William L. Shirer

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William L. Shirer (1961)

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 best known of those independent contemporary witnesses who reported on life in the Third Reich as journalists, diplomats or business people . His most important books, his “Berliner Tagebuch” and the study Rise and Fall of the Third Reich published in 1960 , have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Family and education

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

In 1931 Shirer married the Austrian photographer Theresa Stiberitz in Vienna, with whom he had two daughters, Inga and Linda. The couple divorced in the early 1970s. Shirer married Irina Lugovskaya. The second marriage was childless.

activity

Shirer worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune newspaper from 1925 to 1933 and was stationed in Paris in 1925, before traveling to the Middle East , British India and Europe . From 1926 to 1932 he was head of the European office. Between 1934 and 1940 he lived and worked in Berlin , until 1937 as a correspondent for William Randolph Hearst's Universal News Service .

Then he met Ed Murrow , who was transferred to London in 1937 as director of CBS Europe and hired Shirer as a European reporter and radio reporter for "Columbia Broadcasting Berlin" based in Berlin. They became close friends. Broadcast journalism was still in its infancy when Shirer and colleague and supervisor Ed Murrow set out to broadcast broadcast news not just as headlines, but as immediate news journalism with a format of its own . For the first time ever, there was direct news broadcasts , on site, from different cities. The full potential of the new medium was only just being explored when the Second World War began in 1939 , the radio rose to become a mass medium and was also used for propaganda . The first big report of the two was a report about the annexation of Austria to the German Reich .

However, Shirer experienced the finest moment of his career on June 21, 1940, when he reported directly from a small clearing in the Compiègne forest about the signing of the armistice agreement, which was so humiliating for France. During this time, the conditions for foreign correspondents in the Third Reich became increasingly difficult. Frustrated by the increasing censorship and the poor working conditions, Shirer left Berlin in the fall of 1940. He left Germany before the National Socialists could charge and arrest him for alleged espionage. In 1941 Shirer published his "Berlin Diary". After his death it turned out that he had "vigorously edited" the print version of the "Berlin Diary" compared to the original manuscript, that is, that this original version was decidedly more Nazi-friendly than the printed version.

He joined the Writers' War Board , a private organization founded in 1942 with ties to the White House to coordinate the propaganda activities of American writers and journalists. Later he became a member of the Society to Prevent World War III (German: Society for the prevention of World War III ), which pleaded for harshness against the defeated Germany. In his reports he focused on the ineptitude of the Germans. In 1947 he was fired from CBS.

In 1946 Shirer returned to Germany and took part in the Nuremberg trials as an observer .

In 1947 Shirer returned to the USA; The collaboration and friendship between Murrow and Shirer ended when Shirer left CBS. The sponsor of his show had withdrawn and there was no replacement, which had an impact on Shirer's pay. Shirer claimed Murrow and the broadcaster dumped him after being critical of the Truman Doctrine .

From then on Shirer devoted himself to writing. In 1960 his extensive work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , was published, one of the first comprehensive analyzes of Nazi Germany, which is based on 485 tons of original documents from the various archives of the National Socialist government. In the same year he received the National Book Award in the non-fiction category and the Carey-Thomas Award from the publisher Weekly . The German translation followed in 1961. In 1983 he was awarded the George Polk Award for Journalism.

Shirer died at the age of 89 in Massachusetts General Hospital , where he was admitted with heart problems.

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, memoirs)
  • Gandhi: A Memoir (1979)
  • The Nightmare Years 1930–1940 (20th Century Journey / A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume II, 1984, memoirs)
  • A Native's Return 1945–1988 (20th Century Journey, A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume III; 1990, Memoirs)
  • Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy (1994)

The German translation published in particular:

literature

  • Michael Strobl: Hitler wants peace. The US journalist William L. Shirer vigorously "edited" his famous "Berlin Diary" before it was published in 1941 . In: The time . No. 32 , August 2, 2012, p. 17 ( online ).
  • Martin Herzer:  Foreign Correspondents and Foreign Press Policy in the Third Reich . Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2012,  ISBN 978-3-412-20859-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The NYT writes in 1970, People 1972
  2. ↑ Cf. Michael Strobl: Hitler will Frieden , in: Die Zeit No. 32 (2012), (online, accessed June 25, 2016) .
  3. ^ Steven Casey: The Campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944-1948. LSE Research Online, London 2005, pp. 3, 26, 29 (online) (Original In: History. 90 (297) 2005, pp. 62-92. Blackwell Publishing, “Indeed, in 1944 their main motive for launching a propaganda campaign was to try to put an end to the persistent American habit 'of setting the Nazis apart from the German people. " )
  4. ^ Rosenfeld, Gavriel D .: The Reception of William L. Shirer's the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960-62 . In: Journal of Contemporary History . 29, No. 1, 1995, pp. 95-128. doi : 10.1177 / 002200949402900104 .
  5. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/29/obituaries/william-l-shirer-author-is-dead-at-89.html
  6. ↑ Klaus Epstein: SHIRERS “RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH” in No. 1 of the quarterly issues 1962 on pp. 95–112.
personal data
SURNAME Shirer, William L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shirer, William Lawrence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, historian, and author
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 1993
Place of death Boston