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Overview
In the last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat, his shocking firing by CBS News, and his final visit to Paris sixty years after he first lived there as a cub reporter in the 1920s. It paints a bittersweet picture of his final decades, friends lost to old age, and a changing world.
More personal than the first two volumes, this final installment takes an unflinching look at the author’s own struggles after World War II—and his vindication after the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his most acclaimed work. It also provides intimate details of his often-troubled marriage. This book gives readers a surprising and moving account of the last years of a true historian—and an important witness to history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795334177 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Twentieth Century Journey , #3 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 467 |
| Sales rank: | 702,665 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Twice before, in 1940 and 1944, I had got back from the war in time for Christmas. And now, as the holiday approached in 1945, I was coming home for the third time. For good, I hoped.
The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14.
I would never forget those first August days when the long war ended. The news was almost too tremendous to grasp. How could you be prepared for the news that burst upon us on Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. The force from which the sun draws its awesome power had for the first time, ever, been unleashed by us to slaughter human beings and wipe out their cities.
President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. The extent of the damage it had caused, the War Department declared, was not yet known. An impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke reaching up to the heavens had masked "the target area" from U.S. reconnaissance planes. But a bomb of such terrifying force was bound to have caused appalling loss of human life and property. The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later.
What concerned us at the time was not so much the capacity of the bomb for unbelievable destruction — no one thought of it, as we later would, as threatening to blow up the planet — but whether the bomb would terrify the Japanese into surrendering and ending the war. When that occurred after we had dropped a second bomb, this time on Nagasaki, everyone on the globe, I think, friend, enemy, or neutral, was immensely relieved that the war was over, that the mass killing and the terrible destruction would cease. We would have blessed peace on what was left of a stricken world.
Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. We stood suddenly, apprehensive and unprepared, at the dawn of a new one. In its editorial that morning, I noted, the New York Times posed the problem and asked the crucial question:
A revolution in science and a revolution in warfare have occurred on the same day. ... Civilization and humanity can now survive only if there is a revolution in mankind's political thinking. But can mankind grow up quickly enough to win the race between civilization and disaster?
It was a question that would hang over the rest of my life like a dark, threatening cloud, and cast its shadow over this book from the first page to the last. A half century later there is still no answer and no prospect of one. The mad race is still on and no one can yet be sure how it will end and how soon.
* * *
That spring CBS had sent me out to San Francisco to cover the founding of the United Nations. I had asked to be sent back to Europe to report on what would certainly be our final triumph over Nazi Germany. I had spent so much of my life writing and broadcasting about that country, had been in Berlin when World War II was launched six years before, and had observed at first hand Germany's amazing early triumphs in Poland and in the west, that I very much wanted to be in on its defeat, which had seemed so improbable in the first years of the war. This was not because I felt vindictive. It just seemed like poetic justice for one who had had to report for so long on the arrogance and savagery of Hitler and his thugs when they first conquered Germany and then most of Europe. But the powers-that-be at the network decided they wanted me to go to San Francisco — perhaps because I was the only one on the staff who had covered the old League of Nations in Geneva.
Now that victory over Germany in Europe and over Japan in Asia seemed certain, perhaps the most important thing to report on was no longer the war but the kind of peace the victorious Allies were going to make. Just as after World War I the victors at Versailles had set up the League of Nations, a dream of President Woodrow Wilson, to prevent further wars and maintain the peace, now they were meeting in San Francisco to establish a new world body called the United Nations, hoping it would do a better job than its predecessor. Strangely enough, I, who had seen the old League flounder in Geneva because the Big Powers were too nationalistic and too selfish to yield an inch of their sovereignty to the common good, was blandly optimistic about the chances this time for the United Nations. I was naïve enough to believe they had learned a lesson from history, especially from the suffering and sacrifice they had gone through in the Second World War. I thought their leaders, even though not very bright, knew our small planet could not survive a third world war — and this before the A-bomb was dropped and made it certain.
So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. Not even the anticipated antagonism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., which were emerging from the war as the world's two superpowers, could dampen my enthusiasm. After all, I reflected, Americans might be hysterical about the terrible Bolsheviks, as the Russians were hysterical about the terrible capitalist, imperialist Americans, but despite the paranoia and the rhetoric, there seemed to me no fundamental conflicts of interest between the two countries. There never had been, whether Russia was Czarist or Bolshevik.
In this I would prove to be naïve, too. But, for a moment, as the statesmen from fifty nations gathered from the far corners of the earth in the beautiful city by the bay, there was an atmosphere of goodwill and a determination to succeed. Jan Christiaan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, summed it up. He was the sole survivor of those who had played leading parts in shaping the League of Nations at Versailles after the last war. He had seen it slowly fail. He thought the proposed United Nations was better than the old League. He also believed, he told me, that this was our last chance.
Smuts thought it would be better, for one thing, because this time the world's two greatest powers would be in it from the beginning. One of the weaknesses of the old League had been that the United States, whose president had inspired it, spurned it and stayed out, and that the Soviet Union had not been invited to join until toward the end, when it was doomed. Smuts also believed the U.N. would have more teeth to enforce the peace — even, if necessary, by the employment of armed force, which the League had never had. I could not conceive in those heady spring days that my fierce belief in the future of the United Nations, shared by so many there, would turn out to be as illusory as that I had entertained as a youngster back in the 1920s about the League of Nations.
The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. My euphoria, my high hopes, were reflected in my diary that evening.
... Here were expressed today all the hopes we have of peace. In Berlin a maniac's hopes of world conquest were being buried in the debris of a once great city. [Russian troops that day were reported approaching the center of the city, where Adolf Hitler was believed holed up in the Chancellery.] Here in this beautiful community along the ocean we call Pacific, more decent hopes were being born.
... The president of the United States [Truman had just succeeded Roosevelt thirteen days before] broadcast to the delegates: "In your hands rests our future. Make certain that another war is impossible."
Meanwhile from the war we still had, tremendous news was beginning to break. My diary tells of the climactic, blazing end.
Sunday, April 22. The Russians are within three miles of Unter den Linden in the heart of Berlin. The city is in flames. ...Somewhere south of Berlin a junction between the American and Russian armies is imminent. ...
* * *
Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!
American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.
But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.
Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. Today his body is hanging in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. ... According to the Milan Free Radio the Duce's mistress, Clara Petacci, was also executed, and the tyrant's body, after it was cut down, lay on hers in the Milan gutter for all to see.
After Il Duce, Der Führer?
Indeed. Adolf Hitler's time had come too.
On Tuesday, May 1, I was lunching with some members of the American delegation at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco when a bellboy summoned me to the telephone. It was our local CBS office. Come quick, they said. Hitler is dead!
Though not surprised, given the latest news, I found it hard to believe. Over so many years Hitler had stridden the earth as an arrogant, ruthless conqueror, first of Germany and then of most of Europe, that I had not imagined him in my time in Berlin coming to such a sorry end, trapped at last in his lair by the despised Russians, whose country he had without provocation or warning set out to destroy four years before. Now it was his own country that was utterly destroyed, the war he had started so irresponsibly, irretrievably lost.
I hurried to the CBS studios, where they put me on the air to give some first reactions to the death of the Nazi tyrant. It was difficult to articulate them so suddenly, and I did not do very well. A golden opportunity missed! And one I had waited for so long! But it would take more than a few hours or even days to express adequately my thoughts on the impact of Adolf Hitler on his country, on me, and on the rest of the world. He had been such an evil genius.
I find a note at the end of a long diary entry for that day:
To write some time: A summing-up of ... Hitler. Your personal impressions ... Remember the first time you saw him, in Nuremberg in September 1934, when he did not personally impress you so much? When was the last time you actually saw him? I think it was in the Reichstag on July 18, 1940, after he had overrun Denmark and Norway, the Lowlands and France and was making what he thought was a magnanimous peace bid to Britain.
Now the man was dead. How had he died? I wondered. And who, if anyone, had taken his place? Göring, the Number Two? Goebbels, the Number Three? Or Himmler, the chief of the Gestapo, who had been reported in recent days to be in contact with the Swedes about a surrender in the West? CBS had recorded the broadcasts from Germany telling of Hitler's end.
The news first came from the radio station in Hamburg.
ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer's headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor. ...
The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died "a hero's death" fighting to the last "the frightful danger of Bolshevism." That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be "solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe."
Doenitz's broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler's fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler's embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.
I doubted very much that Hitler had died "a hero's death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism." I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies.
With Hitler gone, Germany's surrender had to be imminent. It came a week later, on May 7. The war in Europe was over — after five years, eight months, and six days of fighting that had almost destroyed the ancient continent, homeland of our Western civilization, and slaughtered millions upon millions and maimed as many more.
* * *
That summer our country did what it had failed to do after the First World War. It joined a world body that it was hoped would keep the peace. The Charter of the United Nations was signed by fifty nations at San Francisco on June 26 — "a day in history!" I noted enthusiastically in my diary. President Truman, disregarding his prepared speech to the delegates, had begun by saying: "Oh, what a great day this can be in history!" It had not been easy, as the president remarked. "That we have a Charter at all," he said, "is a great wonder!" It had come about largely because the United States and the Soviet Union, after quarreling bitterly and endlessly, had finally agreed to compose their differences.
Not a few Americans doubted that the Senate, which had refused to allow us to join the old League after the first war, would agree to our adhering to the United Nations. But the times had changed. America had matured. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, unlike Woodrow Wilson, had wisely made it a bipartisan issue by enlisting the aid of the Senate and other Republican leaders in hammering out an agreement in San Francisco. On July 28 the Senate ratified the U.N. Charter by a vote of 89 to 2.
The two nations that had not been members of the old League when it was formed after the first war, the Soviet Union because it had not been invited, the United States because it chose to stay out, were now, as the world's only two superpowers, to be the backbone of the U.N.
CHAPTER 2At the beginning of October that year, I went back to where the war had started to see at first hand what had happened to the Master Race and its country, to get if I could the story of its last desperate hours. I wanted to find out what kind of an end Adolf Hitler really had had, and I intended to proceed finally, in late November, to Nuremberg, where the trial of the surviving Nazi war criminals was scheduled to begin. Among other things, I hoped to learn more about an unbelievable horror they had perpetrated, the news of which was beginning to surface: the destruction of the European Jews in the ovens of the Nazi extermination camps.
I have in another place described that return to Germany, which I fervently hoped would be the last before I went home for good. But perhaps a few words about it would not be out of place in this last volume of memoirs. This then can be a sort of farewell for me to the Third Reich and its barbarian leader, Adolf Hitler. There is a time to leave a place once and for all.
* * *
I got back to Berlin on Tuesday, October 30, 1945. I'll never forget that first view from the air as we circled the capital before landing. The great city was demolished almost beyond recognition. I scribbled down a few notes for my diary.
The center of the capital around the Leipzigerstrasse and the Friedrichstrasse a vast acreage of rubble. Most of the little streets I knew, gone, erased as off a map. The railway stations — Potsdamerbahnhof, Anhalterbahnhof, Lehrterbahnhof — gaunt shells. The Imperial Palace of the Kaisers roofless, some of its wings pulverized, and here and there the outer walls battered in. The Tiergarten, like any other battlefield from the air, pockmarked with shell holes, the old spreading trees that I had known, bare stumps. And as far as you can see in all directions, a great wilderness of debris, dotted with roofless burnt-out buildings that look like mousetraps with the low autumn sun shining through the spaces where windows had been.
For days, often with my CBS colleague, Howard Smith, I prowled the ruins of the great city. My diary reminds me that the sorriest figures we saw in the streets were the demobilized German soldiers — especially the ones who had come back from POW camps in Russia and whom the Western Allied commanders were giving them their freedom, we having already more POWs than we could find accommodation for. These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Native's Return, 1945–1988"
by .
Copyright © 2014 William L. Shirer.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
General Introduction,
BOOK ONE A Coming Home. 1945,
BOOK TWO The First Two Years. 1945–1947,
BOOK THREE Ousted by CBS. 1947 The End of a Career in Broadcasting.,
BOOK FOUR Down and Out: The McCarthy Years. 1948–1959 The Struggle to Survive and to Write and to Publish.,
BOOK FIVE "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" — A Turning Point. 1954–1960,
BOOK SIX The Running Out of Time. 1960–1975,
BOOK SEVEN Past Hope or Fear: Twilight and the Gathering Night. 1975–1988,
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