Reply #87: Perhaps William Shirer’s Berlin Diary might be worth a read [View All]

[legin]

"Berlin, August 25, 1934—Tomorrow begins a new chapter for me...

So began William Shirer’s journal entry upon his arrival in the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich. Shirer had left a rather mediocre post with the New York Herald in Paris to become the Universal News Service’s Berlin correspondent. Returning to Berlin for the first time since its decadent Weimarer Republik days, he was struck by what seemed a complete transformation of the place. While he previously had sat up long nights with German friends in bars, cafes and their studios discussing politics, art and literature, sex, music, the meaning of existence and other provocative topics, he found many of the same people—most of whom had been liberals, artists, students, socialists or communists—now infected with Nazism.

Shirer’s former friends mostly praised the rebirth of the German Vaterland under National Socialism and the firm guidance of the Fuehrer. As good Germans they valued the return of respect for authority and the honoring of basic Teutonic traditions. Glad to see a recovery from the nation’s shameful humiliation at Versailles, they seemed for the most part to tolerate shortages of some consumer goods, censorship and the enforced lack of general freedom in exchange for a reinvigorated German spirit. Shirer found these people exceptionally depressing. Those who disapproved of the “New Germany,” however, distrustfully watched what they said out of fear of being silenced—like so many others already had been—and subsequently remained invisible."

a bit from :
http://www.traces.org/williamshirer.html