Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

Berlin Diary is a work of nonfiction: the published journal of William L. Shirer, an American foreign correspondent who lived and worked in Nazi Germany and across Europe from 1934 to 1940. Written from day to day as events unfolded, the diary chronicles the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, the Nazi regime in Germany, the collapse of European democracy, and the outbreak of the Second World War.

The diary opens in January 1934 in a Spanish fishing village, where Shirer and his wife, Tess, were ending a sabbatical year. Their savings depleted, Shirer accepted a low-paying job at the Paris Herald and returned to journalism. He found himself covering the political violence convulsing Europe. In Paris, he witnessed a riot at the Place de la Concorde on February 6, 1934, in which right-wing mobs and Communists attempted to storm the Chamber of Deputies, leaving 16 dead. In Austria, Chancellor Dollfuss crushed the Social Democrats with tanks and artillery, destroying Viennese democracy. That summer, Hitler purged his paramilitary S.A. leadership, having its chief, Ernst Röhm, murdered. When President Hindenburg died in August, Hitler seized both the presidency and the chancellery, binding the German army to him with a personal oath of loyalty.

Shirer moved to Berlin in August 1934, accepting a position with Universal Service, a news wire agency. He and Tess were met at the train station by agents of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. The carefree atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Germany's pre-Nazi democratic government, had vanished, replaced by constant salutes, marching storm troopers, and oppressive regimentation. At the Nuremberg Party Rally in September, Shirer got his first close look at Hitler's hold on the German people. He describes elaborately staged ceremonies, massed searchlights over hundreds of thousands of uniformed followers, and the hysterical devotion of the crowds. He began to comprehend, he writes, some reasons for Hitler's success: the restoration of pageantry and mysticism to ordinary German lives.

Over the following years, Shirer records the steady dismantling of the post-World War I order. On March 16, 1935, Hitler announced universal military conscription, openly repudiating the Versailles Treaty, which had restricted German military power after 1918. Britain and France did nothing. On March 7, 1936, German troops reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland, tearing up the Locarno Treaty, a pact Germany had voluntarily signed. Shirer learns that the troops had orders to retreat if the French army resisted. France instead appealed to the League of Nations. This failure to act, Shirer recognizes, destroyed the main pillar of European peace.

Shirer describes daily life among Berlin's foreign correspondents, a tight-knit group that gathered nightly at the Taverne. Norman Ebbutt of the London Times, the best-informed reporter in Berlin, presided over their table, sharing intelligence from contacts across the government and military. Shirer also records the regime's escalating persecution of Jews and the Nazification of German schools.

In August 1937, Universal Service folded, leaving Shirer jobless. A telegram from Edward R. Murrow, European manager of the American radio network CBS, led to a meeting at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. Murrow offered Shirer a position as CBS's Continental correspondent. Shirer was hired and moved to Vienna, reflecting on three years lived in the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, persecution, and preparation for war.

From Vienna, Shirer covers the Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria, in March 1938. He watched Nazi mobs fill the streets and armed Nazis seize the Austrian Broadcasting System, blocking him from going on the air. Unable to broadcast under censorship, he flew to London via Berlin on Murrow's suggestion and delivered the first uncensored eyewitness account. Two nights later, he and Murrow organized CBS's first European news round-up, a pioneering broadcast that coordinated live reports from multiple capitals. Returning to Vienna, Shirer witnessed Jews forced to scrub sidewalks on their knees under jeering storm troopers, Jewish homes looted, and suicides mounting.

The Czechoslovak crisis followed that summer and fall. Shirer broadcasts from Prague as Hitler demanded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia. At the Godesberg conference in September, he observed Hitler up close, noticing a nervous tic and hearing officials whisper about the Teppichfresser (carpet-eater), a mocking reference to Hitler's reported rages. On September 27, a motorized division rolled through Berlin toward the Czech frontier; the populace refused to cheer, standing at the curb in utter silence. At the Munich Conference on September 30, Britain and France capitulated, handing the Sudetenland to Hitler. Shirer describes Premier Daladier as "a completely beaten and broken man" (244), while Hitler strode out with a swagger. Afterward in Paris, Shirer and Murrow agreed that war was now more probable than ever.

Events accelerated through 1939. Germany swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, and Britain guaranteed Polish independence. Shirer visited Warsaw, finding the Poles confident but their military hopelessly outdated. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, announced on August 21, stunned the world. On September 1, his colleague Sigrid Schultz, a fellow Berlin correspondent, phoned at six a.m. to tell him Germany had invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on September 3. Shirer stood in the Wilhelmplatz as some 250 Berliners listened to the announcement in stunned silence, a scene he contrasts with the wild enthusiasm of August 1914.

The diary's second half covers the war. Shirer chronicles the rapid conquest of Poland, visiting the front near Gdynia to watch outgunned Polish forces fight desperately against tanks and dive-bombers. Warsaw held out until September 27. Russia invaded from the east on September 17. A long stalemate followed on the western front, where French and German soldiers faced each other without firing. In April 1940, Germany seized Denmark and Norway. On May 10, the invasion of the Low Countries and France began. Shirer traveled to the front in Belgium, noting the efficiency of the German military machine, with its combination of tanks, dive-bombers, motorized artillery, and parachutists. King Leopold of Belgium surrendered on May 28, and the British evacuated from Dunkirk under heavy air attack, losing all their equipment.

Paris fell without a fight on June 14. On June 21, at the clearing in Compiègne Forest where the 1918 armistice had been signed, Hitler received the French surrender in Marshal Foch's original railway car. Observing from 50 yards away, Shirer describes Hitler's face as "afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph" (254).

Through the summer and fall of 1940, Shirer covers the Battle of Britain from the German side. He visited the Channel coast, watched waves of bombers head toward England, and analyzes the failure of the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, to destroy Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF). When Berlin came under British bombing in late August, he describes the population's shock, broadcasting through anti-aircraft fire. He also uncovers the regime's systematic killing of people with intellectual disabilities, documenting suspicious death notices and obtaining the form letter sent to families that described the deaths as releases.

By late 1940, Shirer decided to leave Germany, concluding that censorship had made honest reporting impossible. He sent Tess and their daughter across unoccupied France toward Spain on a bus loaded with terrified Jewish refugees. In a final summation, he assesses Germany's strengths, profiles Hitler's inner circle, and reflects on the German national character. On December 13, he boarded the SS Excambion in Lisbon. As the ship slid down the Tagus past the lights of the last free corner of the continent, Shirer watched Europe recede, reflecting on 15 years spent there and the destruction wrought by the Nazi regime.