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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
78d7bfb	Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler's Germany. Per..			William L. Shirer
cd7fb3e	Then yesterday Hitler dispatched an ultimatum: Either carry out the terms of the Berchtesgaden "agreement," or the Reichswehr marches. A little after midnight this morning Schuschnigg and Miklas surrendered. The new Cabinet was announced, Seyss-Inquart is in the key post of Minister of the Interior, and there is an amnesty for all Nazis. Douglas Reed when I saw him today so indignant he could hardly talk. He's given the London Times the com..			William L. Shirer
a22d018	I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down ... This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to succe..			William L. Shirer
4239602	They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany's defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the G..			William L. Shirer
62aa0d8	Rommel hesitated and finally made his decision. "I believe," he said to Stroelin, "it is my duty to come to the rescue of Germany." At this meeting and at all subsequent ones which Rommel had with the plotters, he opposed assassinating Hitler--not on moral but on practical grounds. To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyr of him. He insisted that Hitler be arrested by the Army and haled before a German court for crimes aga..			William L. Shirer
bfe15a4	All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them. from a speech by the Nazi Minister of Education		might-makes-right nazi-germany	William L. Shirer
23070af	The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many antirepublicans took notice of it.			William L. Shirer
7da7730	Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler.			William L. Shirer
151bedc	No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him.			William L. Shirer
7a2e24e	Since Kemal's death, Turkey has been ruled by small minds, unsteady, weak men.			William L. Shirer
7043e83	irregularly as though it were farm land.			William L. Shirer
84b7a60	broadcast,			William L. Shirer
591224e	The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank			William L. Shirer
1f9fafc	moment of declaration of war, if there			William L. Shirer
ad43dae	Henderson, Hitler lapsed into a typical display of sentimental hogwash, though			William L. Shirer
284cf0d	demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it.			William L. Shirer
85236fd	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.			William L. Shirer
6a5a6a5	The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent--if necessary by force--all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen."19"			William L. Shirer
66f8386	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.			William L. Shirer
62b3e16	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			William L. Shirer
3a8d0f4	a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)* b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted.... d.... 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police... 5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can b..			William L. Shirer
2be9f91	is true that because of much greater employment the total income from wages and salaries grew from twenty-five billion marks to forty-two billions, an increase of 66 per cent. But income from capital and business rose much more steeply--by 146 per cent. All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the ..			William L. Shirer
01fce31	Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was exposed when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth "labor trustees," appointed by him, would "regulate labor contracts" and maintain "labor peace."18 Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised "to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a fact..			William L. Shirer
9a690cc	It never, however, drove him to the extremity of trying to find a regular job. As he makes clear in Mein Kampf, he had the petty bourgeoisie's gnawing fear of sliding back into the ranks of the proletariat, of the manual laborers--a fear he was later to exploit in building up the National Socialist Party on the broad foundation of the hitherto leaderless, ill-paid, neglected white-collar class, whose millions nourished the illusion that the..			William L. Shirer
9b9bd8b	It grows more and more clear that his purpose is simply to use the National Socialist party as a springboard for his own immoral purposes, and to seize the leadership in order to force the Party onto a different track at the psychological moment. This is most clearly shown by an ultimatum which he sent to the Party leaders a few days ago, in which he demands, among other things, that he shall have a sole and absolute dictatorship of the Par..			William L. Shirer
0888921	I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to its trust in the promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of democratic governments... I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production... developed traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being gigantic new factories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and cul..			William L. Shirer
bfa9e0e	1933." Farben scientists had saved Germany from early disaster in the First World War by the invention of a process to make synthetic nitrates from air after the country's normal supply of nitrates from Chile was cut off by the British blockade." --			William L. Shirer
e5548de	But they were now on that April morning determined to use them--the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.			William L. Shirer
e58a210	The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremberg that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew, by Henry Ford.			William L. Shirer
9b26070	LATER.--After seven days of almost ceaseless goose-stepping, speech-making, and pageantry, the party rally came to an end tonight. And though dead tired and rapidly developing a bad case of crowd-phobia, I'm glad I came. You have to go through one of these to understand Hitler's hold on the people, to feel the dynamic in the movement he's unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess. And now--as Hitler told the correspo..			William L. Shirer
8173552	For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murde..			William L. Shirer
8388ebe	With such incomparable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.			William L. Shirer
9aff9d5	BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.			William L. Shirer
cace6f9	The individual, as well as the nation, can renounce only those things which are not vital." There you have German character stripped to the bone. A German cannot renounce vital things, but he expects the other fellow to. Hitler this afternoon addressed the members of the Reichstag in the Chancellery, though it was not a regular session. No report of his speech available. A DNB communique merely says the Fuhrer "outlined the gravity of the s..			William L. Shirer
e558668	When Hitler brushed past me going down the aisle, he was followed by Himmler, Bruckner, Keitel, and several others, all in dusty field-grey. Most of them were unshaven and I must say they looked like a pack of Chicago gangsters.			William L. Shirer
923c39a	It was known that he demanded, and received, a high fee for the many articles which he wrote in those days for the impoverished Nazi press. There was much grumbling in party circles over the high cost of Hitler. These			William L. Shirer
b687fab	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, as time would tell.			William L. Shirer
8c34c4c	Mussolini and Ciano, in black Fascist uniforms, sauntered along behind the two ridiculous-looking Englishmen, Musso displaying a fine smirk on his face the whole time. When he passed me he was joking under his breath with his son-in-law, passing wise-cracks. He looks much older, much more vulgar than he used to, his face having grown fat. My local spies tell me he is much taken with a blonde young lady of nineteen whom he's installed in a v..			William L. Shirer
56d5f78	The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is true that he found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was po..			William L. Shirer
1b9f232	In 1914, I believe, the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. There is not even any hate for the French and British--despite Hitler's various proclamations to the people, the party, the East Army, the West Army, accusing the "English warmongers and capitalistic Jews" of starting this war. When I passed the F..			William L. Shirer
53ad211	He accused the venerable Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race, Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the government's hostility to both Protestant and Catholic churches. The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the doing of God's will... God's will reveals itself in German blood... Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen [the Cath..			William L. Shirer
de06d89	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" --			William L. Shirer
ebfdce6	To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. He would make Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations, repudiate the Versailles Treaty, stamp out corruption, bring the money barons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every German had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry men seeking not only relief but new faith and new gods, ..			William L. Shirer
c1c5ab7	Women, whom Nietzsche never had, he consigned to a distinctly inferior status, as did the Nazis, who decreed that their place was in the kitchen and their chief role in life to beget children for German warriors. Nietzsche put the idea this way: "Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly." He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!"..			William L. Shirer

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