Quotes from William L. Shirer

it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.

The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.

The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.

On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor.

To Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Among other things, he says, it is the highest revelation of the "world spirit"; it is the "moral universe"; it is "the actuality of the ethical idea… ethical mind… knowing and thinking itself"; the State "has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges…

To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. He would make Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations, repudiate the Versailles Treaty, stamp out corruption, bring the money barons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every German had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry men seeking not only relief but new faith and new gods, the appeal was not without effect.

He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man's morals.

the ancient mountain kingdom of Abyssinia.

The suffering of his fellow Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions.

Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as "imperialist" as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

Though Eva Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all—perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women—it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

he had the patience to wait and the shrewdness to realize that the climate of material prosperity and of a feeling of relaxation which settled over Germany in those years was not propitious for his purposes.

a nation comes into existence with its mythology… The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, [is] presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.

The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.

If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and fine talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.

He made it clear enough that there would be no "democratic nonsense" and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship.

I thought of a bad pun: "I'm going from bad to Hearst.

irregularly as though it were farm land.

I'm glad you've seen the part played by our women in our movement, Gandhi beamed. The world has never seen such a magnificent spectacle. They were as brave as our men.

Without Lenin and Hitler the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions most probably would not have succeeded. Without Gandhi there would have been no serious threat to British rule as the 1930's began. In India I began to see that Gandhi, as Friedrich Meinecke would say of Hitler, was already one of the examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life. In India it was the only such personality there was.

NUREMBERG, September 5 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 mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.

The British, he (Gandhi) said, want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine-guns where they have the weapons and we do not. Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on a plane where we have the weapons and they do not.