William Lawrence Shirer , born on February 23rd, 1904 with Chicago and dead on December 28th, 1993 with Boston, was a Journaliste, Historien and American writer .

He was corresponding of press then of radio in Europe in the Années 1920 and 1930, and its cover of the annexations Nazis of 1938-1939 and of the release of the Second world war for CBS since Berlin made it famous near the American public. It was with other journalists engaged by Edward R. Murrow one of the pioneers of the transatlantic diffusion, carrying out a certain number of media “blows” and inaugurating the formula of the “review” between correspondents on line since several large capitals. The Peabody Award was given to him in 1946 for “remarkable cover and interpretation of the topicality”.

It is also known for its work The Rise and Fall off the Third Reich (1960), a detailed account of the Histoire diplomatic Politique, and military of the Nazisme, mode hitlérien and Germany in the Second world war; it had before made appear its Berlin Diary (1941). He is the author of about fifteen other books on the events of the 20th century as of some Romance S. Several of its works had a great popular success and were preceded, but made the object of criticism of Historien S for their weakness with the ell of the university requirements and for their coloring by certain bias.

Origins, formation and family

William Shirer is born with Chicago on February 23rd, 1904. His/her father, a federal magistrate, dies when it is nine years old, and his/her mother moves with William, her older sister and her younger brother with Cedar Rapids, in the Iowa, where his/her own parents live. After its secondary schooling in Washington High School, it enters to the Coe College, a college of liberal arts; it takes part in the student newspaper, the Cosmos , and works the summer in the sporting pages of the Cedar Rapids Republican .

After having obtained a Baccalaureat in arts of Journalism in 1925, it goes in Europe in the intention to spend the summer there and with $   200 out of pocket, but having found, the morning of the day planned for its return, an employment at the office of the Chicago Platform with Paris, it is established there and will return to the the United States only fifteen years later.

At the time of its Parisian stay, it follows courses on the history of Europe to the Collège de France.

He marries in 1931 a photographer Austrian, Theresa Stiberitz, known as Tess; they will have two girls, Eileen Inga and Linda Elizabeth, and will divorce in 1961. Shirer will be remariera with Irina Lugovskaya.

It loses the use of the eye right in 1932 following an accident of Ski in the the Alps.

During its schooling and from its years in Europe, he learned the German , the French, the Spanish and the Italian .

Career

Paris

From 1925 to 1927, Shirer works with the Paris Tribune , the French edition of the Chicago Tribune , then becomes in 1927 corresponding of the American edition. This new function leads it to travel in Europe like to the the Middle East and in India, where it meets the mahatma Gandhi, with which it will remain in contact.

It loses its employment with the Tribune in 1932 because of the Grande Depression; the Shirer couple leaves food in Spain, where it divides during one year a villa on the coast with the guitarist Andrés Segovia.

In 1934, Shirer is engaged by the French edition of the New York Herald , but leaves Paris for Germany in August. It will frequently return to France in the years 1930.

The Nazi Germany

In 1934, Shirer is engaged by the office Berlin ois of Universal News Service, one of both news agencies of the tycoon of the media William Randolph Hearst. It covers in particular the triumphs hitlériens Années 1930 like the return to Germany of the Territoire of the Basin of the Saar in 1935 and the Remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936.

When the ONES ceases its in August 1937 activities, Shirer is transferred to International News Service, the other arranges of Hearst, but returned a few weeks later. The very same day where it receives its opinion of dismissal, it also receives an invitation of Edward R. Murrow, person in charge of the European activities of CBS. At the time of their meeting, a few days later in Berlin, Murrow explains to Shirer that it cannot cover all the European topicality from its office of London and that it seeks a correspondent to open an office for the continental Europe. He proposes the station with Shirer, provided a recording of test satisfies the leaders of the network, who wish to judge if its voice is adapted to the radiophonic diffusion. Although Shirer fears that its flûtée voice is not appropriate, the test is considered to be conclusive.

Shirer becomes chief of the European office of the CBS, which it installs with Vienna; the Austrian capital, in addition to having a situation more central than Berlin, then offers more guarantee of independence with respect to the German authorities. It is charged to prepare the emissions and, in the first times, to engage of the press correspondents to conclude them, because the CBS then prohibits its correspondents from taking themselves the word on the network; this prohibition, considered to be absurd by Murrow and Shirer, is raised in March 1938. Shirer is the first of what one will call the “guy of Murrow” ( in Murrow' S Boys ), a group of journalists of radio operator recruited by Murrow which covered the Second world war and the Après-guerre for the American public.

Until 1939, foreign Shirer and the other correspondents in Germany are subjected only to a Autocensure: they know that the civils servant of the ministry for Reich to the Education of the people and Propaganda, directed by Joseph Goebbels, can refuse the access to the to them studios of radio of the State or to make them expel country. They preserve despite everything more freedom in their work than the German journalists addressing itself to the German public.

March 11th, 1938, at the time of the annexation of Austria by Germany after several weeks of pressures of the Nazis on the Austrian government, Shirer is the only journalist of radio operator American to be in Vienna, its fellow-member max Jordan, of the NBC, being gone away. However, the German troops of occupation, which control the studios of the radio, do not authorize it to transmit its report to the United States. On the council of Murrow, which comes to replace it in Vienna, Shirer gains London in the plane and can make there the first report not censured of a direct witness of the events. It reports in its Berlin Diary that on the aircraft were many Juifs which fled Austria become Nazi.

The following day, Paul White, director of the information of the CBS, asks Murrow and Shirer to produce a “European review” of about thirty minutes in which must intervene on line of the correspondents since five Capitale S European (Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Rome and London). The emission, organized in eight hours with the telephone and radiophonic equipment available and presented since New York by Robert Trout, is a great success and establishes a new format in the journalism of radio. It is at the origin of the CBS World News Roundup , which is, eight decades later, always diffused each morning and each evening on the CBS; it is the programme of radiophonic information oldest still in activity.

The office Viennese is moved with Geneva after Anschluss. Shirer follows the majority of the great speeches of Adolf Hitler as well as gatherings of propaganda like the congresses of the Nazi party to Nuremberg, and covers the Accords of Munich and the Crise of Sudètes.

The Second world war

Based with Berlin for the period previous the Second world war, Shirer covers the germano-Polish tensions and the invasion of Poland which starts the conflict in September 1939, then, in spring 1940, the operations of the Western face, Campagne of Norway in April, Bataille of France in May. It can then move near the German troops when those approach Paris, and achieves one of the principal media “blows” of the war by announcing since Compiegne with the American listeners the signature of the Armistice of June 22nd, 1940 before even as the news is not published by the German authorities.

The Censure is established at the beginning of the war, with for goal to keep secret information which could be used by the countries in war with Germany. It is accentuated when Great Britain refuses the peace overtures of Hitler and lance of the bombardments against German cities, of which Berlin. Whereas ED Murrow can make follow the Blitz on line from London, the foreign correspondents in Germany are not authorized to announce the British attacks. It is to them also interdict to question the veracity of the official statements of the ministry for Propaganda and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and the weather are requested not to employ the term “Nazi”, considered to be likely to be bad impression. During a few months, Shirer manages to communicate the bottom of its reports while using of a particular tone, silences, inflections, allusions or terms of American slang unknown of the critics.

During the summer 1940, sudden Shirer of the increasing pressures on behalf of the authorities Nazis to diffuse the official reports, that it can be incomplete or untrue, and it warns its superiors in New York that the censure prevents it from working in all objectivity. In October, it makes return his wife and their little girl to the United States because of the intensity of the British bombardments. Having learned by a knowledge that the Gestapo suspects it of espionage and undertook to constitute a file against him, it organizes its own departure. An easy way enables him to carry its newspaper, which would have been a compromising document and which it envisaged to destroy: it places volumes at the bottom of two Valise S, recovers them with the texts of its reports aimed and plugged by the censure and the administration, and deposits over Geological Survey maps which it is not supposed capacity to make leave Germany. It then makes control the bags by Gestapo: the agents seize the charts and start to control the documents, but the seizure seeming to justify their inspection and the many official plugs extinguishing their mistrust, they neglect to go until the bottom of the bags, and seal them. Shirer leaves Germany on December 5th, 1940.

The following year, it publishes its Berlin Diary , a testimony from day to day of the events which it covered with 1934 to 1940, adapted its newspapers and of its notes. The work is quickly translated into several languages, in particular in German, French and Russian.

Shirer remains commentator with the CBS after his return to the United States; it also gives conference and holds a chronicle with the New York Herald Tribune .

After the war

After the fine of the Second world war, Shirer covers the lawsuit of the large war criminals in Nuremberg and the Conférence of San Francisco. It receives in 1946 the Peabody Award for “remarkable cover and interpretation of the topicality”.

The friendship between Shirer and ED Murrow ends in 1947 at the time of one of the médiatisées estrangements of the history of American broadcasting. The foam manufacturer to shave J.B. Williams having withdrawn his financing with the Sunday emission of Shirer, the CBS, where Murrow became vice-president in charge of the public affairs, does not find an other sponsor, but agrees to maintain the program, which causes a loss of income for Shirer. Shirer thinks that the sponsor and the network wish to dissociate from his comments to the antenna, in particular his criticisms of the Truman doctrine, and that the station attach more importance to the advertizing receipts than with the Journalisme. It leaves the CBS by allotting the responsibility for its departure to Murrow, which it shows to be “flatterer” with respect to William S. Paley, founder and managing director of the network.

After having left the CBS, Shirer works until 1949 for the Mutual Broadcasting System and continuous giving conferences and collaborating in various publications. He does not manage however to find a work regular in the Written press or the Radiodiffusion during the Maccarthysme because of his convictions of left: he militated in particular in favor of an American intervention in the war of Spain and publicly constant the Ten of Hollywood, and is referred in 1950 in the Black list anticommunist Red Channels . He continues to give conferences and turns to the writing for earns his living, but times are materially difficult for him and its family. He publishes three novels, as well as a work on the Scandinavia, and launches out in and the drafting research task of a work on the history of the Nazi Germany.

In 1960, it publishes The Rise and Fall off the Third Reich , an account of more than: 1200 pages resulting from its memories and its research. The work meets a great success immediately, and knows twenty reprintings in one year. Shirer gains in 1961 the National Book Award, and an adaptation in serial is diffused by ABC in 1966. The work, which is translated in several languages and is sold to several million specimens in the United States and in the world, quickly becomes one of most famous over the period.

Shirer continues its historical publications with a biography of Adolf Hitler, a work on the torpedoing of DKM '' Bismarck '' and a testimony on its relations with Gandhi. From 1976 to 1990, it makes appear its Mémoires, in three volumes, under the title 20th Century Journey .

Shirer and Murrow were never reconciled, in spite of an attempt at Murrow in 1964, one year before its death of a Lung cancer; Shirer will refuse until the end of its life to explain the reasons of their rupture.

1989 see the diffusion of The Nightmare Years , a Télésuite putting in scene the years of Shirer, incarnated by Sam Waterston, in Nazi Germany.

Shirer dies on December 28th, 1993 in Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston, little before its ninetieth birthday. A few months after its death appear its last two books, a work on Lev and Sofia Tolstoj and the third volume of its memories.

In 1999, a collection of reports of Shirer for the CBS is published under the title This Is Berlin , with a foreword of the British military historian John Keegan.

Historical work

Berlin Diary

Berlin Diary: The Journal off has Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 ( Journal of Berlin. The newspaper of a foreign correspondent, 1924-1941 ) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941, a few months after the return of Shirer to the United States. It is about an altered version of the newspaper held by Shirer, which will off be used as a basis for The Rise and Fall the Third Reich . The majority of its sources are not named in order to protect them from possible reprisals of the Gestapo.

It was followed in 1947 by End off has Berlin Diary , the newspaper of its voyage in devastated Germany of 1945 and its cover of the Procès of Nuremberg.

The Small channel and Fall off the Third Reich

The Small channel and Fall off the Third Reich: In History off Nazi Germany ( the Rise to power and the Fall of Third Reich. History of the Nazi Germany ) was published by Simon & Schuster in 1960.

Shirer used for this work its memories of the events and its newspapers and notes; files available, in particular several tons of German files seized after the war and transporées in the United States; talks carried out before and after the war; and newspapers and memories of many actors, in particular Joseph Goebbels, German Minister for Propaganda, the general Franz Halder, chief of staff of the Army, and the count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for the Foreign affairs.

The work was severely received by the medium historian. William O. Shanahan, in her recension for the American Historical Review , writes that it “does not exceed the most ordinary level of the comprehension” and “thorough at all our knowledge of Hitler and its political action does not have”. It reproaches Shirer for using of a “ultra-simplified historical structure” and “not to take the trouble to explore the historical topics and the political systems of the twentieth century”. “Of vast readings - sometimes skewed and with important omissions - sources and work of second hand did not lead it towards unexplored aspects of Third Reich, and it was not impressed by the subtlety and the sophistication which characterize the best studies on this topic. ” He also criticizes the place granted to secondary information: “The majority of the details were developed because they are diverting; the majority of the important things were isolated because they were likely to annoy. ” Shanahan recognizes however that the work “is not an unpleasant or tedious reading. The lesson gains continuously in interest to become increasingly enthralling. The account, although poor from the historical point of view, is traversed by a constant dramatic tension. ”

Elizabeth Wiskemann, in International Affairs , the “too long and massive” judge, and while writing that it “will appear certainly useful”, it does not estimate it “erudite enough or not written rather well to meet the university requirements”.

One of the most discussed passages is formed of the sections of chapter 4 on “the historical bases of Third Reich” and “the intellectual roots of Third Reich”. Shirer there made of the Nazism produces it history of Germany and German national character: “The acceptance of the autocracy and blind obedience to petty tyrants who were posed as princes enracina in his mentality”, a “perverse and ruined mentality”, writes it of the German people. This vision contributed to the bad reception of the work in Germany.

Shirer allots in particular a “immense influence on the Germans and the continuation of their history” to Martin Luther, “genius higher and complex, passionately anti-semite and antiromain which joined together in its stormy character so much better qualities and worse defects of the German - the roughness, the coarseness, fanaticism, intolerance, violence, but also honesty, simplicity, the provision with the examination of conscience, the burning desire to learn, the taste of the music and poetry, the need to be right with the eyes of God”

The Collapse off the Third Republic

The Collapse off the Third Republic: Year Inquiry into the Fall off France in 1940 ( the Collapse of the Third Republic. Inquire into the fall of France in 1940 ) was published by Simon & Schuster in 1969. The work is devoted to the France last years of the Third Republic and to the causes of the demolished of 1940. Shirer was pilot of certain events which it analyzes, having lived in France of 1925 to 1934 and there having returned regularly until 1940; it also met certain political personalities of the period still in life in its preliminary work with the work.

Shirer sees in the defeat of 1940 the result of serious divisions in the political arena and the company going back to cleavages of the Affaire Dreyfus and worsened by the effects of the Great Depression and the corruption of the French press.

Publications

; Newspapers and memories

• Berlin Diary: The Journal off has Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1941
• My newspaper in Berlin. The newspaper of a foreign correspondent, 1934-1941 , translated by Albert Pascal, Editions of the modern Review, Montreal, 1943,558  p.
• End off has Berlin Diary , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1947,369 p.
• 20th Century Journey: In Memoir off has Life and the Times , Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1976-1990, 3 volumes
• # The Start, 1904-1930 , 1976
• # The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940 , 1984
• # has Native' S Return, 1945-1988 , 1990
• This is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany , foreword of John Keegan, Overlook Near, Woodstock, 1999,462 p.

; Historical works

• Mid-Century Journey: The Western World Through Its Years off Conflict , Farrar, Straus, New York, 1952,310 p.
• The Challenge off Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland in Our Time , Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1955,437  p.
• The Small channel and Fall off the Third Reich: In History off Nazi Germany , Simon & Schuster, New York, 1960: 1245 p.
• Third Reich of the origins to the fall , not allotted translation, Stock, Paris, 1961,2  vol., 1275  p.
• The Small channel and Fall off Adolf Hitler , Random House, New York, 1961
• The Sinking off the Bismarck , Random House, New York, 1962,178 p.
• The Collapse off the Third Republic: Year Inquiry into the Fall off France in 1940 , Simon & Schuster, New York, 1969,1082 p.
• the Fall of IIIe Republic. An investigation into the defeat of 1940 , not allotted translation, Stock, Paris, 1970: 1049  p.
• Gandhi: In Memoir , Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979,255 p.
• Coils and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage off Leo and Sonya Tolstoy , Simon & Schuster, New York, 1994,400 p.

; Novels

• The Traitor , Farrar, Straus, New York, 1950,374 p.
• Stranger, Like Home , Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1954,369 p.
• The Consul' S Wife , Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1956,262 p.

Distinctions

• 1938 : Headliners Club Award

• 1941: Headliners Club Award
• 1946: George Foster Peabody Award
• 1961: National Book Award
• 1961: Sidney Hillman Foundation Award
• 1981 : George Polk Award

Resources

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