Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

by William L. Shirer

see von Kahr is on the list, the man who balked Hitler’s Beer House Putsch in 1923. Hitler has thus taken his personal revenge.

One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.

I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.

In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high. Man’s—or at least the German’s—critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself.

Rust is not without ability and is completely Nazifying the schools. This includes new Nazi textbooks falsifying history—sometimes ludicrously.

Hitler, I learn, acted with lightning speed, apparently on the inspiration that now was the time—if ever—to act and get by with it, and it looks as though he will.

For a while they stormed the news-stands to buy the Baseler Nachrichten, a Swiss German-language paper, which sold more copies in Germany than it did in Switzerland. But that paper has now been banned.

But I began to realize, what I should have known, that I was getting nowhere, that no one, and Bade least of all, had the power or the decency ever to correct a piece of Nazi propaganda once it had been launched, regardless of how big the lie.