." There are barely references to Italian campaigns in North Africa, never mind Japanese campaigns in the Far East.

It seems like the book was written through German eyes (Shirer was based in Berlin). So there is a lot of material about the war from the German point of view, and little from anyone else's.

Shirer's book remains by far the best book on the subject and at this point it appears it will never be eclipsed; he is the Suetonius of the Third Reich.

The portions involving the history prior to 1941 are more in-depth and accurate than the chapters involving 1941-1945, which tend to just follow American newspaper reports. This is because he lived in Germany and had many contacts there until he left in December of 1940. The main shortcoming of the text from a historical point of view is that being fundamentally an American he was completely unsympathetic to German attitudes and philosophies, tone deaf to sturm and drang, you might say. Therefore, any events or happenings that might reflect favorably on Nazism are ignored by him. Thus, the book tends to be a litany of faults rather than an objective assessment. Another drawback of the book is that, as mentioned, it is written from a purely American perspective, so some Germanic cultural phenomena of the times, such as the Joy Through Sex movement, are ignored not because Shirer censored them, but just because he was not aware of what was going on.

A worthy counterpoise to the RAFTR is Shirer's "Berlin Diary" which records his personal experiences in Nazi Germany and gives an idea of the daily life there.

Concerning things to "watch out for," the main issue is that Shirer was a left-wing journalist who was dismayed that the Communists in Germany had been defeated by the Nazis, so he was especially thorough in completely avoiding any mention of the socialist programs of the Nazis because that would have made them look good in comparison to the Communists. This particular aspect of RAFTR is very distorted because at the time the Germans were extremely proud of their socialist accomplishments and they had like 20 different programs all of which are completely ignored by Shirer as though they did not even exist. For example, he never once mentions the building of the Autobahn, a huge public works program that employed hundreds of thousands. Todt, the public works minister, a very important person in the Nazi administration is mentioned only a single time in the whole 1000-page book, and then just in passing.