William Shirer
 William Shirer     (journalist, historian) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 23. February 1904 Chicago |
| Died | 28. December 1993 (Age 89) Boston |
| Alma mater | Coe College |
| Interests | Morgenthau Plan |
American journalist and war correspondent. | |
William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent.
Contents
Career
Shirer worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune newspaper from 1925 to 1933 and was stationed in Paris in 1925 before traveling to the Middle East, British India ((where he formed a friendship with Mohandas Gandhi) and Europe. From 1926 to 1932 he was the head of the European bureau. Between 1934 and 1940 he lived and worked in Berlin, until 1937 as a correspondent for the Universal News Service of William Randolph Hearst.
Reports from Nazi Germany
Then he met Ed Murrow, who was transferred to London in 1937 as director of CBS Europe and hired Shirer as a European reporter and radio reporter for the "Columbia Broadcasting Berlin" based in Berlin. They became close friends. Broadcast journalism was still in its infancy when Shirer and his colleague and supervisor Ed Murrow set out to broadcast radio news not only as headlines, but as immediate news journalism with a very own format. For the first time ever there were direct news broadcasts, on site, from different cities. The full potential of the new medium was only just being explored when the Second World War began in 1939, radio became a mass medium and was also used for propaganda. The first major report of the two was a report on the annexation of Austria to the German Reich.[1]
Shirer experienced the finest hour of his career on June 21, 1940, when he reported directly from a small clearing in the forest of Compiègne about the signing of the armistice agreement, which was so humiliating for France. During this period, the conditions for foreign correspondents in the Third Reich became more and more difficult. Frustrated by the increasing censorship and the poor working conditions, Shirer left Berlin in the autumn of 1940. Before leaving the country, he was tipped off that the Gestapo was building an espionage case against him[For What? More info would be interesting][2]. In 1941, Shirer published his "Berlin Diary". After his death, it turned out that he had "vigorously edited" the printed version of the "Berlin Diary" compared to the original manuscript, that is, the original version was decidedly more Nazi-friendly than the print edition.[3]
Defeated Germany
He joined the Writers' War Board, a private organization with ties to the White House, founded in 1942, which sought to coordinate the propaganda activities of American writers and journalists. He later became a member of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, which advocated harshness towards defeated Germany. In his reports, he focused on the lack of repentance of the Germans.[4] He was fired from CBS in 1947.
William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. In 1946, Shirer returned to Germany and participated as an observer in the Nuremberg trials.
In 1947, Shirer returned to the United States; Murrow and Shirer's collaboration and friendship were ended by Shirer's departure from CBS. The sponsor of his show had withdrawn, there was no replacement, which had an effect on the payment of Shirer. Shirer claimed that Murrow and the broadcaster had dropped him after he had expressed criticism of the Truman doctrine.[5][1]
From then on, Shirer devoted himself to writing. in 1960, his extensive work Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published, one of the first comprehensive analyses of Nazi Germany, which is based on 485 tons of original documents from the various archives of the government of the National Socialists. For this, he received the National Book Award in the non-fiction category in the same year, as well as the Carey-Thomas Award from the industry journal Publishers Weekly.[6]. In 1983 he was awarded the George Polk Award for Journalism.
Later life
In his seventies he learned Russian, publishing a biography of Tolstoy at the age of 89.
Shirer died in 1994 at the age of 89 at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had been admitted with heart problems.[7]
A Document by William Shirer
| Title | Document type | Publication date | Subject(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| File:The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.pdf | book | 1960 | Germany Nazi party |
References
- ↑ a b http://usgerrelations.traces.org/obituarycontent.htm
- ↑ https://www.otrcat.com/p/william-shirer
- ↑ http://www.zeit.de/2012/32/Shirer-Berliner-Tagebuch-Hitler
- ↑ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000736
- ↑ William L. Shirer (1990). 20th Century Journey: A Native's Return: 1945-1988. Little Brown. pp. 93–120. ISBN 0-316-78712-4.
- ↑ https://doi.org/10.1177/002200949402900104
- ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/29/obituaries/william-l-shirer-author-is-dead-at-89.html
