William L. Shirer

William Lawrence Shirer ( born February 23, 1904 in Chicago, † December 28, 1993 in Boston ) was an American historian, journalist and publicist. He is considered the most famous of those independent witnesses who reported as journalists, diplomats or businessmen about life in the Third Reich. His most important books, his " Berlin Diary " and the 1960 study published in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Family and Education

William Lawrence Shirer was born the son of Seward Smith Shirer and Bessie Tanner. He had a younger brother and an older sister. The father was district attorney in Chicago and died in 1913 as a result of appendicitis at a peritonitis. The mother went with her all minor children back to her family to Cedar Rapids in Iowa, where Shirer the Washington High School and then attended the Coe College. Already during his school and college days reported the boy for the student newspaper of the College and the sports side of the Cedar Rapids Republican.

1931 married Shirer in Vienna, the Austrian photographer Theresa Stiberitz, with whom he had two daughters, Inga and Linda. In 1961, the couple divorced, and Shirer married Irina Lugovskaya. The second marriage remained childless.

Activity

Shirer worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1933 and 1925, initially stationed in Paris, to then travel to the Middle East, British India and Europe. From 1926 to 1932 he was head of European offices. Lived between 1934 and 1940 and worked in Berlin until 1937 as a correspondent for the news agency Universal News Service of William Randolph Hearst.

Then he met Ed Murrow, who became displaced in 1937 as director of CBS Europe after London and Shirer committed as Europe Rapporteur and radio reporter for the " Columbia Broadcasting Berlin" in Berlin. They became close friends. The broadcast journalism was still in its infancy, when Shirer and his colleague and boss Ed Murrow made ​​from sending broadcast messages not only as headlines, but as immediate news journalism with a format very own. The first time ever there was a direct message transfers, on-site, from different cities. The full potential of the new medium has just been researched as 1939, the Second World War began, the radio ascended to the mass media and has been exploited by the propaganda. The first major report of the two was a report on the annexation of Austria to the German Reich.

The great moment of his career experienced Shirer but on 21 June 1940, when he reported a small clearing in the forest of Compiègne from directly above the so humiliating for France signing of the ceasefire agreement. During this time, the conditions for foreign correspondents in the Third Reich were more difficult. Frustrated by the increasing censorship and the poor working conditions Shirer traveled in autumn 1940 from Berlin. He left Germany before the Nazis were able to charge him for alleged espionage and settle.

In 1946, Shirer returned to Germany and took part as observers in the Nuremberg trials.

In 1947 he Shirer back to the U.S.; Cooperation and friendship of Murrow and Shirer were terminated by the resignation Shirer at CBS. The sponsor of his mission had retired, there was not a replacement, what impact it has had on the payment Shirer. Shirer claimed Murrow and the transmitter would have dropped him after he had been critical of the Truman Doctrine.

From then on devoted Shirer writing activities. In 1960 he published his extensive work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one of the first comprehensive analyzes of Nazi Germany, based on 485 tons of original documents from the various archives of the Government of National Socialists. For this he received in the same year the National Book Award in the nonfiction category. The German translation was followed by 1961. 1983 he was awarded the George Polk Award for journalism.

Shirer died at the age of 89 years at the Boston Hospital of heart failure.

Works

  • Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (1941 )
  • End of a Berlin Diary (1947 )
  • The Traitor (1950, novel)
  • Mid Century Journey ( 1952)
  • Stranger Come Home (1954, novel)
  • The Challenge of Scandinavia (1955 )
  • The Consul 's Wife (1956, novel)
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960 )
  • The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1961 )
  • The Sinking of the Bismarck ( 1962)
  • The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969)
  • The Start 1904-1930 (20th Century Journey / A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume I, 1976, memoir )
  • Gandhi: A Memoir (1979 )
  • The Nightmare Years 1930-1940 (20th Century Journey / A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume II, 1984, memoir )
  • A Native 's Return 1945-1988 (20th Century Journey, A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume III, 1990, memoir )
  • Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy (1994 )

In German translation appeared in particular:

  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 1961, ISBN 3-933366-61-5
  • The collapse of France - The Rise and Fall of the Third Republic in 1970, ISBN 3-453-48040-6
  • The decade of disaster. 1984, ISBN 3-502-16677-3
  • Berlin Diary - records from 1934 to 1941. 1991, ISBN 3-379-01514-8
  • Berlin Diary - The end of 1944-1945. 1994, ISBN 3-378-00559-9
  • Clemens Vollnhals (ed.): This is Berlin. Radio reports from Germany 1939-1940. 2001, ISBN 3-378-01041- X
Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Near East British Raj Edward R. Murrow George Polk Awards Integrated Authority File
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