- What's that? You thought the book was over?
- Just think of this "Brief Epilogue" as a not-so-secret added scene. By now the credits have started to roll, but Shirer fades back in to give us one more look at the bitter end of the Third Reich.
- Shirer has a few final words about the German officers and Nazi minions who were arrested, tried, and sentenced for their crimes in the days, weeks, and months after the war.
- Heinrich Himmler committed suicide after being captured by British soldiers.
- Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Horace Hjalmar Greeley Schacht, Franz von Papen, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, General Alfred Jodl, Admiral Erich Raeder, and Hans Frank, among others, were tried at Nuremberg.
- After telling us how many received death sentences and how many were sentenced to imprisonment, he describes the executions (by hanging) of those who were sentenced to death.
- Goering escaped the executioner. He committed suicide in his cell, using poisoned that had been smuggled to him.
- Goering's suicide shared much in common with the deaths of Heinrich Himmler and Hitler himself. They all chose the way they would die.
- True to form, Shirer ends TRFTR on a pensive note—one that leaves us mulling over all of the grim realities that are recorded in its pages.
- That's the end for real this time.
- Unless, of course, you want to include the Afterword that Shirer added to the book in 1990…