The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William Shirer

Shirer's history of Nazi Germany, first published in 1960, was written by a journalist who had reported from Berlin during the 1930s and who had access to captured German documents not yet available to academic historians. The book is remarkable for its combination of immediate witness and documentary analysis, and for the clarity with which it traces the internal logic of Nazi power — how each step followed from the last, how opposition was eliminated, how the catastrophe was made to seem inevitable in retrospect.