Who was William L. Shirer? part 2: The Nightmare Years 1934-1940
Another biographical deep dive into Shirer's years in Berlin covering the Nazis, as we try to better understand the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
When we began this reading group, I offered a quick biographical sketch of William Shirer. That post, which led up to his 1934 arrival in Berlin, was meant to give you a sense of the man behind the epic history of Nazi Germany.
Now that our reading of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has passed 1934, it seems worthwhile to revisit Shirer’s life again.
You will remember that after almost a decade covering Europe and Asia with the Chicago Tribune, Shirer was fired by the newspaper’s right-wing publisher Colonel McCormick in late 1932. To regroup, he and his wife Tess decided to leave Austria to go live in Spain, where the cost of living was cheaper (and the beaches substantially better).
In 1933, Shirer then managed to snag a lowly copy editing job at the Paris Herald (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) and so relocated to Paris. But copy editing was such a fall from his heady days as a foreign correspondent, he just couldn’t stand it. When the call came from the UNS (the Universal News Service—a news wire service owned by Hearst), Shirer jumped at the chance to move to Berlin and cover the biggest story in Europe: the Nazification of Germany. Shirer cheekily referred to this professional step as “moving from bad to Hearst.”
Shirer knew Berlin from his days as a roving Chicago Tribune correspondent. But the city was changed. A week after arriving in Berlin, he wrote in his diary:
In the throes of a severe case of depression. I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion. The constant Heil Hitler’s, clicking of heels, and brown-shirted storm troopers or black-coated S.S. guards marching up and down the street grate me, though the old-timers say there are not nearly so many brown-shirts since the purge.
One of his very first assignments was to go south to Nuremberg to cover the Nazi party rally held each year in early September. The experience was revealing. On September 5, 1934, he wrote in his diary from Nuremberg:
I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysiticm to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.
In Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 and in Twentieth Century Journey: The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940, the second part of his memoir, published four decades later, Shirer provides wonderful description of those crucial years.
On a personal note, I will say that, as someone who has read way too many journalist memoirs, most are not worth your time. However, Shirer is a notch above the rest. That’s partially because of his subject matter, but it’s also his inherent ability. I would not recommend 90% of journalists’ memoirs, but I would highly recommend Shirer’s Berlin Diary and his memoirs if The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has piqued your interest.
During those years covering Nazi Germany, Shirer saw Hitler many times, sometimes at crucial moments. He also got to know Hitler’s lieutenants quite well—Goering best of all. At different moments in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, you’ll find a personal observation—a general’s whitened face coming out of a Hitler speech or an overly critical comment to Shirer by someone Hitler would later purge. As I’ve written before, this is why we read Shirer, why he is worth our time, even if we ought to turn to historians for some of the broader contextualization.
In the mid-1930s, the Ristorante Italiano in Berlin was the favored watering hold of Shirer and other foreign journalists. The hodge podge of fascinating characters included George Kennan, who was studying Russian language and culture in Berlin in preparation to go to Moscow and would later go on to author American Cold War policy of containment. And, of course, there were the Gestapo chiefs, who would hang out there at the Ristorante Italiano in the evenings. You can imagine a bit what it might have been like…
From his first train ride into Berlin in early 1934, Shirer was constantly under surveillance during those years. At one point, well before World War II, the Nazis beheaded two of his sources. He found the brutality and terror demoralizing.
In September 1935, Shirer returned to the United States for the first time in years. He noted that he felt a certain freedom that was entirely absent in Germany. He could breath. However, he was shocked that there was such little interest in his native land about what was going on in Europe. In that sense, it wasn’t that different from Coolidge’s America he had left in the mid-1920s. (Or, I might add, the United States today.)
The next year, Shirer covered the Berlin Olympics, as the whole world descended on the German capital. American elites who came to Germany were impressed by what they saw, unwittingly being taken in by Goebbels’ propaganda operation. And then these VIPs would loudly criticize the journalists who were even mildly critical of the Nazis. The owner of the Los Angeles Times and Charles Lindbergh were two such individuals who took the side of the Nazi leadership against American journalists in Berlin.
In August 1937, the UNS, where Shirer worked, joined with its sister service the INS. At first, it seemed that Shirer might get a promotion of sorts in the merger, but then most of the UNS jobs were cut, and he found himself out of work yet once again.
Coincidentally, just at that moment, Ed Murrow, the rising star at CBS, was looking for an established foreign correspondent who could do radio. He asked Shirer to dinner and proposed making the switch from writing journalism to reporting it over the radio.
It was not a great fit. Radio was still largely known as a medium for entertainment, a seeming step down from being a foreign correspondent for a major newspaper or wire service. And Shirer’s voice was a bit reedy for radio. But he didn’t have a lot of other choices. So he jumped at the chance. He immediately entered into a rivalry with Max Jordan of NBC, who seemed to constantly scoop Shirer on the same beat.
As part of this shift, Shirer moved to Vienna, his wife’s hometown. Of course, everything was changing in Vienna. Shirer’s wife Tess was pregnant at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, with a bad case of phlebitis. Unfortunately, much of the hospital staff in Vienna at the time was Jewish. And so Tess struggled to get medical attention as so many Jews fled the city.
One of the most important events in American media history, in which Shirer played a key role, occurred on March 13, 1938. CBS Radio News Roundup launched on that date. The day before, the Germans had annexed Austria in the Anschluss, and Max Jordan had done a better job covering it. In response, CBS’s team of correspondents, later termed “The Murrow Boys,” put together a jointly hosted live coverage of reactions to the Anschluss from different European capitals. Murrow, of course, spoke from Vienna. It was unprecedented at the time with countless logistical complications. But its success put all of them on the map, including Shirer.
It is worth mentioning, as an aside, that this broader vision for what CBS could do with news was shepherded through those countless logistical challenges by Ed Murrow, but it could not have happened without CBS’s owner William Paley, who, along with a lot of other titans of 20th century media, was later on the board of the International Herald Tribune.
In 1939, with the outbreak of war between the United Kingdom and Germany, all the British journalists fled Berlin. From 1938 on, Shirer would take breaks from Germany and go to neutral Geneva to recoup from time to time.
In 1940, he went to Compiègne to report on the French surrender to Germany. And then in August 1940, the RAF bombings of Berlin began. There were more and more restrictions, deprivations, and stresses. He became convinced that he was in danger. And so, in late 1940, he made the decision to return to the United States. It was still a full year before Pearl Harbor, and three and a half years before D-Day.
During his entire career, Shirer kept a diary. But with all the comings and goings inherent in a journalist’s peripatetic life, he occasionally lost a notebook here or there. Many of the most interesting tidbits of his life were published in his newspaper reports. However, after World War II began, he was increasingly censored.
There was simply no way to speak openly about what was happening in Nazi Germany, as every word that he would read on the air to be broadcast back to CBS listeners in the United States would have to be approved by Nazi censors. He invested more in his journals and took precautions first to keep them safe in Germany and then to get them out of the country.
After returning to the United States in late 1940, he immediately began work on a version of his journals covering his years in Germany and Austria. It was published in 1942 as Berlin Diary and met with huge commercial success.
Bouyed by the success, Shirer entered a period of financial success and public renown he had never experienced before. He spent much of the rest of World War II in the relative comfort of the United States, a regular on the speaking circuit to talk about Nazi Germany. He continued to provide commentary and news analysis on CBS radio, but increasingly a rift opened between him and his former colleagues based in Europe (mostly in London). Shirer would speak as if he were an expert on events in Europe, even three or four years after leaving. When they returned home to the U.S. briefly, the CBS correspondents did not take kindly to this dynamic.
In 1945, Shirer returned to Germany and eventually covered the Nuremberg Trials. In 1947, he wrote a follow-up to his successful Berlin Diary entitled End of Berlin Diary. It was not nearly as successful. The appetite for things related to Nazi Germany had declined significantly in those years.
As the Cold War got going in the late 1940s, Shirer’s left-liberal politics did not make him any friends. He also was—it must be said—not the hardest worker at CBS. He was dismissed in a controversial decision and later he was blacklisted. The 1950s thus saw Shirer struggling to make ends meet.
It was in that context that he took an interest in the comprehensive Nazi archives that had been captured by the U.S. Army. Shirer began to do the research to complement his own reporting and would eventually lead to his 1960 success The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which we are now reading.
I may write something more about the events of Shirer’s life in the early Cold War later on, but at this point I just wanted to sketch out the main outlines of his life in the 1930s and 1940s, to provide some context for the appearance of this book.
Despite covering Nazi Germany in person for the crucial years of 1934 to 1940, he did not experience World War II in Europe, but rather from the United States.
A recap of this past week’s reading will come tomorrow.
As always, drop me a note or leave a comment. Would love to hear from you!