The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

The greatest damage inflicted by the Anglo–American air forces, as Goebbels makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale of the German people. In the first war years they had been buoyed up, as this writer remembers, by the lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing had done to the enemy, especially to the British. They were sure it would help bring the war to an early—and victorious—end. Now, in 1943, they themselves began to bear the full brunt of air warfare far more devastating than any the Luftwaffe had dealt to others, even to the populace of London in 1940–41. The German people endured it as bravely and as stoically as the British people had done. But after four years of war it was all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and with their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.