The Nightmare Years Quotes

“Goebbels was unbelievably ignorant of the world outside Germany. He appeared to know absolutely nothing of the history, the literature and the people of any foreign land. He understood no modern foreign language. His ideas of America, for instance, were childish. This was a weakness shared by all the Nazi bigwigs, beginning with Hitler, and it began to occur to me that it might have ominous consequences for the Third Reich, and unfortunately, for much of the rest of the world. There is nothing more dangerous in the shaping of foreign policy than ignorance - of foreign lands and people.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years: 1930-40

“All of us in the West, our political leaders and our newspapers above all, had underestimated Adolf Hitler and his domination of this land and its people. His ideas might seem half-baked and often evil - to me they did. But the unpleasant fact was not only that he believed in them, fanatically, but that he was persuading the German people to believe in them. He might seem like a demagogue... but his oratory, his drive, his zeal, his iron will and the power of his personality were having an immense impact on the citizens of this country. He was convincing them that the new Germany...under his leadership, was great, was strong, and had a manifest destiny ... I heard no mention...of the loss of personal freedom and of other democratic rights. Apparently this was not much of a sacrifice. They couldn't have cared less. They had committed themselves to Adolf Hitler and his barbarian dictatorship.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years: 1930-40

“Who were these leaders? What was the strength of the storm troops they were throwing into the streets? And what exactly were they up to? I worked long hours those first weeks in Paris to try to find out. It was not easy. Even the government and the police, as the rioting grew day after day, seemed to be ignorant and confused about the forces opposing them. The origins of these forces went back much farther than I had suspected. As early as 1926, when the franc had fallen to new lows and the government was facing bankruptcy, Ernest Mercier, the electricity magnate, had founded an antiparliamentarian movement called Redressement Français (French Resurgence). Its message was that a parliament of politicians was incompetent to handle the affairs of state in the complicated postwar world, where the intricacies of national and international business and finance called for specialized knowledge. It wanted a parliament and government of “technicians” who knew how modern capitalist society functioned, and it assured the country that the great business and financial enterprises could furnish these trained men. In other words, it wanted its own men to control directly what up to now they controlled only indirectly. Mercier saw in Mussolini’s corporate state a form in which his aims could be realized. Gradually he built up a following among his fellow magnates. Together they dispensed millions propagating their ideas.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940: Twentieth Century Journey Vol. II

“Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years: 1930-40

“a former Norwegian army officer and”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940: Twentieth Century Journey Vol. II

“At last, man had unlocked the terrible force of the tiny atom. Overnight this hot summer we had entered a new age, leaving behind the old one that had lasted since the emergence of man on this earth. We had found a weapon that could blow up our world.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“It hit the Germans on a two-hundred-mile front in front of Moscow on the morning of December 6, drove them back with heavy losses, and doomed their chances of knocking Russia out of the war.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“like myself, it had grown up a bit. Surely it had now shed much of that shallowness, superficiality, mindlessness, and provincialism of the 1920s, with its Prohibition, its mad rush for a buck, its bloodless Coolidge in the White House, its isolationism, its Babbitty culture dominated by the Rotary and the Chambers of Commerce.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Many had hoped the League of Nations would, at last, provide it. But it had not. No nation would give up an iota of its selfish sovereignty for the common good. Perhaps no nation ever would.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Even for the great mass of Germans who supported Hitler, who were now basking in his conquest of most of Europe, I felt a sort of sorrow. They did not seem to realize what the poison of Nazism was doing to them.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Though God knows I was used to Goebbels’ lies by this time, I was depressed at the thought that the gullible Germans would believe them.132”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“At last, after so many years of stunning successes, the Nazi dictator had met failure. The invasion of Britain, which Hitler had been sure would end the victorious war, was called off—indefinitely. The war would go on. For a month, in order to keep up the pressure on the British, a pretense would be made that the invasion might still be launched that autumn.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“It was also, I thought, one of his best, one of his cleverest, very eloquent and as usual full of deceit.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Through my binoculars I observed his face. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else… a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“As with Austria, which he felt had rejected him as a youth, and then Czechoslovakia, whose people he hated, the messianic Nazi dictator was again taking revenge—revenge this time for the German defeat that had been sealed in this very clearing in 1918.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“As he launched into his speech, de Gaulle remembered later: “I felt in myself the termination of a life, one which I had led within the framework of a solid France and an indivisible army. At 49 I plunged into an adventure, like a man whom destiny was casting off from all previous connections.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“wanted to rush up and say: “But Mr. President, you are dealing with gangsters, with Hitler and Goring! You think they are capable of reason, goodwill and trust?”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“How carefree we felt! How young! They were the last days of peace and quiet, as it turned out, we would know for seven long years—until the three of us had slipped into middle age and gone through the wear and tear of constant threats of war, one after another, and in the end, like hundreds of millions of others, of war itself, this time more terrible in its horrors than any other in the life of the planet.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Despite a personal frustration my life and work would go on. But for many Austrians this night’s happenings meant the end. In a concentration camp, a prison. Or the ruin of a career or business. For the country’s two hundred thousand Jews it meant worse.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“For several minutes I stood there in the chilly night, hating to admit defeat.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“In his Alpine mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden on February 13, Hitler, in a scene probably unique in modern European history, had rudely threatened and badgered Schuschnigg to turn over Austria to the Nazis or face invasion of the German army.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“the young in Germany were being poisoned by Nazi indoctrination, their immature minds stuffed with the most awful nonsense, and they were being dulled by regimentation.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“In retrospect I see that the Nazi dictator’s successful gamble brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than I could possibly realize at the time. At home, as the vote in the referendum showed, it fortified his popularity and his power, raising them to heights that no German ruler of the past had ever achieved. It assured, finally, his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“But Mein Kampf was ignored, or forgotten or dismissed, and this later proved to be a boon to the author. It enabled him, when he became ruler, to disguise his aims until he was ready to strike.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“But like almost everyone else who had bothered to read the Nazi Bible, I had not taken the aims Hitler set down in that hodgepodge of a book seriously.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“Such were the men around Hitler in those first years of the Third Reich. In a normal, civilized society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But that, as I had to keep reminding myself, was not how most Germans regarded them. The vast majority, so far as I could tell, gave these murderous louts not only the respect a German invariably accorded to high government officials, but held them in high esteem.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“in this weird Nazi world there were a number of men of little competence and intelligence and no character—veritable thugs—who, to one’s astonishment, would be given posts of key importance, with power over the life and death of millions.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“It was a disheartening experience to watch Hitler take over the youth of Germany, poison their minds, and prepare them for the sinister ends he had in store for them. I had not believed it possible until I saw it with my own eyes.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

“It weighed on an American correspondent in Berlin more than any other aspect of Hitler’s primitive rule, provoking in me a constant depression of spirits and often sickness of heart.”
― William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940