William L. Shirer (1904–1993)

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, though that doesn't take anything away from it, because it's really both a memoir of Gandhi through a particular time and a memoir of the journalist who covered him at the time. I wanted to learn more about Gandhi because he's a hero of a couple of my own heroes, most notably the late John Lewis. Gandhi's persistent resistance, underestimated by British leaders, changed the face of his nation eventually but also changed the face of international show more struggles for freedom and social justice. The book makes clear that he was a complicated fellow, with his own scandals, but also a giant intellect and keen judge of the character of individuals, as well as groups.

Though not always succeeding in his own struggle for moral and spiritual purity, he followed his satyagraha, or soul-force, to bring behemoths to their knees - civil disobedience; passive resistance; non-cooperation; non-violence; search for truth; search for the essence of the spirit; and search for decency in human interaction.

Though not an exhaustive biography, this book hit just the right note in detail and explanation of the effect Gandhi had on those around him

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended show less

I've read this book twice now (and am considering a third time through). What fascinates me about this book is the immediacy, the electric current of "this is happening NOW" that runs through it. Yes, it's full of facts and observations of Germany during the rise of the Nazis, but it's also a glimpse into the life of a man creating a new form of communication -- the radio news broadcast, which Shirer is credited with practically inventing along with Edward R. Murrow. The highest show more recommendation I can give this book is that, both times that I read it, at the end I spend a few seconds worried about who would win WWII. show less

Clocking out at more than 1,200 pages this book is everything but for the faint-hearted! Yet, recounting first the birth of the Nazi party and its rise under the Republic of Weimar, before then launching into a retelling of WWII and the collapse of a regime that aimed to last at least a millennium, the sheer scope of its approaches makes it a absolute must-read for anyone wanting to try and comprehend what the hell happened to Germany at that time. The fact that the author was there all show more along makes it even more insightful, or, at least, fascinatingly gripping.

It has often been reproached to Shirer that he was not an historian but a journalist, and so that his work could lack in certain academic standard. His adherence to the Sonderweg theory, for instance, has especially been hurled at him more than once for supposedly reflecting a poor understanding of German history, besides being, or so you could claim, 'prejudiced' somehow against German people overall. This last point, I must say, may have been true to a point. After all, comparing the trajectory and fate of fascism in Italy to that of Nazism in Germany, Shirer had no qualm referring to the Italians as being a more 'civilized' and sensible people than the Germans, hence why fascistic ideals were never quite fully embraced by the population at large in one country as opposed to the other. His scathing judgement, here, surely was terribly unfair to the Germans considering, not only that Hitler never managed to obtain a clear majority even during chaotic elections in a society on the brink of collapse, but, also, that despite the brutality of his terroristic regime which had silenced any opposition, right up to the end of the war pockets of resistance could still nevertheless be found to be active. And yet...

And yet, despite its personal views and flaws perhaps, the issue remains that to be a professional historian is certainly no guarantee of being immune to misinterpretations and/ or subjective judgements and opinions either, anymore than not being an historian makes one, de facto, less of an expert on a given topic. When it comes to Shirer, then, what should matter is not his professional background but his method, relying as much upon his personal experience as a reporter as upon a waste arrays of official sources, from captured Nazi documents to reports and directives, and from diaries of the people concerned to transcripts and testimonies from their trials. What emerged from all of that?

Hitler was not merely the product of WWI and, later, of the Wall Street crash. He also had been born in Austria-Hungary at a time when it went through massive crises and changes (at least for the German speaking population) and so Shirer shows how such cultural background can also help to understand him a bit better.

The Nazis, at least in the popular narrative, are often understood as being ultra-Conservatives and motivated only by anti-Semitism and war-mongering. It certainly turned out to be true over the years. Yet, as Shirer also clearly demonstrates, such trajectory was taken only because of Hitler's ultimate monopoly upon what started as a 'Workers Party' that is, a party concerned as much about nationalism and racism than it was about socialist measures. Many since have put the question forth: was the NSDAP rooted in the Right, or was it a product of the Left? The debate has often turned into a caricature, with both sides of the political spectrum refusing to reckon with their responsibilities. Nevertheless, if there is no denying that Nazism benefited 'the bourgeois' and the financiers, leaving the working classes to be exploited (e.g. trade unions had been mercilessly eradicated; and if employment rates were high, incomes were everything but...) there is no denying either that among their original '25 Points' many were strikingly Communist in intent. And indeed, the likes of Strasser, Goebbels, and Rohm could not only be called 'leftists' in many respect (no matter how counter-intuitive), but they made no qualm about having wanted to push for a 'second revolution' too once power had been gained. This, here, are very important ideological acknowledging; for, if anything, they point to the complexities (and so anomalies) of what Nazism truly entailed, a ragtag of people as much as it was a ragtag of ideas, and which made it not only a bizarre bastard offshoot of even fascism itself but contributed to its widespread success as well.

The chapters dedicated to the war are, or so I personally found, less challenging. It has become a trope that Germany lost the war mostly because Hitler ultimately side lined his own commanding officers to, incompetently, take charge. The disaster of the Russian campaign, and his utter failure in seeing the crucial importance of the Middle East and of the North African fronts, surely justify such views; and so Shirer walks such perspective too. Nevertheless, these are points made only insofar as one assesses the ending years of the war. As the author also rightly points, Hitler might have been an incompetent military commander, but in the late 1930s he had been a formidable gambler and here was a tactic that would have consequences. When it comes to the army and its leadership indeed, the then apathy, complacency, let alone sheer naivety of the Allies (France and Britain especially) had made it not only possible for him to put his militaristic plans in action, but contributed to further give him credibility at the top levels of an institution where, here again, opponents would end up discarded with not much complaint otherwise (e.g. the fates of Blomberg and Fritsch).

What about the Sonderweg theory? I confess: I haven't read Fichte, I haven't read Hegel, I haven't read Treitschke, and my understanding of Nietzsche is very limited. I for one, then, cannot comment upon his interpreting of their works to serve the argument that Germany's history and zeitgeist then was geared towards allowing such monstrosity as Nazism to take root. My ignorance, though, didn't prevent me to appreciate the arguments put forth by the author. No matter the bureaucratic chaos that was the Nazi regime (a monstrous centralised State yet preyed upon by constant, intestine political intrigues, completely confused and disorganized overlapping institutions, and that could have sustained itself only through terroristic violence) Germany did end up as a strongly militaristic State, where martial virtues were celebrated, the belief in a master race more widely accepted than one would like to admit (although propaganda and the brainwashing of a whole generation had a lot to do with it, something that the author seems to downplay at time), and were totalitarianism had been, indeed, more successful (and brutal) than elsewhere. Relevant or not, the mere fact that Nazism was, in fact, a anomaly even when assessed as per fascistic standards, render the period extremely complicated to fully understand anyway!

All in all, then, this is a massive, massive opus that will challenge many a preconception. It is, however, a must-read. Ideologies which are self-contradictory, downright absurd, and peddled by ignorant people having more charisma than intellect abound, and they surely are easy to ridicule, dismiss, and/ or ignore. What Nazism can teach us, though, is what no matter how marginal many toxic trends can be, it can take only a few sparks for them to emblaze a whole society... and become dangerously mainstream. Far more concerning is how such demagogueries and crass populisms can be fully served by otherwise complacent politicians. The chaos of the German elections in the early 1930s, for example, and the incompetence of self-interested political leaders far more concerned about their petty careers than the common good (at a time when the Republic was in dire crisis) should be a warning: public office come with responsibilities, it also demands accountability. Nazism, surely, imposed and sustained itself through relentless propaganda and violence. Nevertheless, if divisive ideologies are mere ideas floating in the air, what makes them potent (and dangerous) is how we, all of us, ultimately face them. It might be long gone the time of the brown shirts parading in the streets, wearing Swastika armbands and indulging in thuggish violence (although, the attacking of democratic institutions, while wearing regalia and following the call of populist, has recently been seen elsewhere...). What will never go away, though, is ignorance, hatred, bigotry, intolerance, even, pseudo-science to back it all up, served by 'saviours' who know just the right scapegoats to target. Be warned. show less

William L Shirer was an American journalist who played a major role, alongside Ed Murrow, in waking his fellow countrymen up to the dangers of Nazism and the impossibility of US neutrality in the face of the existential threat to the liberal democratic world posed by Hitler. His most famous work is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in my view one of the best works of narrative history/journalism ever written. This book contains his diaries from when he was correspondent in Berlin, show more initially for two of Randolph Hearst's wire services, then for CBS. He arrives in the German capital at a time when "Hitler and the Nazis have lasted out a whole year in Germany and our friends in Vienna write that fascism, both of a local clerical brand and of the Berlin type, is rapidly gaining ground in Austria". World war is still of course, well over five years away, but Shirer is more prescient than many.
He chronicles the rise of fascism and collapse of social democracy in Austria, then the familiar litany of Hitler's advances, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland before Britain and France wake up to the threat and finally abandon appeasement and stand up to Hitler. He is an excellent writer and brings home clearly the drama and horror of events as they unfold, in the sheer rapidity of the German advance into Poland and of the Blitzkrieg across northern and western Europe in 1940, which year covers half of the entire text of the book. Reading this account as the events unfold is very different from reading a historical account written with the hindsight knowledge of Nazi defeat in 1945.

While Shirer acknowledges that Hitler could never totally control Europe as long as Britain remained free, he thinks it plausible that Hitler could effectively control the world: "I am firmly convinced that he does contemplate [invading the USA] and that if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless we are prepared to give up our way of life and adapt ourselves to a subservient place in his totalitarian scheme of things". He marks the contrast between the old world and the new in these striking words: "How dim in memory the time when there was peace. That world ended, and for me, on the whole, despite its faults, its injustices, its inequalities, it was a good one. I came of age in that one, and the life it gave was free, civilized, deepening, full of minor tragedy and joy and work and leisure, new lands, new faces—and rarely commonplace and never without hope. And now darkness. A new world. Black-out, bombs, slaughter, Nazism. Now the night and the shrieks and barbarism".

Despite this bleakly pessimistic vision, he thinks that "even if Germany should win the war it will lose its struggle to organize Europe". This derives from his belief that, contrary to the assertions of some that Hitler and the Nazis imposed their creed on a wholly unwilling populace, "the Nazi regime has expressed something very deep in the German nature and in that respect it has been representative of the people it rules". He believes that "the German.......is incapable of organizing Europe. His lack of balance, his bullying sadism when he is on top, his constitutional inability to grasp even faintly what is in the minds and hearts of other peoples, his instinctive feeling that relations between two peoples can only be on the basis of master and slave and never on the basis of let-live equality—these characteristics of the German make him and his nation unfit for the leadership in Europe they have always sought and make it certain that, however he may try, he will in the long run fail". So while he accepts that only Hitler made this appalling war possible, in doing so the dictator was, in the author's view, drawing on the dark side of the nature of a critical mass of German people who craved submission and who had "almost joyfully, almost masochistically, ...... turned to an authoritarianism which releases them from the strain of individual decision and choice and thought and allows them what to a German is a luxury—letting someone else make the decisions and take the risks, in return for which they gladly give their own obedience". At the same time, this weakness caused Germany to underrate the infuriating stubbornness of British resistance, as the latter "won’t admit they’re licked. [The Germans] cannot repress their rage against Churchill for still holding out hopes of victory to his people, instead of lying down and surrendering, as have all of Hitler’s opponents up to date".

Shirer finally leaves Berlin towards the end of 1940 when the censorship has got so bad once Hitler has abandoned his plans to invade Britain and the Nazis are for the first time not having everything their own way, that he is virtually restricted to reading out the communiques of the High Command verbatim, without analysis or comment. He can do no more to raise the awareness of his American audience to the realities of Nazism. He concludes his diaries as follows:

"I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency."

Superb writing and just a brilliant piece of narrative of these world-shattering events. 5/5 show less