Quotes from William L. Shirer

A people who had so lightly given up their political and cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for a relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship.

Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been written by authors of world reputation.

At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party's gospels.

Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of "the Jewish world conspiracy." In

The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only

I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written.

story of the Nazi plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and induce the former King of England to work with Hitler for a peace settlement with Great Britain.

Himmler announced today that a Polish farm labourer had been hanged for sleeping with a German woman. No race pollution is to be permitted. Another

Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves "with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich.

despite one's inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda.

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him.

While surrender negotiations were under way—a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms—bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless.

For the first few months in 1933, a few party radicals tried to get control of the business associations, take over the department stores and institute a corporate state

The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank

Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers in the national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932 to 53.6 per cent in the boom year of 1938.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet. Book One THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER

This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic "nonsense" and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These

At home, American critics of that system, especially in the American Medical Association, had derided British "socialized medicine" as impossible and unwanted. But this was not true. It was extremely popular among all classes, all parties. While I was in England, even the Conservative party, girding

One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the Nazi regime has ruined German industry. And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!

Some time after dinner a newsboy rushed into the lobby of the Ambassador with extra editions of a German-language paper, the only one I can read since I do not know Czech. The headlines said: Chamberlain to fly to Berchtesgaden tomorrow to see Hitler! The Czechs are dumbfounded. They suspect a sell-out and I'm afraid they're right.

One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of "honor"—a word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps. When

For what must have been a period of several hours, broken only by a late lunch, the demonic dictator rambled on, and there is no evidence from the records that a single general, admiral or Air Force commander dared to interrupt him to question his judgment or even to challenge his lies.

The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years