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It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent dist… - William L. Shirer
" "It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons.
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About William L. Shirer
William Lawrence Shirer (February 23, 1904 – December 28, 1993) was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany cited in scholarly works since publication. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what would become a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II (1940).
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Native Name:
William Lawrence Shirer
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Wm. L. Shirer
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Additional quotes by William L. Shirer
It was a prophetic pronouncement. But Clemenceau gave in. In return for abandoning the Rhine he accepted solemn guarantees of his country's frontier from his two great allies. Neither ally kept its word. Both houses of the British parliament approved the Treaty of Guarantee in July 1919, but on the condition that the United States also ratify it. The U.S. Senate refused to approve either it or the Versailles Treaty, and the British assent was nullified.
And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann — there were a number of supplementary directives -- been carried out, millions of Germans who had escaped with their lives up to then might well have died. Speer tried to summarize for the Nuremberg court the various "scorched earth" orders. To be destroyed he said were: "All industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works, gas works, food stores and clothing stores; all bridges, all railway and communication installations, all waterways, all ships, all freight cars and all locomotives."
Shortly after the British government had protested Hitler's violation of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty on March 16 and then joined Italy and France in proclaiming their determination to uphold the sanctity of treaties, it had, behind the backs of its two Stresa allies, negotiated a naval agreement which violated the naval clauses of the Versailles Treaty and gave Hitler the right and encouragement to build all the warships his shipyards could construct for at least ten years.* The Naval Pact was signed in London on June 18, 1935, without the British government having the courtesy to consult with France and Italy, or later, to inform them of the secret agreements which stipulated that the Germans could build in certain categories more powerful warships than any the three Western nations then possessed. The French regarded this as treachery, which it was. They saw it as a further appeasement of Hitler, whose appetite grew on concessions. And they resented the British agreeing, for what they thought a private gain, to scrap further the peace treaty and thus add to the growing overall military power of Nazi Germany.
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