|
6cfec64
|
Hitler, in turn, was enraged by the world reaction and convinced himself that it merely proved the power and scope of "the Jewish world conspiracy." In"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
a009210
|
The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
97149eb
|
The Reichstag would be asked to pass an "enabling act" conferring on Hitler's cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation. But"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
c3b8bc0
|
The government [Hitler promised] will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. Neither
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
59b1ce1
|
Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
45d708b
|
Heinrich Himmler is such a mild little fellow when you talk to him, reminding you of a country school-teacher, which he once was--pince-nez and all. Freud, I believe, has told us why the mild little fellows or those with a trace of effeminacy in them, like Hitler, can be so cruel at times. I guess I would prefer my cruelty from great thundering hulks like Goring.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
1a2cd4c
|
The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
e96e14b
|
The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among the S.A. storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler's mass movement, was great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of the dispossessed and the unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experience and they believed that the revolution which they had fought by brawling in the streets would bring them loot and good jobs, either in business or in the governme..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
b93a304
|
In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet. Book One THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
05a4b64
|
obvious they had not heard the
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
9ffe357
|
The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
9e0efa5
|
One foreign observer watched the proceedings that evening with different feelings. "The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy," Andre Francois-Poncet, the ambassador, wrote, "whence, with heavy heart and filled with foreboding, I watched its luminous wake."7"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
5c7fb0c
|
The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the "Thousand-Year Reich." It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a m..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
b00bc99
|
It is one of the great examples," as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent German historian, said, "of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life."10 To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had--or would shortly assume--the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine ..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
d5acee1
|
From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
334a463
|
At this meeting Ribbentrop also assured Ciano that Munich had revealed the strength of the isolationists in the U.S.A. "so that there is nothing to fear from America."10 +"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
56dac4b
|
The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
1236b3b
|
And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as "socialist," Hitler was even more vague on the kind of "socialism" he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a "socialist" which he gave in a speech on July 28, 1922: Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great nationa..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
5a50dc1
|
A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was "only two years."16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: "Gott strafe England!"--whereupon the children are supposed to answer: "He will."
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
9a7a291
|
Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler "the worst of all," General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the Nacht und Nebel Erlass--"Night and Fog Decree." This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons "endangering ..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
37115e4
|
This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by "something deeply rooted in his make-up," it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridic..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
aff4e43
|
While surrender negotiations were under way--a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms--bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
a44c186
|
This government was Papen's conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
1b59d16
|
The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word h..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
4a81ca3
|
No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
a3917d4
|
Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries--in France, in England, in the United States--had proved to be the backbone of democracy. In
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
c57aba6
|
What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic "nonsense" and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
96d5068
|
As Gregor Strasser publicly boasted, "All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe... is good, very good for us and our German revolution."
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
f2f0fe1
|
In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including "serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons."
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
04d5a67
|
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. --Santayana
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
70bb99d
|
The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its businesses as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, ..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
f201e43
|
He had not even considered the military value to the West of Czechoslovakia's thirty-five well-trained, well-armed divisions entrenched behind their strong mountain fortifications at a time when Britain could put only two divisions in France and when the German Army was incapable of fighting on two fronts and, according to the German generals, even incapable of penetrating the Czech defenses. Now
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
a176fea
|
The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German community seemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitive times, but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth and the master race they were far from being unpopular. A
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
6c9506c
|
A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
da48aa5
|
The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
3472d8d
|
Sometimes it has seemed to me that man's main accomplishment has been to tear down, rob pollute, kill. First, his earth, Then his fellow-men. In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, ..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
a1870e7
|
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses... For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written.
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
961d345
|
A curious communique from the German navy today: "The High Command of the Navy announces: The commander of the Graf Spee, Captain Hans Langsdorff, did not want to survive the sinking of his ship. True to old traditions and in the spirit of the training of the Officers Corps of which he was a member for thirty years, he made this decision. Having brought his crew to safety he considered his duty fulfilled, and followed his ship. The navy und..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
77411c7
|
they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.*
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
7367897
|
He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
34cbd7f
|
Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrify..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
c657930
|
The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the "spiritual" foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a form..
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
df8adac
|
It seems that along the Rhine front the French broadcast some recordings which the Germans say constituted a personal insult to the Fuhrer. "The French did not realize," says the DNB with that complete lack of humour which makes the Germans so funny,"
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |
|
40dbcc1
|
concordat,
|
|
|
William L. Shirer |