Word: shirer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Volume II has no such liability. Few Americans were on the scene as the Third Reich took form. Shirer was in Berlin, and accompanied Hitler and his entourage to Paris when the Petain government surrendered in 1940. At the start he was a newspaperman; Edward R. Murrow hired him away in 1937 to be the other half of CBS Radio's staff in Europe. Shirer's journalistic credentials eventually brought him invitations to the bizarre Nazi Bierabends (get-togethers over beer) organized for the press by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. Hermann Göring would circulate...
...Shirer was close enough to Hitler to feel the Nazi leader's messianic personal force. Even in the early '30s, his memoir makes clear, he was not tempted to underrate the Führer. But the collection of crackbrains and third-raters with which Hitler surrounded himself was absurd enough, by Shirer's account, to suggest a reason for the long years before the Nazis were taken seriously in England...
...Shirer's autobiographical narrative threads in and out of the chaos in a remarkable manner. Some of the recollections are simply good journalistic yarns, such as the one about flying with Göring and Aviator Charles Lindbergh in what was claimed to be the world's largest aircraft, a cumbersome, eight-engine passenger plane recently built for Lufthansa. "Göring turned over the controls to Lindbergh somewhere above the Wannsee, and we were treated to some fancy rolls, steep banks and other maneuvers for which the Goliath machine was not designed. I thought...
...beginning of actual fighting did catch the network's attention, but it did not end the correspondents' problems with bosses who were entertainment biggies, not newsmen. No one had ever covered a war by radio, but it was clear to Shirer and Murrow that the way to do it was to record the sounds of bombs and guns-and interviews with combatants when these could be arranged-and then to weave these bits into a nightly broadcast. The Germans, proud of their blitzkrieg success in the early months of the war, offered mobile recording facilities. CBS refused, Shirer...
During the war's early stages, his battles with the censors were tolerable wrangles. As the momentum of Hitler's first successes slackened, censorship tightened and Shirer's struggles to tell something of the truth in his broadcasts became more and more acrimonious and futile ("You can't call Germany aggressive and militaristic," he was told; "please remember that it was Poland which attacked us first"). By autumn of 1940, he was giving his best material to his diary-his sighting, for instance, of Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov on his way to meet a German...