William Shirer’s diary entry about headlines in the Nazi newspapers
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William Shirer perhaps shed more light on the events that led to Hitler’s ascendancy and German involvement in World War II than anyone else from the United States. Although closely watched in Germany, Shirer managed to convey much in his reporting by using subtle phrasing, suggestive tones of voice or U.S. slang unfamiliar to German censors trained only in formal British English.
At this time Shirer was also at work on his most enduring work, Berlin Diary (1941), which gives a sharp insider's look at members of the Nazi hierarchy while also detailing the increasingly dire travails of the ordinary Germans Shirer had met and befriended. Once the war began, Shirer returned to America and embarked on lecture tours as well as becoming a regular radio commentator and publishing a column for The New York Herald Tribune syndicate.
Shirer's life took an unexpected turn when, in the early 1950s, he was unofficially blacklisted for what were perceived as left-wing views. In his New York Times obituary, he recalled:
I became unemployable…I was broke, with two kids in school. Some of my friends were editors and would pay me for an article, but nothing was ever published. I then decided I would speak my piece on the lecture trail. I spent almost five years when my sole income was from one-night stands at universities. They were almost the only place in the country in the 1950s that still had some respect for freedom of speech.
Paradoxically, it was this enforced "retirement" from journalism that gave Shirer the time to gather the information and write his epochal history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). This history was enormously popular in its day, although its accuracy and points of emphasis have since been questioned by historians. Richard J. Evans, for example, writing in The New Republic, complains of the very aspects that are evident in the above-cited talk: