Quotes from William L. Shirer

We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.

When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country.

What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway.

The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.

demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it.

a man who possesses the art of correct reading will… instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing… The art of reading, as of learning, is this:… to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.*… Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose…

A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fancy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania?

It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing.

The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. "It is impossible to escape the conclusion," the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, "that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.

At two o'clock this afternoon, alarm! The Americans! An American detachment takes over the hotel. We are free!

And cannot it be added that it was one of the world's misfortunes that so many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning.

the fall of the mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered for a new war.

The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure they had lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath

albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual

By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In

The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.

He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47

The failure of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends.

recognized that the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!"15

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche's influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of "genial imbecility" and "boyish blasphemies." Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him.

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.