The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Reviewed By Mary Lignor of Bookpleasures.com
- By Mary Lignor
- Published August 14, 2011
- History
Mary Lignor
Reviewer Mary Lignor: Mary is a retired librarian, originally from Connecticut but now living in New Mexico. All her life Mary has loved books and has passed this love on to her daughters. Mary started working in a library when her children were young as an Assistant Librarian and ended up as its Director. Her favorite books are suspense, political intrigue and anything involving the World War II era.
Click Here To Purchase The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Author:
Steve Wick
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:
978-0-230-62318-7
This is a great rehashing of The
Berlin Diary and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, both books
written by and about William L. Shirer's time as foreign
correspondent in Europe before the start of the Second World War.
Mr. Shirer wrote in his own diary about the things that were going on
in Germany in the late 30's and early 40's and used the original
handwritten pages that he smuggled out of Berlin when he and other
Americans were hightailing it out of Europe on the eve of the
Americans entering the war.
In this book, Mr. Wick uses
Shirer's powerful pages to bring Shirer and his family to life and
tell about what they went through during this time. After
college Mr. Shirer's dream was to go to Europe and be a foreign
correspondent for a major newspaper in the United States. This
was not as easy as it sounded as many young people were on their way
to France in the 30's to be on the front lines when things started to
happen. In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and
started his biography of aggression through Germany and beyond.
He was determined to conquer Europe and go on to run the 1000-year
Reich. William Shirer, by the skin of his teeth, got a job when
he arrived in Paris right before he would have had to go home for
lack of funds.
William finally gets a job in
Berlin, right where the action was, in August of 1934. He was
hired by an American news wire service. After working in Berlin
for a while he begins to realize that the Nazi government is using
propaganda purposes to fool the citizens into thinking that the
treaties signed after WWI were not fair to Germany and that the
Jewish population in Germany and surrounding countries were to blame
for everything that had gone wrong. Shirer really did not fall
for the Nazi propaganda and began to try to warn the Americans that
they had better start for home before they couldn't get out of the
country. Germany, in the early 30's swept through Europe and
invaded countries on their borders and when they invaded Poland in
1939, England and France declared war on Germany. Mr.
Shirer had started the Berlin Bureau under Edward R. Murrow of CBS
News and his radio programs became the most listened to in the
country. But, of course, the German government stopped many of
them and censored most of them. However, many of the programs
got through to Ameria and told of the horrible attrocities that were
going on in Europe.
In 1940, Shirer finally realized
that he had to pack up his family (wife and child) and head for
America. The Gestapo wanted to stop him from talking about what
was going on and he left for Portugal to take a plane or ship to
America. He got out right before most of the borders were
closed and went on to write the books about the times when he was a
radio correspondent in Berlin.
The author's
description of The Long Night of waiting before Shirer was able
to board the ship for home was a very difficult time in his
life. He didn't know until the last minute if he would be
able to get out as there were so many people waiting to board
planes and ships to America. Mr. Wick tells an extremely
human story of Mr. Shirer's life with his family in Europe and how
they were forever on the watch for the Gestapo to come to their
apartment and arrest them. By using Mr. Shirer's papers and
diarys and also his books, Mr. Wick was able to write this story
about the horror faced by people in Europe on the eve of
WWII.
This book ends right before
America's entrance into the war and readers will be so glad that Mr.
Shirer did get home and was able to continue to broadcast and write
for some time.