Introduction

The story of legendary American journalist William L. Shirer and how his first-hand reporting on the rise of the Nazis and on World War II brought the devastation alive for millions of Americans

When William L. Shirer started up the Berlin bureau of Edward R. Murrow's CBS News in the 1930s, he quickly became the most trusted reporter in all of Europe. Shirer hit the streets to talk to both the everyman and the disenfranchised, yet he gained the trust of the Nazi elite and through these contacts obtained a unique perspective of the party's rise to power.

Unlike some of his esteemed colleagues, he did not fall for Nazi propaganda and warned early of the consequences if the Third Reich was not stopped. When the Germans swept into Austria in 1938 Shirer was the only American reporter in Vienna, and he broadcast an eyewitness account of the annexation. In 1940 he was embedded with the invading German army as it stormed into France and occupied Paris. The Nazis insisted that the armistice be reported through their channels, yet Shirer managed to circumvent the German censors and again provided the only live eyewitness account. His notoriety grew inside the Gestapo, who began to build a charge of espionage against him. His life at risk, Shirer had to escape from Berlin early in the war. When he returned in 1946 to cover the Nuremberg trials, Shirer had seen the full arc of the Nazi menace. It was that experience that inspired him to write The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich--the magisterial, definitive history of the most brutal ten years the modern world had known--which has sold millions of copies and has become a classic.

Drawing on never-before-seen journals and letters from Shirer's time in Germany, award-winning reporter Steve Wick brings to life the maverick journalist as he watched history unfold and first shared it with the world.

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Excerpt

22
War of the Worlds
First shock. The streets were utterly deserted, the stores closed, the shutters down
tight on all the windows. It was the emptiness which got you.
—William L. Shirer, diary, June 17, 1940
Early on the morning of June 15, the day after German troops marched
into Paris, Shirer set out from Berlin for the long trip over the new autobahn
to France. He hoped to reach Paris as quickly as the car could travel and
as his stamina would allow. He was exhausted, worn down to t he marrow,
angry, and frightened, but he was eager to push on and get there and to see for
himself what the city looked and felt like under German occupation. As hard
as he tried, he could not imagine it.
He knew that what he was seeing was extraordinary history. He had no
idea at all how it would end. But in the late spring of 1940, he and almost everyone
else in Europe could have concluded that the Hitler government had won
everything. There was no more dramatic proof of that than the swastika flying
over the Eiffel Tower and government buildings in Paris.
“Leaving for Paris today. I do not want to see the heavy-heeled German
boots tramping down the streets I loved,” he wrote.
Near the city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River, he found a room in a small
hotel that hugged the autobahn. The car had been trouble since he left Berlin,
and now, as he pulled off the highway, it quit. Pounding the steering wheel in
frustration did nothing to make it better. It was useless to try to repair it, so
he set out to find a replacement as quickly as he could. He cursed his bad luck.
Just when he needed to make great progress in getting to Paris, his car had
failed him.
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Review with Discussion Ideas from Kirkus:

"In a trenchant discussion of journalism, biography and ethics, Newsday senior editor Wick (Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder, 1990, etc.) examines the life of William Shirer (1904–1993), American war correspondent and author of the landmark bookThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).

The author is very much attuned to the conflicts and difficulties of a journalist like Shirer working in a police state. Wick asks what more he might have done, and discusses Shirer's concerns about getting stories published in New York, where he thought "no one...paid much attention." Shirer's knowledge only part of the story. He endured both the German government's lies and the corporate concerns of CBS, and he had to act on this partial and contradictory knowledge, not the fuller truth now available. He also had to protect his sources. His transmissions were monitored by Nazi spies in the United States who reported back with recommendations for action against him. It was a major undertaking for him to get his diaries and personal papers out of Hitler's Germany when he left in 1940. The papers eventually provided the necessary documentation for the influential books he later wrote about Hitler's rise to power and the Third Reich. As one of the first broadcast journalists, Shirer was breaking new ground with his nightly transmissions. Unfortunately, we will never know his full story because he protected his sources and burned sensitive papers before he left.

A gripping account of a courageous journalist's efforts to alert the world to Hitler's plan, and an engaging discussion of the relationship between journalism and personal integrity, which is as relevant today as it was then."

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