The Long Night

The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Steve Wick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Germany, from 1934 to 1940 was both the best place in the world for a reporter to be posted and the worse. There was so much going on: the Nazis were becoming more powerful and more violent, they were clearly remilitarizing, and they had begun systematically persecuting the Jews. One crisis after another was created by Hitler: occupation of the Rhineland, dismissal of the terms of the Versailles treaty, invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg Laws, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg, the fall of France, the bombing of Berlin by the Allies.

William L Shirer was there during all of it, first as a print journalist for the International News Service and eventually as one of the first CBS radio news journalists, working with Edward R Murrow. He broadcast from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Danzig, Compiegne – wherever news was being made. But fear of the Nazis was extensive and it was difficult to get people to tell him the truth of what was really going on. German censorship was extreme, with every word printed in US media being perused by the Nazis and stern warnings given when correspondents criticized Hitler or his government. Numerous journalists were thrown out of the country.

When Shirer began his historic radio broadcasts, the first news broadcasts sent live to the US, the censorship was worse. A censor went over every word Shirer spoke on the air and he was reduced to using a sarcastic tone, a pause, emphasis on a word, and other subtleties to attempt to convey the truth about what was happening in Europe to the American listening public. On occasion he refused to report what was clearly propaganda, such as the purported preparations in 1940 for an invasion of England. Troops and materiel were moving to the west but Shirer noted there were no boats, no naval vessels with which to transport men and equipment. He realized the Germans wanted the Allies to believe they were about to invade when to Shirer they obviously were not.

Difficult as his professional life was, Shirer’s personal life became one of worry and loneliness. He lived in Vienna with his wife, Tess, when they were first married but in the middle of the Anschluss she went into labor, Shirer was out of the city, she required a Caesarean, and their doctor, a Jew, disappeared. His wife became critically ill and required another surgery and only by moving her to a convent in the Vienna woods were they able to entice the doctor to return, at the risk of his life, to perform it. Tess and the baby moved to Geneva and Shirer got away to visit them as often as he could, but that was not often enough. Eventually he arranged for them to travel across France to Spain and from there to Lisbon and on to America.

Steve Wick, who is a reporter himself, portrays these adventures and Shirer’s mental state – a combination of excitement, worry, depression, fear, and loneliness - using Shirer’s books and his diaries, which he was able to sneak out of the country when he finally left in December 1940 as the Germans were preparing a case accusing him of being a spy. Shirer went on to write his monumental book about Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which was for many years the most popular and widely regarded (except among academic historians) history of the period in the US.

I borrowed this book from the library about 10:30 Monday and I finished it Wednesday mid-afternoon. It is a rich tale of the life of a reporter, writing from a viewpoint in the middle of world-shattering events, struggling to maintain ethical standards, and almost overwhelmed by the evil and destruction around him, but unable to report most of it to the free world.

2011 No 123