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

By: William L. Shirer

This book was the first uncensored and intimate account of Germany in the Second World War, of the seven terrible years in which Hitler rose to power and conquered most of a continent. Here is the private, personal, utterly revealing journal of a great foreign correspondent, enabling the millions of Americans who listened to his remarkable broadcasts from Berlin and other European cities to read the things that couldn't be said through censored microphones. William L. Shirer was one of those rare geniuses of journalism -- a close observer and good reporter who has the faculty of being on the spot when anything important happens. He stood in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, on that February night of 1934 when a Fascist mob was kept from storming the Chamber of Deputies only by force. He witnessed the declaration of conscription in Germany the next year, when the Versailles treaty was torn up. He saw the occupation of the Rhineland. He was in Vienna when the Nazis took over Austria. He covered the Sudetenland fighting in 1938, and watched the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Godesberg, Berlin and Munich. He visited Danzig, Gdynia and Warsaw during the fate-heavy August of 1939. He saw the whole of the war from Berlin and on the Western front from its inception up to the end of 1940. He witnessed the signing of the June armistice at Compiègne, and he scooped the world with the news of it and its terms. This book tells of what he saw. It is a simple, day-to-day record of events as they happened before his eyes -- the great events that shaped world history during those seven years, and the small revealing incidents which show how it was with the people of Germany. Without histrionics, without exaggerations, the record of the Nazi career of conquest appears in all its terrifying proportions. There were many books about Germany during this timeframe, but there was not one with the information, the keen perception, and the cumulative power of this.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00220R25W
• Release Date: June 1941
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 605 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.1" x 8.4"