William L. Shirer

Author profile

born

February 23, 1904 in Chicago, Illinois, The United States

died

December 28, 1993

gender

male

genre

History, Nonfiction, Memoirs

About this author

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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 d...more

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Books by William L. Shirer

Average rating: 4.11 · 11,315 ratings · 678 reviews · 21 distinct works

	The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany 4.12 avg rating — 10,031 ratings — published 1959 — 64 editions	My rating:
	Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41 by William L. Shirer, Gordon Alexander Craig (Foreword by) 4.21 avg rating — 565 ratings — published 1941 — 23 editions	My rating:
	The Nightmare Years 1930-40 4.11 avg rating — 170 ratings — published 1984 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler 3.79 avg rating — 151 ratings — 8 editions	My rating:
	The Collapse of the Third Republic 3.93 avg rating — 85 ratings — published 1969 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Gandhi: A Memoir 3.81 avg rating — 85 ratings — published 1979 — 9 editions	My rating:
	The Sinking of the Bismarck: The Deadly Hunt 4.10 avg rating — 79 ratings — published 1962 — 10 editions	My rating:
	This Is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany 1938-40 by William L. Shirer, John Keegan (Introduction), Inga Shirer Dean (Preface by) 4.24 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2001 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy 3.75 avg rating — 28 ratings — published 1994 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Start (20th Century Journey, #1) 3.96 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 1976 — 5 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by William L. Shirer

“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. ”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

5 people liked it

“Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

tags: conquest , history , hitler , third-reich , war , weapons

2 people liked it

“In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

tags: nuclear-war , nuclear-weapons , war , weaponry

1 person liked it

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William L. Shirer

Author profile

combine editionsBooks by William L. Shirer

Quotes by William L. Shirer

Topics Mentioning This Author

combine editions
Books by William L. Shirer