The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by journalist William L. Shirer, is the first and most successful, large scale history of Nazi Germany in English for a general audience, first published in 1960 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Shirer, an American radio reporter for CBS who also worked for a number of newspapers and United Press International, covered Germany for many years, until December 1940, when increasing Nazi censorship of his broadcasts made his work impossible. The book is based mostly on the captured documents of the Third Reich, including the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and General Franz Halder. Additional major sources include testimony and evidence from the Nuremberg trials; British Foreign Office reports; and the detailed diary of Galeazzo Ciano, who was Benito Mussolini's son-in-law and the Italian Foreign Minister. Other sources include confidential speeches, conference reports, transcripts of telephone conversations, and Shirer's personal recollections of his six years spent reporting on the Third Reich as a journalist. When the book was written, only a part of the Goebbels diaries was known. Other documents have since been discovered, and many documents have become available from Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.