Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries in kind – coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc. – were to be made in lieu of cash reparations.”

— William L. Shirer

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding. I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.”

— William L. Shirer

158. “This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people momentarily as they had not been united since 1914.”

— William L. Shirer

159. “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

160. “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

161. “And then: “My own fate became known to me. I decided to go into politics.”6 As it turned out, this was a fateful decision for Hitler and for the world.”

— William L. Shirer

162. “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

163. “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

164. “Most of the heckling at Hitler had really been directed against parts of the program which he read out, but he nevertheless considered all the points as having been adopted and they became the official program of the Nazi Party when its name was altered on April 1, 1920, to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

— William L. Shirer

165. “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

166. “Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.”

— William L. Shirer

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

— William L. Shirer

168. “But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germany was, without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurance that he would keep it.”

— William L. Shirer

169. “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

— William L. Shirer

170. “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

171. “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

172. “And cannot it be added that it was one of the world’s misfortunes that so many in the interwar years either ignored or laughed off the Nazi aims which Hitler had taken the pains to put down in writing? Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning.”

— William L. Shirer

173. “I thought of a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”

— William L. Shirer

174. “He made it clear enough that there would be no “democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehrerprinzip, the leadership principle – that is, that it would be a dictatorship.”

— William L. Shirer

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts of the revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreigners from flocking to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality.”

— William L. Shirer

179. “We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.”

— William L. Shirer

180. “Our expenses, including rent, have averaged sixty dollars a month.”

— William L. Shirer

181. “Indeed, in 1937 there appeared a journal called Deutsche Mathematik, and its first editorial solemnly proclaimed that any idea that mathematics could be judged nonracially carried “within itself the germs of destruction of German science.”

— William L. Shirer

182. “To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ.”

— William L. Shirer

183. “Drexler’s principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist.”

— William L. Shirer

184. “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

185. “The purpose of the plan was to make Germany self-sufficient in four years, so that a wartime blockade would not stifle it.”

— William L. Shirer

186. “In Nazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated” – to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism.”

— William L. Shirer

187. “But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler “was the first to get up and turn back,” leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He.”

— William L. Shirer

188. “The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends.”

— William L. Shirer

189. “One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of “honor” – a word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps. When.”

— William L. Shirer

190. “The party did not fall apart and Hitler did not shoot himself. Strasser might have achieved both these ends, which would have radically altered the course of history, but at the crucial moment he himself gave up.”

— William L. Shirer

191. “Since Kemal’s death, Turkey has been ruled by small minds, unsteady, weak men.”

— William L. Shirer

192. “They might not like the party’s demagoguery and its vulgarity, but on the other hand it was arousing the old feelings of German patriotism and nationalism which had been so muted during the first ten years of the Republic. It promised to lead the German people away from communism, socialism, trade-unionism and the futilities of democracy. Above all, it had caught fire throughout the Reich. It was a success.”

— William L. Shirer

193. “PARIS, August 3 Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal’s body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.”

— William L. Shirer

194. “Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state. “We had to divert the attention of the masses from material to moral values,” Dr. Ley once explained. “It is more important to feed the souls of men than their stomachs.”

— William L. Shirer

195. “And many returned who if they were not converted were at least rendered tolerant of the “new Germany” and believed that they had seen, as they said, “positive achievements.”

— William L. Shirer

196. “What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway.”

— William L. Shirer

197. “I’m glad you’ve seen the part played by our women in our movement,” Gandhi beamed. “The world has never seen such a magnificent spectacle. They were as brave as our men.”

— William L. Shirer

198. “He was now convinced that Hitler had brought the movement to a dead end. The more radical followers were going over to the Communists.”

— William L. Shirer

199. “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

200. “Among the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

— William L. Shirer