The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich is my all-time favorite CBSRMT radio drama. It's one of the programs I remember hearing as a 12 year-old kid and it's probably the single most important reason I was drawn to find the CBSRMT as an adult. I selected it for our show of the week, on the 29th anniversary of its initial broadcast, because I believe this program deserves a bit of a special tribute.

As a 12 year-old growing up in a small town in Wyoming, I truly didn't have the life experiences necessary to understand the magnitude of Adolf Hitler's horrific crimes against man. If I'm being honest with myself and with the rest of you, I really don't have the life experiences to imagine the suffering and violence of these crimes even now that I'm an adult - and I hope no one does. However, I think I'm adult enough to understand justice and I believe Hitler, in his final act of malevolence, deprived his victims of the justice they deserved when he cowardly took his own life.

Fast forward to our radio drama and 1975. Henry Slesar crafted a terrific script that allows us to think, "what if?" Our author delivered us incredible characters and a rich texture to our radio drama by weaving his work into the real-life horror of the Holocaust. He took us down a path where the Führer is resurrected and revered only to reveal the true intentions of his neo-disciples. In the end, we are allowed a moment of delicious vengeance. But maybe it isn't vengeance we are allowed...maybe it's justice in it's purest form.


From the History Channel's, "This Day in History" for May 16, 1943 (32 years, to the day, before our CBSRMT broadcast and 61 years, to the day, before our review of the program)

the Warsaw ghetto revolt was finally put down with the destruction of the Warsaw synagogue. The revolt began on April 18 when Jews, walled into a stifling area after the massive German assault on the city, began a heroic armed revolt against their German persecutors. After all was said and done, 14,000 Jews were killed in the revolt or sent to the death camp at Treblinka and another 42,000 were sent to labor camps in Lublin.