This book, the story of William L. Shirer’s six years as a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the 1930s, is not a scholarly work. I am a journalist, not an academic, and this story is about a journalist at work, based on the books, memoirs, diaries, notes, personal letters, and correspondence of the journalist himself. My goal from the beginning was to write more of an adventure story than a book of history.
During the six years he was based in Berlin, Shirer was a witness, through a small window, of the day-to-day events from his arrival in the summer of 1934 to the snowy night he flew out of Berlin in December 1940, en route to a meeting in Portugal with his colleague and friend Edward R. Murrow. On board Shirer’s plane were years of his personal papers, packed into trunks he managed to trick past the German police and customs authorities. These papers, and many others he collected in his life, are the anchor of a first-class archive in the Stewart Memorial Library at Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Shirer, who spent part of his youth in Cedar Rapids, graduated from Coe College in 1925. During the course of my research on this book, the custodians of this archive at Coe were Richard Doyle, Jill Jack, and Sara Pitcher. No archive could have more dedicated caretakers.
The collection is the foundation of this book. I have borrowed liberally from Shirer’s personal papers, in many places using his own words and in others paraphrasing him or using my own interpretations of what he meant. The thousands of papers filed in the archive show what Shirer did and thought on a certain day, where he was, and what he believed lay ahead for him. He wrote down everything, it seems, probably to create the kind of record he knew he would need later if he wrote his memoirs but also because spilling out his thoughts on paper was part of his personality.
There are deeply personal letters in the collection; some are painful to read, as they reveal the turmoil in Shirer’s life at different times, but particularly when he was older and divorced from his wife, Tess. Other letters, written when he was younger, show the kind of journalist he was—at times angry and frustrated, tenacious, opinionated, resentful of authority, ambitious, conspiratorial, unforgiving, and unwilling to make deals to further his career.
I have mined as much of the collection as possible to support the narrative of this book. That includes diary pages he filed away and those he used in the writing of Berlin Diary, his first book, which was published in 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf. When I could, I used diary entries rather than Shirer’s memoirs, which were mostly written nearly a half century after the events he describes and are thus not as reliable. In his diary entries, Shirer wrote what he saw—but he only saw, in large part, what German authorities allowed him to see; he was told, with some significant exceptions, only what German authorities wanted him to know. A great deal of the information passed on to Shirer and the other foreign correspondents covering Hitler’s government was false—the official lies of the government. His work as a journalist, as is true with any journalist, was to learn the truth, if only a small piece of it, while working at odds with censors and manipulative government officials. In the end, he found that process so demoralizing that it became the major reason he left Berlin in 1940.
While Shirer’s work in Berlin was extraordinary, his view of the history unfolding in Germany during those years was not the same as that of Victor Klemperer, the German professor, born a Jew, who had served his country in the army during the Great War. Klemperer converted to Christianity and married a Protestant and remained in the country throughout the second German war. Klemperer also kept a diary, which was published after the war. It shows the insults and horrors and doom all around him that descended on Germany like a great, black night after Hitler came to power in January 1933. It is no small point to say that Klemperer wrote about his and his wife Eva’s lives as Germans, lives lived on very thin ice, while Shirer wrote about others’ lives from the safety of his position as an American correspondent.
Shirer had high-ranking and influential sources within the government, but many of them, perhaps all of them, could not have predicted that by the middle of 1941 and into the spring of the following year, their government would have already murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and established extermination centers along main rail lines to murder millions more under factory conditions. While based in Berlin, Shirer did not see that coming. In that way, he and other American as well as British correspondents missed the central story of Germany and World War II.
Only a small number of Berlin-based foreign correspondents wrote much at all about the Nazi efforts against the Jews during the years from Hitler’s coming to power to the start of the war in September 1939. Each of these correspondents, including Shirer, had to make choices about what to write, with the real risk of expulsion hanging over their heads. This is not to offer an excuse for why they did not write more about official harassment and disenfranchisement of Germany’s Jews—and, in November 1938, state-sponsored violence—but it was a factor.
In a real way, each of these correspondents faced a choice—how much of the Nazis’ official programs against the Jews should they try to cover? Some did not write about these efforts because they just didn’t care about what was happening to the German Jews. Guido Enderis of the New York Times Berlin bureau seems to fit into this category. The work of Laurel Leff, a former journalist and now a faculty member at Northeastern University, shows how Enderis went out of his way to avoid writing about the German government’s policies against the Jews.
She also shows in her book Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper that the Times’s coverage of the exterminations after the war had commenced was woefully inadequate. Leff’s research has brought her to the conclusion that, for most of the Berlin-based foreign correspondents at work in Germany during the 1930s, what was happening to the Jews wasn’t that important to them.
Some American correspondents were harsh anti-Semites and openly pro-Nazi. An American colleague of Shirer’s, Robert Best, who reported from Vienna, went to work for the Germans and was arrested after the war and put on trial in the United States for treason. Shirer testified against him in a Boston courtroom. Best was convicted and sentenced to prison, where he died. Donald Day of the Chicago Tribune went to work for the Germans in 1942 as a propagandist. Unlike a group of other Americans and Englishmen who went to work for the Germans, Day somehow avoided prosecution after the war. He justified his work in a bizarre book that he completed while working for the Nazis, whom he describes as doing a great service for “Western civilization” by going to war against the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace. His book, published in the United States in 1982 under the title Onward Christian Soldiers, has a chapter called “Jews” that reads like something Joseph Goebbels might have written.
It is almost too strange to be true, but one of Day’s sisters was Dorothy Day, the Catholic convert who spent much of her life in the Catholic Worker movement helping the poor. She has been proposed for sainthood, something her brother, who broadcast for the Nazis on an English-language radio station in Berlin as Americans were being killed by the thousands in western Europe—and as Jews were being murdered by the millions—could never have understood.
For the other foreign correspondents, questions about the focus of their work can’t be answered today. It is impossible to get into their heads. As for Shirer, while I had many questions about the fact that he hardly mentioned the German government’s official policies against the Jews in his letters and diaries, correspondence in his archive at Coe College, written in the summer and fall of 1938 between Shirer and a Vienna photographer named Helene Katz, helped to answer some of these questions. They also helped me to get inside his head, and to understand him better, as he worked to get her out of Austria and to safety.
From his unique post, Shirer saw many things that horrified him. He stood near Hitler and heard his threats. He attended parties at which high-ranking Nazis entertained foreign correspondents. It’s clear he found them a loathsome group and a grave threat to democracies everywhere. It was only after the war—after he sat in the courtroom in Nuremberg, after he read many of the captured German documents kept in the US National Archives in preparation for writing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and after he read the accounts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem—that he realized that what he had seen during his six years in Berlin was through a very small window. I believe he made a pact with himself while he was in Berlin—to write as best he could under difficult conditions, to keep going as long as he could, and to report as thoroughly as was possible. He could not do it all. By all appearances, he did the best he could.
Many journalists have worked under conditions of official government deception, lies typed out daily in press statements, and reaped great results. David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan covered the war in Vietnam while working against military censors and government officials angered at the two journalists’ stories about the state of the war effort. Both men were denounced by American officials. They kept writing.
There are many journalists working in countries around the world who write stories that anger their governments. They swim against the current that other journalists float comfortably along in. Two courageous Israeli journalists, Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, write what they see in Israel and in the occupied territories. Hass has lived in the territories so she can better understand the day-to-day lives of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation. Both continue to file stories; their newspaper, Haaretz, continues to publish them.
A former colleague of mine at Newsday, Roy Gutman, won the Pulitzer Prize for writing about concentration camps in Bosnia. No government official typed out that story on a press release and handed it to him, along with a map showing just where to look for the evidence. Concentration camps! Could he have done more important work as a journalist? This is not a book about journalism as it is being practiced in America circa 2011. There is no sermon embedded in the narrative of this book. It is a story about a single journalist at work.
The expression “the good German” has since the end of World War II come to apply to those “good” Germans who opposed Hitler and worked against his policies. In Berlin, as I see it, Shirer was “the good American.” Whether he could have done more—whether he could have written serious, in-depth stories about the German government’s drive against the country’s Jews, whether his editors would have shown any interest in these stories—is a question that can’t be answered today. The role and responsibilities of a journalist covering a vast human catastrophe is the theme that lies at the heart of this book. The expression the “good American” applies to all journalists working under horrific conditions who are still writing for American newspapers or broadcasting for American radio or television networks.