William Shirer's Berlin Diary
by Anders Skovly
William Shirer is best known for his book The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, which details the story of Hitler and his Nazi-Germany, from Hitler’s childhood in Austria to his last days in the Fuhrerbunker during the Battle of Berlin. But Rise and Fall was not Shirer’s first book on Nazi-Germany. His first book on the topic was his Berlin Diary, released in 1941 following his return from Germany to the USA in December 1940.
Shirer worked as a foreign correspondent for an American news organization and resided in Berlin from 1934 to 1940. As he states in the foreword, his is not a typical diary, in that it was not written for his eyes only. It was written with an idea that it might one day be something worthy of publication. Hence, while we do get some diary entries on Shirer’s vacations and that sort of stuff, the meat of the book is Shirer’s observations and comments on Hitler’s Germany, and they are generally interesting. Here we get an inside view on events such as the Sudetenland conflict and the following Munich agreement, on Hitler’s wars in Poland and the west, the June 1940 armistice with France in Compiegne, and the British bombing of Berlin. Below are some select passages from the book.
Munich, September 30th, 1938
[The following quote relates to the Sudetenland conflict, stemming from Hitler’s demand that the Czech Sudetenland territory should become a part of Germany.]
It’s all over. At twelve thirty this morning—thirty minutes after midnight—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier signed a pact turning over Sudetenland to Germany. The German occupation begins tomorrow, Saturday, October 1, and will be completed by October 10. Thus the two “democracies” even assent to letting Hitler get by with his Sportpalast boast that he would get his Sudetenland by October 1. He gets everything he wanted, except that he has to wait a few days longer for all of it. His waiting ten short days has saved the peace of Europe—a curious commentary on this sick, decadent continent.
So far as I’ve been able to observe during these last, strangely unreal twenty-four hours, Daladier and Chamberlain never pressed for a single concession from Hitler. They never got together alone once and made no effort to present some kind of common “democratic” front to the two Caesars. Hitler met Mussolini early yesterday morning at Kufstein and they made their plans. Daladier and Chamberlain arrived by separate planes and didn’t even deem it useful to lunch together yesterday to map out their strategy, though the two dictators did.
Czechoslovakia, which is asked to make all the sacrifices so that Europe may have peace, was not consulted here at any stage of the talks. Their two representatives, Dr. Mastny, the intelligent and honest Czech Minister in Berlin, and a Dr. Masaryk of the Prague Foreign Office, were told at one thirty AM that Czechoslovakia would have to accept, told not by Hitler, but by Chamberlain and Daladier! Their protests, we hear, were practically laughed off by the elder statesman. Chamberlain looked particularly pleased with himself when he returned to the Regina Palace Hotel after the signing early this morning, though he was a bit sleepy, pleasantly sleepy.
Daladier, on the other hand, looked a completely beaten and broken man. He came over to the Regina to say good-bye to Chamberlain. A bunch of us were waiting as he came down the stairs. Someone asked, or started to ask: “Monsieur le President, are you satisfied with the agreement…?” He turned as if to say something, but he was too tired and defeated and the words did not come out and he stumbled out the door in silence. The French say he fears to return to Paris, thinks a hostile mob will get him. Can only hope they’re right. For France has sacrificed her whole Continental position and lost her main prop in eastern Europe. For France this day has been disastrous.
Geneva, October 10th, 1939
[Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Britain and France followed this up with declarations of war on Germany on September 3. The following entry takes place some five weeks after the outbreak of war.]
Coming up the Rhine from Karlsruhe to Basel this morning, we skirted the French frontier for a hundred miles. No sign of war and the train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front since the war began. Where the train ran along the Rhine, we could see the French bunkers and at many places great mats behind which the French were building fortifications. Identical picture on the German side. The troops seemed to be observing an armistice. They went about their business in full sight and range of each other. For that matter, one blast from a French “75” could have liquidated our train. The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war.
Paris, June 19th, 1940
[Hitler’s offensive against France began on May 10, 1940. By June, northern France had been overrun and the French government chose to sign an armistice with the Germans.]
It is still a mystery to me how this campaign has been won so easily by Hitler. Admitted, the French fought in the towns. But even in the towns not many of the millions of men available could have fought. There was not room. But they did not fight in the fields, as in all other wars. The grain twenty yards from the main roads has not been touched by the tramping feet of soldiers or their tens of thousands of motorized vehicles.
I keep asking myself: If the French were making a serious defence, why are the main roads never blown up? Why so many strategic bridges left untouched? Here and there along the roads, a tank barrier, that is, a few logs or stones or debris—but nothing really serious for the tanks. No real tank-traps, such as the Swiss built by the thousands. This has been a war of machines down the main highways, and the French do not appear to have been ready for it, to have understood it, or to have had anything ready to stop it.
Berlin, August 26th, 1940
We had our first big air-raid of the war last night. The sirens sounded at twelve twenty AM and the all-clear came at three twenty-three AM. For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. The concentration of anti-aircraft fire was the greatest I’ve ever witnessed. It provided a magnificent, a terrible sight. And it was strangely ineffective. Not a plane was brought down; not one was even picked up by the searchlights, which flashed back and forth frantically across the skies throughout the night.
Until almost dawn we watched the spectacle from a balcony. There was a low ceiling of clouds, and the German searchlight batteries tried vainly to pick up the British bombers. The beams of light would flash on for a few seconds, search the skies wildly, and then go off. The British were cruising as they wished over the heart of the city and flying quite low, judging by the sound of their motors. The German flak was firing wildly, completely by sound. It was easy, from the firing, to follow a plane across the city as one battery after another picked up the sound of the motors and fired blindly into the sky. Most of the noise came from the north, where the armament factories are.
End of a Berlin diary
In 1947 Shirer released another book, this one titled End of a Berlin diary. Despite its name, End of a Berlin diary is not a diary: it does not record Shirer’s observations on this and that day. The first part of the book covers the period July 1944 to the end of the war, and consists of Shirer commenting on news reports relating to the war. (At this time Shirer is in the USA, so all he knows of Germany is what he reads in the news, he doesn’t make any firsthand observations like in the first Berlin Diary.) I don’t find his commentary here much interesting, he’s mostly just going on and on about how happy he is that the nazis are getting their just deserts, which doesn’t make for engaging reading.
In the remainer of the book Shirer uses various sources to give some insight into certain parts of the war, including for example what was going on in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in April 1945. This stuff is somewhat more interesting than Shirer commenting on the news, but it’s still not a diary, so I think this book ought not to have been titled as it was.