A Native's Return: 1945-1988

20th Century Journey #3

by William L. Shirer

The third in a three-volume series, this edition chronicles the life of noted journalist, historian, and author William Shirer--a witness to the rise of the Third Reich. Here, Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after its defeat, his shocking firing by CBS News, and his final visit to Paris sixty years after he first lived there as a cub reporter in the 1920s. It paints a bittersweet picture of his final decades, friends lost to old age, and a changing world.

More personal than the first two volumes, this final installment takes an unflinching look at the author's own struggles after World War II--and his vindication after the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his most acclaimed work. It also provides intimate details of his often-troubled marriage. This book gives readers a surprising and moving account of the last years of a true historian--and an important witness to history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Lawrence Shirer (1904-1993) was an American war correspondent, historian, and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich--a definitive account of Nazi Germany that has stood the test of time as a scholarly resource for over five decades. Shirer was the first journalist hired for Edward R. Murrow's CBS radio team of journalists covering World War II events worldwide, and later became famous for his radio broadcasts from Berlin.

Shirer's work is gripping for its first-hand immediacy, informed by personal observation, storytelling, and interviews with prominent leaders including Hitler himself. As a member of CBS's news team, he produced a 30-minute broadcast of live reporting from Vienna, Paris, Berlin, London, and Rome. This was later adopted as the CBS World News Roundup, one of the longest-running programs in news broadcasting today.

ABOUT THE SERIES

In this three-volume series, prominent journalist, historian, and author William Shirer tells the story of his life. From his origins in Cedar Rapids in 1904 to his last decades, Shirer paints a surprisingly intimate portrait--and an honest one, refusing to flinch from the personal failures and challenges he experienced alongside his greatest successes.

This autobiography is notable both as a fascinating portrait of a very eventful life and as a historical document--shedding personal light on a broad swath of 20th century history. Readers will find personal anecdotes detailing Shirer's conversations with world leaders, including Hitler himself, as well as other prominent people such as Ernest Hemingway and Isadora Duncan. This series is ideal for readers fascinated by 20th century or World War II history--as well as fans of Shirer's other works.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, World War II, Audiobook, Journalism

484 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and historian. He became known for his broadcasts on CBS from the German capital of Berlin through the first year of World War II.

Shirer first became famous through his account of those years in his Berlin Diary (published in 1941), but his greatest achievement was his 1960 book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, originally published by Simon & Schuster. This book of well over 1000 pages is still in print, and is a detailed examination of the Third Reich filled with historical information from German archives captured at the end of the war, along with impressions Shirer gained during his days as a correspondent in Berlin. Later, in 1969, his work The Collapse of the Third Republic drew on his experience spent living and working in France from 1925 to 1933. This work is filled with historical information about the Battle of France from the secret orders and reports of the French High Command and of the commanding generals of the field. Shirer also used the memoirs, journals, and diaries of the prominent British, Italian, Spanish, and French figures in government, Parliament, the Army, and diplomacy.

Reviews

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third and last book of Shirer's memoirs, 20th Century Journey and covers his life after WWII when he has returned to the United States. I don't usually read biographies since I always feel that I am not getting the whole story, that the author is glossing over or omitting events that are disagreeable to him/her. But, beings a huge fan of Shirer's books on WWII, I thought I would give it a chance. I'm glad I did.

Shirer was what we would now call a liberal and in the days of the "Communist threat" and "Red baiting", he found a US that was different from the one he had left so many years before to become a foreign correspondent and CBS broadcaster. His name soon cropped up in Red Channels, the infamous publication that pointed the finger at public personages who were "sympathetic" to Communism. He suddenly was fired by CBS and blacklisted as were so many reporters, authors, actors, etc., and he could not find a job. He struggled through several years by giving speeches and seminars where he could find them and was having trouble supporting his family. Then he decided that he would write a book about the Third Reich and the rest is history (no pun intended).

This book is full of fascinating vignettes about famous people that he knew and he was honest about his own less than honorable love life which finally ended his 30+ year marriage. The only complaint that I have about this informative book is that it was rather choppy as he jumped back and forth in time and it could have been about 100 pages shorter. Otherwise, it is an in-depth look at the life of a man whose books on WWII Europe during the Second World War are must reads for anyone interested in that tragic time frame.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I focused mainly on the challenges behind the writing and production of his classic ''The Rise and fall of the Third Reich'' which is an absolute 5 star indispensable work on the subject. Many historians have since written complete works on the period, like Richard Evans. They offer voluminous, comprehensive and very competent coverage and analysis of the period, but they remain complementary to the great book by the journalist, the man on the spot who describes very capably and shares his emotions as a professional witness to those historic events of the 20th century in Europe. I am glad that he overcame all the difficulties and left us with his greatest legacy. The book despite its length was well received and captured voluminous sales to this day; it is interesting to note that the most negative reactions came from Germany with the involvement of the West German chancellery. The Germans were trying to forget this period of their nation and any reminder which described in detail the incredible violence and terror of the regime was not welcome. Nazis did not suddenly disappear after the Nuremberg trials and they wanted to erase the past. That is why this work is so important because the tendancy was to bury any recollections of the extremist racial regime and its genocide. And we know that avoiding truth and facts does not lead to permanent behavioral change for an individual and a collectivity. What is the purpose of history after all?

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a number of Shirer's works, including the other two volumes of his three-part memoir. When reading part 1, I felt that Shirer stretched his story into too many books. Part 3 makes me feel the same way, though it is definitely a more worthwhile book the Volume 1.

It covers Shirer's life after WWII, and thus deals with things like his writing and publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer's biggest work. It also covers fascinating topics like his experience being unfairly tarnished during the Communist scare of the 1950s.

The problem is that Shirer spends page after page discussing reviews of his books (and responding to the negative reviews). The fact that this man, in his mid-80s at the time of writing Volume III, still was so bothered by unfair reviews that he felt a need to rectify them decades later, is interesting.

I like Shirer, and have followed his story. For anybody else, moments like this would likely get too boring.

Having read so much of Shirer's younger years in the other memoirs, plus Berlin Diaries, it is poignant when he discusses his declining health and what he knows will be his last visit to Europe.

All in all, Shirer lived a fascinating life, and his work -- both in print and radio -- during and after the war had a profound impact on our understanding of some of the biggest moments in the 20th Century.

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite space of the universe. The limited space and time that we can comprehend are nothing in the incalculable extent and age of inorganic nature. Who can say, then, that the purpose of the universe, if it has a purpose, has been to create man? Who can even say that there are not billions of other planets on which there is some kind of human life, perhaps much further advanced than ours, or at least more sane, meaningful, and peaceful?"

"What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellowmen? In fact, was there not a retrogression here? In my own brief time we vastly multiplied our capacity to kill and destroy. With the advent of the bomber, we not only slaughtered soldiers but also innocent women and children far behind the lines of battle.

"We could see in our own country as late as the 1960s and 1970s how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and coolly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre by bombing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools, and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering—or should one say, cowardly?—consciences were aroused."

" ... In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.

"In such a world what meaning can there be in life, what purpose?"

"As Gertrude Stein lay dying in the July heat of 1946 in Paris she mumbled to someone by her bedside: “What is the answer?” And when there was no answer she said: “Then what is the question?”"

"The gloomy Schopenhauer found that life was merely the passage from being to nothingness."

"Plato thought that heaven, the Elysian Fields, was the reward for all the injustices and unhappiness on Earth."

"George Eliot was equally skeptical. For her, God was unknowable and immortality unthinkable.

"Such, in part, have been the meanderings of my own thoughts as they mixed with those of others and were influenced by them. They will creep in and color, no doubt, this narrative of one life and of the times as the world moved through our momentous twentieth century. That brief whiff of time, as time goes, that has comprised my own span, encompassed more changes, I believe, than the previous thousand years. It has been an interesting experience to have been born in the horse-and-buggy age and to have survived into the nuclear era."

"I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it."

"“Anyone desiring a quiet life,” Trotsky wrote shortly before he was hacked to death in Mexico by agents of Stalin, “has done badly to be born in the Twentieth Century.”"
........

"The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14."

" ... Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. ... "

"President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. ... The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later."

"Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. ... "

"So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. ... "

"The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. ... "

"Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!

"American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.

"But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.

"Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. ... "

The author was called to phone on May 1st, CBS informing him of the news; German announcements came later, but lied at first.

"ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor….

"The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died “a hero’s death” fighting to the last “the frightful danger of Bolshevism.” That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be “solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.”

"Doenitz’s broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler’s fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler’s embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.

"I doubted very much that Hitler had died “a hero’s death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies."
........

So far it's still where End Of Berlin Diary began, and chapter two he is setting off to see the end of the Third Reich, when news about holocaust is just percolating in.

"These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!"

"So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich!

"The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago in this once proud capital.

"It is something to see—here where it ended. And it is indescribable.

"How can you find words to convey the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry, without will or purpose, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day.

"I found out something that first week in Berlin that depressed me, though it did not surprise me. The German people did not regret having started the war, only having lost it. I talked to a number of Germans about that. If only Hitler, they said, had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world had not ganged up on poor Germany—they would have won and been spared their present sufferings. I found no sense of guilt or remorse in Berlin. Nor any resentment against Hitler for having landed them in such a mess. As for the terrible crimes inflicted on the occupied peoples, they seemed indifferent."

" ... In the golden years for Nazism, when Hitler was riding high, we correspondents in Berlin had often called him mad. But he wasn’t really, at least no madder than other totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin, for example. He had been, like the Soviet leader, a cold, calculating, brutal tyrant.

"But in the last year or so, after the disasters in Russia and then in the west had doomed him and his regime, and especially in the final months, Adolf Hitler had degenerated into a wild and often insane man. The long strain of conducting the war, the shock of the defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air or exercise in the various underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent and violent temper tantrums, and, finally, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had left him a physical and mental wreck. When his headquarters in East Prussia were blown up by a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, leader of a small group of military dissidents, he had barely escaped being killed, but he had been hurt. The explosion had not only injured one arm but had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness."

"It was in this state of mind and health that the Nazi dictator made one of the last ....

Merged review:

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite s

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite space of the universe. The limited space and time that we can comprehend are nothing in the incalculable extent and age of inorganic nature. Who can say, then, that the purpose of the universe, if it has a purpose, has been to create man? Who can even say that there are not billions of other planets on which there is some kind of human life, perhaps much further advanced than ours, or at least more sane, meaningful, and peaceful?"

"What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellowmen? In fact, was there not a retrogression here? In my own brief time we vastly multiplied our capacity to kill and destroy. With the advent of the bomber, we not only slaughtered soldiers but also innocent women and children far behind the lines of battle.

"We could see in our own country as late as the 1960s and 1970s how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and coolly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre by bombing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools, and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering—or should one say, cowardly?—consciences were aroused."

" ... In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.

"In such a world what meaning can there be in life, what purpose?"

"As Gertrude Stein lay dying in the July heat of 1946 in Paris she mumbled to someone by her bedside: “What is the answer?” And when there was no answer she said: “Then what is the question?”"

"The gloomy Schopenhauer found that life was merely the passage from being to nothingness."

"Plato thought that heaven, the Elysian Fields, was the reward for all the injustices and unhappiness on Earth."

"George Eliot was equally skeptical. For her, God was unknowable and immortality unthinkable.

"Such, in part, have been the meanderings of my own thoughts as they mixed with those of others and were influenced by them. They will creep in and color, no doubt, this narrative of one life and of the times as the world moved through our momentous twentieth century. That brief whiff of time, as time goes, that has comprised my own span, encompassed more changes, I believe, than the previous thousand years. It has been an interesting experience to have been born in the horse-and-buggy age and to have survived into the nuclear era."

"I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it."

"“Anyone desiring a quiet life,” Trotsky wrote shortly before he was hacked to death in Mexico by agents of Stalin, “has done badly to be born in the Twentieth Century.”"
........

"The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14."

" ... Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. ... "

"President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. ... The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later."

"Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. ... "

"So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. ... "

"The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. ... "

"Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!

"American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.

"But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.

"Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. ... "

The author was called to phone on May 1st, CBS informing him of the news; German announcements came later, but lied at first.

"ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor….

"The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died “a hero’s death” fighting to the last “the frightful danger of Bolshevism.” That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be “solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.”

"Doenitz’s broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler’s fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler’s embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.

"I doubted very much that Hitler had died “a hero’s death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies."
........

So far it's still where End Of Berlin Diary began, and chapter two he is setting off to see the end of the Third Reich, when news about holocaust is just percolating in.

"These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!"

"So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich!

"The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago in this once proud capital.

"It is something to see—here where it ended. And it is indescribable.

"How can you find words to convey the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry, without will or purpose, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day.

"I found out something that first week in Berlin that depressed me, though it did not surprise me. The German people did not regret having started the war, only having lost it. I talked to a number of Germans about that. If only Hitler, they said, had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world had not ganged up on poor Germany—they would have won and been spared their present sufferings. I found no sense of guilt or remorse in Berlin. Nor any resentment against Hitler for having landed them in such a mess. As for the terrible crimes inflicted on the occupied peoples, they seemed indifferent."

" ... In the golden years for Nazism, when Hitler was riding high, we correspondents in Berlin had often called him mad. But he wasn’t really, at least no madder than other totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin, for example. He had been, like the Soviet leader, a cold, calculating, brutal tyrant.

"But in the last year or so, after the disasters in Russia and then in the west had doomed him and his regime, and especially in the final months, Adolf Hitler had degenerated into a wild and often insane man. The long strain of conducting the war, the shock of the defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air or exercise in the various underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent and violent temper tantrums, and, finally, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had left him a physical and mental wreck. When his headquarters in East Prussia were blown up by a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, leader of a small group of military dissidents, he had barely escaped being killed, but he had been hurt. The explosion had not only injured one arm but had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness."

"It was in this state of mind and health that the Nazi dictator made one of the last ....

[Jim Karabin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirer was a giant among journalists; a great writer and a keen observer. Like the other books of his I've read, this brings the 20th century into sharp focus. I'm also a student of all things Murrow, so this book held an added attraction to me.

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite space of the universe. The limited space and time that we can comprehend are nothing in the incalculable extent and age of inorganic nature. Who can say, then, that the purpose of the universe, if it has a purpose, has been to create man? Who can even say that there are not billions of other planets on which there is some kind of human life, perhaps much further advanced than ours, or at least more sane, meaningful, and peaceful?"

"What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellowmen? In fact, was there not a retrogression here? In my own brief time we vastly multiplied our capacity to kill and destroy. With the advent of the bomber, we not only slaughtered soldiers but also innocent women and children far behind the lines of battle.

"We could see in our own country as late as the 1960s and 1970s how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and coolly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre by bombing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools, and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering—or should one say, cowardly?—consciences were aroused."

" ... In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.

"In such a world what meaning can there be in life, what purpose?"

"As Gertrude Stein lay dying in the July heat of 1946 in Paris she mumbled to someone by her bedside: “What is the answer?” And when there was no answer she said: “Then what is the question?”"

"The gloomy Schopenhauer found that life was merely the passage from being to nothingness."

"Plato thought that heaven, the Elysian Fields, was the reward for all the injustices and unhappiness on Earth."

"George Eliot was equally skeptical. For her, God was unknowable and immortality unthinkable.

"Such, in part, have been the meanderings of my own thoughts as they mixed with those of others and were influenced by them. They will creep in and color, no doubt, this narrative of one life and of the times as the world moved through our momentous twentieth century. That brief whiff of time, as time goes, that has comprised my own span, encompassed more changes, I believe, than the previous thousand years. It has been an interesting experience to have been born in the horse-and-buggy age and to have survived into the nuclear era."

"I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it."

"“Anyone desiring a quiet life,” Trotsky wrote shortly before he was hacked to death in Mexico by agents of Stalin, “has done badly to be born in the Twentieth Century.”"
........

"The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14."

" ... Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. ... "

"President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. ... The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later."

"Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. ... "

"So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. ... "

"The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. ... "

"Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!

"American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.

"But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.

"Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. ... "

The author was called to phone on May 1st, CBS informing him of the news; German announcements came later, but lied at first.

"ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor….

"The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died “a hero’s death” fighting to the last “the frightful danger of Bolshevism.” That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be “solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.”

"Doenitz’s broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler’s fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler’s embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.

"I doubted very much that Hitler had died “a hero’s death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies."
........

So far it's still where End Of Berlin Diary began, and chapter two he is setting off to see the end of the Third Reich, when news about holocaust is just percolating in.

"These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!"

"So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich!

"The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago in this once proud capital.

"It is something to see—here where it ended. And it is indescribable.

"How can you find words to convey the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry, without will or purpose, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day.

"I found out something that first week in Berlin that depressed me, though it did not surprise me. The German people did not regret having started the war, only having lost it. I talked to a number of Germans about that. If only Hitler, they said, had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world had not ganged up on poor Germany—they would have won and been spared their present sufferings. I found no sense of guilt or remorse in Berlin. Nor any resentment against Hitler for having landed them in such a mess. As for the terrible crimes inflicted on the occupied peoples, they seemed indifferent."

" ... In the golden years for Nazism, when Hitler was riding high, we correspondents in Berlin had often called him mad. But he wasn’t really, at least no madder than other totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin, for example. He had been, like the Soviet leader, a cold, calculating, brutal tyrant.

"But in the last year or so, after the disasters in Russia and then in the west had doomed him and his regime, and especially in the final months, Adolf Hitler had degenerated into a wild and often insane man. The long strain of conducting the war, the shock of the defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air or exercise in the various underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent and violent temper tantrums, and, finally, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had left him a physical and mental wreck. When his headquarters in East Prussia were blown up by a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, leader of a small group of military dissidents, he had barely escaped being killed, but he had been hurt. The explosion had not only injured one arm but had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness."

"It was in this state of mind and health that the Nazi dictator made one of the last ....

Merged review:

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite s

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite space of the universe. The limited space and time that we can comprehend are nothing in the incalculable extent and age of inorganic nature. Who can say, then, that the purpose of the universe, if it has a purpose, has been to create man? Who can even say that there are not billions of other planets on which there is some kind of human life, perhaps much further advanced than ours, or at least more sane, meaningful, and peaceful?"

"What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellowmen? In fact, was there not a retrogression here? In my own brief time we vastly multiplied our capacity to kill and destroy. With the advent of the bomber, we not only slaughtered soldiers but also innocent women and children far behind the lines of battle.

"We could see in our own country as late as the 1960s and 1970s how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and coolly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre by bombing of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools, and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering—or should one say, cowardly?—consciences were aroused."

" ... In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.

"In such a world what meaning can there be in life, what purpose?"

"As Gertrude Stein lay dying in the July heat of 1946 in Paris she mumbled to someone by her bedside: “What is the answer?” And when there was no answer she said: “Then what is the question?”"

"The gloomy Schopenhauer found that life was merely the passage from being to nothingness."

"Plato thought that heaven, the Elysian Fields, was the reward for all the injustices and unhappiness on Earth."

"George Eliot was equally skeptical. For her, God was unknowable and immortality unthinkable.

"Such, in part, have been the meanderings of my own thoughts as they mixed with those of others and were influenced by them. They will creep in and color, no doubt, this narrative of one life and of the times as the world moved through our momentous twentieth century. That brief whiff of time, as time goes, that has comprised my own span, encompassed more changes, I believe, than the previous thousand years. It has been an interesting experience to have been born in the horse-and-buggy age and to have survived into the nuclear era."

"I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it."

"“Anyone desiring a quiet life,” Trotsky wrote shortly before he was hacked to death in Mexico by agents of Stalin, “has done badly to be born in the Twentieth Century.”"
........

"The war was over. Germany, which had started it on the first day of September 1939, had surrendered unconditionally on May 7. Japan had given up on August 14."

" ... Monday, August 6? That day we had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a large city in Japan of which I had not previously heard, just as I had never heard before of an atom bomb. ... "

"President Truman had taken to the air to tell us about it. The single bomb over Hiroshima, he said, had the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. ... The additional destructiveness of radioactive fallout was not mentioned. Only a handful of insiders, the little band of American scientific geniuses who in great secrecy had built the bomb in the sands of New Mexico, knew that radioactive fallout might in the end be the most frightful consequence of all. This would dawn on the rest of us later."

"Somehow we felt, though, that the planet would never be the same again. The explosion of the two American atom bombs over Japan had ended one age for mankind. ... "

"So from New York I set off for San Francisco on April 20, 1945, with high hopes. ... "

"The conference of fifty nations opened officially on April 25, 1945, in the resplendent opera house, built as a war memorial. ... "

"Sunday, April 29. A weekend for you!

"American troops have entered Munich and Milan, birthplaces, respectively, of Nazism and Fascism. The British Eighth Army has liberated Venice. Nine-tenths of Berlin is now in Russian hands.

"But the greatest news of all comes from Milan.

"Benito Mussolini, the swaggering little sawdust Caesar, is dead. He was executed by Italian patriots at four twenty P.M. yesterday in a little mountain village near Como. ... "

The author was called to phone on May 1st, CBS informing him of the news; German announcements came later, but lied at first.

"ANNOUNCER: Achtung! Achtung! The German Broadcasting Company has a serious, important message for the German people. It is reported from the Führer’s headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery. On April 30 the Führer appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz his successor….

"The admiral, a dour, thin-faced old submarine commander, came on the air. Hitler, he said, had died “a hero’s death” fighting to the last “the frightful danger of Bolshevism.” That struggle, he went on, would continue. Against the British and Americans only a defensive war would be fought, and if they continued to drive into Germany they would be “solely responsible for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.”

"Doenitz’s broadcast, I thought, must have been written by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Would anyone at this late date, even Russian-hating diehard Americans, fall for the old Nazi line about Hitler’s fighting against Bolshevism? It was Hitler’s embrace of Bolshevism in the pact with Stalin in August 1939 that had enabled the Nazi dictator to launch the war.

"I doubted very much that Hitler had died “a hero’s death, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” I was sure he had killed himself to avoid being captured by the Russians. But the lie would be necessary to perpetuate the Hitler myth, which was based on so many lies."
........

So far it's still where End Of Berlin Diary began, and chapter two he is setting off to see the end of the Third Reich, when news about holocaust is just percolating in.

"These soldiers of Hitler had been so cocky and confident when I accompanied them through Poland in 1939 and Holland, Belgium, and France that spring of 1940. But now!"

"So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich!

"The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago in this once proud capital.

"It is something to see—here where it ended. And it is indescribable.

"How can you find words to convey the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry, without will or purpose, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day.

"I found out something that first week in Berlin that depressed me, though it did not surprise me. The German people did not regret having started the war, only having lost it. I talked to a number of Germans about that. If only Hitler, they said, had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world had not ganged up on poor Germany—they would have won and been spared their present sufferings. I found no sense of guilt or remorse in Berlin. Nor any resentment against Hitler for having landed them in such a mess. As for the terrible crimes inflicted on the occupied peoples, they seemed indifferent."

" ... In the golden years for Nazism, when Hitler was riding high, we correspondents in Berlin had often called him mad. But he wasn’t really, at least no madder than other totalitarian dictators, Josef Stalin, for example. He had been, like the Soviet leader, a cold, calculating, brutal tyrant.

"But in the last year or so, after the disasters in Russia and then in the west had doomed him and his regime, and especially in the final months, Adolf Hitler had degenerated into a wild and often insane man. The long strain of conducting the war, the shock of the defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air or exercise in the various underground headquarters bunkers that he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent and violent temper tantrums, and, finally, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had left him a physical and mental wreck. When his headquarters in East Prussia were blown up by a bomb planted by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, leader of a small group of military dissidents, he had barely escaped being killed, but he had been hurt. The explosion had not only injured one arm but had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness."

"It was in this state of mind and health that the Nazi dictator made one of the last ....

Merged review:

Shirer, writing of his settling down to life in Berkshires after his having said farewell to Europe, talks of his thoughts of hereafter. His reference to Gandhi and his views of attempts of his Christian friends to convert him are interesting, and Shirer points out that Thomas Jefferson had views very similar to those of Gandhi.

His final words on the topic about being unable to believe, as a result of having been to India, that everyone not Christian would go to hell, are reassuring about his visit to India having been not in vain, after all.
........

At the end of the chapter about his last visit to Germany where he's been very realistic about Germans, the author exposes a subconscious racism helped on by ignorance - he calls the Swastik 'primitive'. This is, of course, in context of nazis.

Racist, because despite acquaintance with India and Germany both, he fails to see which is the primitive culture, the primitive people, and while this might have to do with his own part German ancestry too - British use the epithet 'hun' for Germans - he also fails to notice that Swastik is of India and that India is far too ancient a culture with treasures of knowledge unfathomable for West.

Swastik is a deeply rooted cultural symbol from ancient India, still used everywhere on everyday and permanent basis, and since Shirer did visit India and says he was fascinated, he might be expected to have noticed it being used. Or did he assume India was copying Germany?

No, it could only be ignorance of India despite the visit, and lack of insight into the fact of Hitler having borrowed the symbol from India before he used it in ways and for purposes which the highly occult symbol is not permitted for - which brought on the horrors and defeat for the users.

Swastik or Swastika is a Sanskrit word and it literally means 'symbol of well being, and is used on or before entrances of homes, or other buildings. It is not to be twisted the way nazis did, not to be used for perpetrating horrors, and not in the colours they used, red and black, which signify worse than death.

In India traditional drawing of Swastik before entrances of homes can be seen on floors in morning, in white. It's about welcoming all that's auspicious, and that includes Gods and Goddesses.
............

"This is the third and last volume recounting one man’s journey through the twentieth century, a time that saw more changes on the planet than in the previous nineteen hundred years.

"It saw more violence too, more bloodshed, bigger, more devastating wars."

Third, depends on how he counts it. His most famous one apart, I recall having read The Start: Early Years, Berlin Diary, Nightmare Years, and End of Berlin Diary.

"My father, who had a college and law-school education, and was a liberal, tolerant man—not an old fogey at all and only forty-two when he died—thought motor cars, of which there were only a few thousand in the whole land, were a menace and should be barred from the city streets and the country roads because they endangered pedestrians and frightened horses.

"He also took a dim view of airplanes, of which there were only a handful—all tiny biplanes—in the whole country. The idea of travel by air, especially across continents and oceans at close to the speed of sound or beyond it, he would have dismissed as a pipe dream.

"“If God had intended us to fly,” he told me after we saw our first planes in a primitive demonstration of a dozen sputtering little biplanes over Grant Park in Chicago on September 27, 1910, “He would have given us wings. Let’s leave flying to the birds.”"
.......

"Montaigne thought man was simply incapable of attaining truth because he “was the servant of customs, prejudices, self-interest and fanaticism. …The bane of man is the illusion that he has the certainty of his knowledge.”

"Isadora Duncan, who lived such a full and tragic life, used to talk to me about her memoirs while she was writing them in Paris. “How can we write the truth about ourselves?” she would ask. “Do we even know it?” Emily Dickinson thought that “truth is so rare, it’s delightful to tell it.” Delightful maybe, but difficult."

"Einstein, for whom the conception of time was so important in his theory of relativity, and in mathematics and physics generally, thought it was impossible to sort it out. “The separation between past, present and future,” he said, “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.”"

"Only rarely have I paused amid the trivia of living, which makes up so much of our existence, and out of which comes the setbacks, the triumphs, the sorrows, and the rare moments of happiness, to consider how puny and unimportant we all are, how puny, in fact, is our planet. Even the solar system, of which the Earth is a negligible part, is but a dot in the infinite s

[Len Knighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a number of William Shirer's books, all of them listed on my READ book list. As I mentioned in one of my notes from this book, Shirer's book SINK THE BISMARCK, written for Random House's Book of the Month Club targeting young readers, was my favorite book in the World Landmark series. He also wrote a similar version of THE RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER which I also enjoyed, if that is the proper word. I also read the two epic books he described in detail in this book.
It is my opinion that William Shirer was a much better writer of history than of his own life. We probably learn more about his life than we expected. Indeed, the self-portrait Shirer paints is hardly flattering. I was especially distressed at his attitude toward his family during the years he spent writing on the Third Reich. He wandered away from the traditional duties of a husband and father and while his book was a success, he damaged his relationships irrevocably.
Shirer also strays from his life story to expound on some moments, issues, and/or personalities that were important during the half century he covered world events via print or radio. What his observations tell us, when put into the context of the second and third decades of the 21st Century is that, as is written in the Old Test6ament book of Ecclesiastes, "there is nothing new under the sun."
I'm not sure I agree with all of Shirer's conclusions. He has next to nothing good to say about Richard Nixon, which is not at all surprising; few people do. But Nixon, after leaving office in disgrace, was still considered by many in Washington and members of the media to be an authority on foreign policy.
Shirer called Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, "scheming" but did not elaborate.
One of the weaknesses of this book, (and what brought its rating down to three stars), is a characteristic of two books I read recently, both written by celebrities: actress Debbie Reynolds, and football player Tim Tebow. In my reviews of their books, I wrote of the meticulous and overbearing details they included of all their movies (Reynolds) and college football games (Tebow). The readers of this book will be "treated" to an extensive critique of the reviews of Shirer's books on the Third Reich and the Third Republic. Thus, instead of giving this book four stars waning, I rate the book

Three stars waxing

[Alex Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read (listened) to this last year and am just getting around to a review.

Shirer, in my opinion, is one of the greatest chroniclers of the 20th Century.

I waited in anticipation for the audio version of this book. The narration by Grover Gardner was excellent but the book itself? Not exactly a disappointment, but not the writer at his best.

If you’ve read much Shirer, his best writing, in its more vital form can be found elsewhere in the oeuvre of this literary giant and chronicler of most of the historical pivot points of the middle third of the 20th Century. This man seems to have met and mingled with everyone who was anyone in an historically intense period in American and European history .

The recounting of his declining years, the incessant bickering over criticism, the revealing of a giant ego seemed, at least to me, less worthy of the man and not a little depressing.

After experiencing and writing about so many astounding and historically important events, the detail and minutiae of the author’s personal aftermath is anticlimactic at best, tedious and boring at worst.

But truth is true...or is it?

Should you read it? Probably not, if you’ve read everything else the great man has written.

If you haven’t, start with something else: Vol. 1 of this series, The Rise and Fall or Berlin Diary and then sit back and be gobsmacked by history.

[Clair Keizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

William L. Shirer's memoirs take a turn in the third and final volume of 20th Century Journey: A Native's Return. Returning the US, after a remarkable career overseas in newspaper and radio journalism, Shirer's career falters, thanks to paranoia driven by a renewed red scare at home. He turns to writing, as had been his desire from an early age. He meets success, but it's a slog as he devotes extensive time to research, resulting in the masterpiece Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Other books follow and each proves challenging and time consuming, but the results further Shirer's legacy as a remarkable journalist and historian. A Native's Return takes on a more personal path than his earlier volumes. Shirer bares his soul, shedding light on his failed marriage, his children, life with forced retirement, friendships and ultimately his life's philosophy, accentuated by what he sees as ignorance and failure of President Reagan and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and the virtual denial by the German populace of their role in the rise of Nazism. One senses however, that as Shirer nears the end of his life, he finds peace in who is and the contributions he made in the 20th century.

[Peter Kiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely more boring than volume 2, but not as insufferable as the first. Shirer is a good writer and draws you in with his prose, but good grief, his philosphical meanderings are shallow and pathetic. Oh wow, problem of evil, no Christian has ever contemplated that one. And outright saying that there's nothing unique or philsophically deep about Christianity? How ignorant can you be? It's clear that Shirer is in love with himself as an intellectual, and is actually not the profound man he sees himself to be unfortunately. That doesn't mean he isn't gifted, but his gifts lie elsewhere. It was also heartbreaking to hear about his repeated affairs. He is truly a villain for what he's done to his wife, yet he never seemed to grasp the severity of his adulteries. He almost seemed surprised that his marriage was strained because of them. This is not a man who has ever truly contemplated his own sinfulness, and thus it makes for an imbalanced series of memoirs. I love his writing on history, his life experiences, his narrative approach to his life and teaching, but wow, I am bummed by his actions.

[Alifa Saadya]

This is the third and final volume of the trilogy autobiography of William L. Shirer. I am glad I read it, although I found it rather wordy. I learned some surprising things. I did not know, for example, that Shirer had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era; it explains his antipathy towards Richard Nixon and his immense satisfaction at Pres. Nixon's resignation. One set of comments that gave me a smile were his remarks on how television was leading to a loss of the ability of having a good conversation and social interaction. I can only imagine what he would have had to say about the internet.
Basically, I would recommend this book for someone who has an intense interest in the Twentieth century, the development of television news, the publishing industry, and history. A good read, even if tedious at times.

[John Albers · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Shirer is a good writer, and his book Berlin Diary is considered one of the best primary sources concerning the events covering the Munich agreement, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the beginning of World War II. His Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Collapse of the Third Republic are informative and very readable. A Native's Return is also readable, an interesting memoir covering the end of the second World War, his blacklisting during the McCarthy era, the writing of Rise and Fall of the Reich and the Collapse of the Third Republic are interesting. But Shirer, who was getting up in years, spends too much time on attacking those who criticized his work. Shirer was a good writer, but he comes off as rather thin skinned when it comes to critical reactions.

[Jerome Eisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary - Greatest Historian of the 20th Century

Today, Academia sees Evans as the ultimate historian of the 3rd Reich, but as so often in academia: this is just "current fashion." Evans makes too many mistakes to enumerate here, while Shirer WAS THERE: and combines the facts with an understanding of the feelings of the humans who made the history happen. Cold academic facts leave us without UNDERSTANDING the WHY of history. Shirer makes us think....makes us better people. An extraordinary life.

[Lisa Holyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will give him that he has talent at writing... Despite being long winded. His tales of the past are interesting and the fact that he was there while Hitler was rising to power and the beginning of WW2 gives him an intimate insight to what was going on. But as a person, I found him to be a pompous named dropped who was an ass for cheating on his wife with various women and couldn't figure out why he shouldn't be able to have his cake and eat it too.

[Tom Griggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “The Nightmare Years” are two of the better books I’ve read, so expectations were high. “A Native’s Return” is a very good book, but doesn’t measure up to the high bar set by the first two. William Shirer lived one of the more interesting lives around, and I would give anything for the opportunity to have lunch with him if he were still around.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read all three!

All three of William Shirer's autobiographies read like good fiction, but it's all about the accounts of history wrirren by a person who lived through it. Loved all three volumes, but don't take my word for it. Read it for all three volumes for yourself and decide.

[RYD · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Shirer was one of the giants of 20th century journalism, and it is a shame that he isn't more celebrated today.

[SheriC]

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1...

[Michael F. Lessens · Rating 5 out of 5]

New perspective on America

I was pleasantly surprised at how Schirer gave me a view of American history unlike any I have read before. This book was a pleasure to read.

[Leo W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far less compelling than the previous two volumes, as Shirer was no longer professionally engaged with the events of the period.

[George Hodgson]

A really good read. He gives a great perspective on the 20th century from the vantage point of someone who paid attention and wrote about it.