Top 200 William L. Shirer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

152. “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

153. “With such incomparable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

— William L. Shirer

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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. “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

161. “All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament.”

— William L. Shirer

162. “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

163. “It is only as an Austrian who came of age in the last decade before the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, who failed to take root in its civilized capital, who embraced all the preposterous prejudices and hates then rife among its German-speaking extremists and who failed to grasp what was decent and honest and honorable in the vast majority of his fellow citizens, were they Czechs or Jews or Germans, poor or well off, artists or artisans, that Hitler can be understood.”

— William L. Shirer

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

— William L. Shirer

165. “Without Lenin and Hitler the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions most probably would not have succeeded. Without Gandhi there would have been no serious threat to British rule as the 1930′s began. In India I began to see that Gandhi, as Friedrich Meinecke would say of Hitler, was already one of the examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life. In India it was the only such personality there was.”

— William L. Shirer

166. “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

167. “But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable.”

— William L. Shirer

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “The great issues of peace and war will never be decided by majority vote, or any vote. We Americans have got to get that through our heads. That, and the fact that Russia, Great Britain and the United States, after due discussion, will largely determine the kind of world organization we are going to have.”

— William L. Shirer

176. “The plotters finally had someone to give orders – without such, a German officer seemed lost, even a rebellious one, even on this crucial day – and they began to act.”

— William L. Shirer

177. “He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition – a man’s morals.”

— William L. Shirer

178. “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

179. “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

180. “As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazi.”

— William L. Shirer

181. “Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”

— William L. Shirer

182. “The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted – the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power – was now crumbling.”

— William L. Shirer

183. “And now, as the fateful summer of 1944 approached, they realized that with the Red armies nearing the frontier of the Reich, the British and American armies poised for a large-scale invasion across the Channel, and the German resistance to Alexander’s Allied forces in Italy crumbling, they must quickly get rid of Hitler and the Nazi regime if any kind of peace at all was to be had that would spare Germany from being overrun and annihilated.”

— William L. Shirer

184. “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

185. “In private conversation he disclosed himself as a forceful and logical speaker, which, when tempered with a fanatical earnestness, made a very deep impression on a neutral listener.”

— William L. Shirer

186. “Everyone could see the contrast between this thriving, martial, boldly led new Germany and the decadent democracies in the West, whose confusions and vacillations seemed to increase with each new month of the calendar.”

— William L. Shirer

187. “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

188. “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

— William L. Shirer

189. “The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.”

— William L. Shirer

190. “The Fuehrer thanked Chamberlain for his words and told him that he had similar hopes. As he had already stated several times, the Czech problem was the last territorial demand which he had to make in Europe.”

— William L. Shirer

191. “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

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

— William L. Shirer

193. “Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady’s handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.”

— William L. Shirer

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

— William L. Shirer

195. “At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels.”

— William L. Shirer

196. “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

197. “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

198. “But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.”

— William L. Shirer

199. “There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to – or shared with – so many of his German followers.”

— William L. Shirer

200. “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