Quotes from William L. Shirer

To (the British), the Gandhi-Irwin pact had merely brought about the end of a temporarily troublesome situation. They still had no inkling of the depth of the Indian revolution that Gandhi was unleashing nor of how it was being kindled by a resurgent Indian nationalism, a nationalism that across the Himalayas was also beginning to stir China to throw off foreign domination, and that one American historian, Hans Kohn, already believed was turning into what he called The Revolt of Asia.

For six years, since the Nazi "co-ordination" of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world.

Often we have tried to segregate ourselves from it all. We have found three refuges: ourselves, our books . . . our friends . . . the lakes and woods around Berlin.

To sum up these three years: Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.

Marvin found that German clergymen had taken to wearing clerical collars made of paper. They cost eight cents, can be worn inside out the second day, and are then thrown away….

After midnight and no air-raid

BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.

Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian. M.K. Gandhi, Defence in a trial for sedition, 1922

When Hitler brushed past me going down the aisle, he was followed by Himmler, Brückner, Keitel, and several others, all in dusty field-grey. Most of them were unshaven and I must say they looked like a pack of Chicago gangsters.

PARIS, February 15 The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.

Roosevelt: "Please for the sake of the future, nail every Communist

PARIS, August 3 Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal's body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.

Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady's handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.

Still, the talk went on, especially in the nation's capital, though by the end of 1946, I noted, it was beginning to shift toward fear of Russian spies. Wild charges were beginning to be made that some of our most eminent statesmen were agents of Moscow and participants in a Communist conspiracy. Certain politicians were drumming up fear that our Communists, who couldn't elect a dogcatcher in any state of the Union, were about to take over the Republic.

The secret police announced that two men were shot for "resisting arrest" yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.

As an escape, I suppose, I read some Goethe letters this afternoon. It was reassuring to be reminded of the devastation of Germany that Napoleon wrought. Apparently Jena, near Goethe's Weimar, was pretty roughly handled by the French troops. But through it all the great poet never loses hope. He keeps saying that the Human Spirit will triumph, the European spirit. But today, where is the European spirit in Germany? Dead.… Dead…

These three things seem so logical, almost so simple to us now. But history will record—even if we forget—the great fight the President had to make to achieve them. It will record how our growing army was saved from dissolution by one single vote in Congress. It will note by what a narrow margin Lend-Lease, which kept Britain and Russia in the fight until they could regain their strength to hit back, passed the Congress.

The great issues of peace and war will never be decided by majority vote, or any vote. We Americans have got to get that through our heads. That, and the fact that Russia, Great Britain and the United States, after due discussion, will largely determine the kind of world organization we are going to have.

The goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state.

A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was "only two years."16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: "Gott strafe England!"—whereupon the children are supposed to answer: "He will.

All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them. from a speech by the Nazi Minister of Education

Our expenses, including rent, have averaged sixty dollars a month.