Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If Chamberlain was right and honorable in appeasing Hitler in September 1938 by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, was Stalin wrong and dishonorable in appeasing the Fuehrer a year later at the expense of Poland, which had shunned Soviet help anyway?”

— William L. Shirer

102. “Hegel developed a theory of “heroes” which had great appeal to the German mind. In one of-the Berlin lectures he discussed how the “will of the world spirit” is carried out by “world-historical individuals.”

— William L. Shirer

103. “While some of his men were mounting a machine gun in the entrance, Hitler jumped up on a table and to attract attention fired a revolver shot toward the ceiling.”

— William L. Shirer

104. “To his dying day, it is obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers for the poor marks they had given him – nor could he forget. But he could distort to a point of grotesqueness.”

— William L. Shirer

105. “Goebbels was sure of one thing, though: “Once we have the power we will never give it up. They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the ministries.”

— William L. Shirer

106. “This man was Anton Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be said to have been the actual founder of National Socialism.”

— William L. Shirer

107. “Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes – an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.”

— William L. Shirer

108. “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

109. “Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power.”

— William L. Shirer

110. “On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor.”

— William L. Shirer

111. “To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament.”

— William L. Shirer

112. “The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. “This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.”

— William L. Shirer

113. “The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France. Both had added glory to the German name. The Weimar Republic, as Nazi propaganda had it, had dragged that fair name in the mud. The Third Reich restored it, just as Hitler had promised. Hitler’s Germany, then, was depicted as a logical development from all that had gone before – or at least of all that had been glorious.”

— William L. Shirer

114. “But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this.”

— William L. Shirer

115. “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

116. “The university students in Germany, as we have seen, had been among the most fanatical of Nazis in the early Thirties. But ten years of Hitler’s rule had brought disillusionment, and this was sharpened by the failure of Germany to win the war and particularly, as 1943 came, by the disaster at Stalingrad.”

— William L. Shirer

117. “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

118. “Nazism appeared to be a dying cause. It had mushroomed on the country’s misfortunes; now that the nation’s outlook was suddenly bright it was rapidly withering away. Or so most Germans and foreign observers believed.”

— William L. Shirer

119. “Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by.”

— William L. Shirer

120. “He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was “monstrous” and undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.”

— William L. Shirer

121. “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

122. “But the Third Reich owed nothing to the fortunes of war or to foreign influence. It was inaugurated in peacetime, and peacefully, by the Germans themselves, out of both their weaknesses and their strengths. The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves.”

— William L. Shirer

123. “As Hitler had told an audience some months before, “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

124. “The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure they had lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath.”

— William L. Shirer

125. “The Hereditary Farm Law of September 29, 1933, was a remarkable mixture of pushing back the peasants to medieval days and of protecting them against the abuses of the modern monetary age.”

— William L. Shirer

126. “What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.”

— William L. Shirer

127. “The suffering of his fellow Germans was not something to waste time sympathizing with, but rather to transform, cold-bloodedly and immediately, into political support for his own ambitions.”

— William L. Shirer

128. “PARIS, February 15 The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.”

— William L. Shirer

129. “When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country.”

— William L. Shirer

130. “It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth.”

— William L. Shirer

131. “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

132. “It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing.”

— William L. Shirer

133. “Though Eva Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual impression on Hitler at all – perhaps this is one reason he preferred her company to that of intelligent women – it is obvious that his influence on her, as on so many others, was total.”

— William L. Shirer

134. “On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world.”

— William L. Shirer

135. “At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’s oversize cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be lined with three and a half pounds of steel plating.”

— William L. Shirer

136. “His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his head and the veins stood out in his temples.”

— William L. Shirer

137. “Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State.”

— William L. Shirer

138. “The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.”

— William L. Shirer

139. “The lower middle classes, all the millions of shopkeepers and small-salaried folk on whom Hitler had to draw for his mass support, shared in the general prosperity.”

— William L. Shirer

140. “Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated.”

— William L. Shirer

141. “Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the National Socialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors. And they had two advantages over their opponents: They were led by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthless enough, and opportunist enough, to go to any lengths to help him get it.”

— William L. Shirer

142. “Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him.”

— William L. Shirer

143. “The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.”

— William L. Shirer

144. “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.”

— William L. Shirer

145. “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

146. “Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.15.”

— William L. Shirer

147. “Not the half-paralyzed old man, dying, not even Hitler, nor anyone else in Germany, could have foreseen in that bleak January month of 1927, when the fortunes of the Nazi Party were at their lowest ebb, how soon, how very soon, those weapons which the transplanted Englishman had forged would be put to their fullest use, and with what fearful consequences.”

— William L. Shirer

148. “For six years, since the Nazi “co-ordination” of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world.”

— William L. Shirer

149. “Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.”

— William L. Shirer

150. “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 they were at least socially better off than the “workers.”

— William L. Shirer