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Overview
In the second of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II. This remarkable account tells the story of an American reporter caught in a maelstrom of war and politics, desperately trying to warn Europe and the United States about the dangers to come.
This memoir gives readers a chance to relive one of the most turbulent periods in twentieth century history—painting a stunningly intimate portrait of a dangerous decade.
“Mr. Shirer stirs the ashes of memory in a personal way that results in both a strong view of world events and of the need for outspoken journalism. Had Mr. Shirer been merely a bland ‘objective’ reporter without passion while covering Hitler’s Third Reich, this book and his other histories could never have been written.” —The New York Times
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795334269 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Twentieth Century Journey , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 639 |
| Sales rank: | 89,761 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Home to Vienna from India (I)
1930 An Interlude in Kabul
One stifling October day in 1930, at a party in Bombay, I ran into the crown prince of Afghanistan. He had arrived by boat a couple of days before from Paris and was on his way to Kabul to mark the first anniversary of his father's becoming king. The Indian press had been referring to the occasion as a "coronation," but the young prince informed me that this was a misnomer. Afghan kings did not wear crowns — it would have looked ridiculous to the wild, mountain tribesmen.
On October 16, ten days hence, his father would formally assume the throne as Nadir Shah. As General Nadir Khan, he had entered Kabul just a year ago, overthrown the usurper Bacha-i-Saqao (who ten months previously had ousted King Amanullah), and had been acclaimed king by the tribal chiefs. But there had been a great deal of mopping up to do and it was only now that Nadir felt sufficiently in the saddle to take over as king.
For some days I had been pestering the Afghan consulate for a visa so that I could cover the festivities. With Gandhi and some fifty thousand of his followers in jail, the Civil Disobedience movement for the moment had slackened. I was restless to find a good story for my newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, which had sent me out to India that summer from my post in Vienna. Perhaps, unconsciously, I felt ready for a new adventure, for a taste of danger. A journey to Afghanistan, if the British would let me through the embattled Khyber Pass, promised all three. No correspondent had been able to get into the country for more than a year, and no one outside it knew what had been going on.
During the previous year, 1929, four men in succession had occupied the throne in Kabul, and the tribes had gone to war for or against each of them. Amanullah, who had made himself king when his father was murdered in 1919, was overthrown in January by angry tribesmen, stirred up by mullahs (priests) who resented his unveiling the women and otherwise trying to modernize and secularize the backward, intensely Moslem country. His elder brother Inayatullah, whom he had cheated out of the rightful succession in 1919 but whom he now named to succeed him, lasted but three days. Bacha-i-Saqao, the doughty water carrier's son (his name identified himself as such) and a famous bandit and Robin Hood, who had driven them both out, now proclaimed himself Amir and reigned nine months, only to be overthrown by Nadir Khan, who after promising to spare his life, had had him executed in a rather Afghan manner — by degrees: first stoning, then shooting, and finally hanging.
The primitive, warring country provided a further interest for an American reporter. Strategically situated between the Asian empires of Soviet Russia and Great Britain, Afghanistan had become a center of their rivalry. The Soviet and British legations in Kabul, I had heard, were swollen with secret agents stirring up trouble on each other's borders and striving to keep Afghanistan on their side with subsidies, bribes and covert military support. To the British, Soviet dominance would be a threat to India, already embroiled in Gandhi's revolution. Through the Indian government the British, I had good reason to believe, had financed and armed the successful effort of their old enemy, Nadir Khan. They hoped he would be their man. Bacha had turned out to be pretty much Moscow's man.
* * *
During the party I struck up a conversation with the sixteen-year-old crown prince that was to solve all my problems. For not only did I need the permission of the Afghan government to journey to Kabul, I had to have the permission of the British to go up through the Khyber Pass in order to get on the road to the Afghan capital. Since spring, when the Afridis had come down the Khyber to attack Peshawar, the Pass had been closed to civilians, and British and Indian troops had been fighting ever since to clear it. A few weeks before, I had gone up to the northwest frontier to see how the fighting was going. I had pleaded with the authorities to let me at least see the fabled Khyber Pass. I had been flatly turned down. Too much risk, the hard-pressed British general in charge of operations had decided.
In Delhi I had received the same runaround. The government could not take the responsibility of allowing a Westerner to cross into Afghanistan, especially an American, whose government had no diplomatic or consular representation in the country and therefore could offer no protection to its citizens.
"Your life wouldn't be worth a rupee in that wild place," a friendly British official had said in turning me down.
Still, I wanted to take the chance. The British were exaggerating the danger, I felt certain, because having scarcely appreciated my coverage of Gandhi's Civil Disobedience movement, they did not intend now to allow me to poke my nose into a country where they, like the Russians, were conniving for control.
But even if they weren't exaggerating? An old cliché was much in my mind in those days of my brash youth: "Nothing risked, nothing gained." That was what newspapering was all about, at least for a roving correspondent.
Mohammed Zahir Khan, as the young prince was named, spoke French but little English, and this proved to be a break for me. Few Indians or English at the party spoke French. So the prince seemed relieved to find someone he could talk to, and soon we were deep in a conversation comparing our experiences in Paris. He already missed it, he said, and so, I said, did I — I would always miss it. As we chatted on I soon felt enough at ease to enlist his help.
"Let me see," he said, reflecting for a moment. "No problem with the visa. I can arrange that. But with the British — that's more difficult." He paused for a moment and then smiled.
"If you like," he said, "I can make you an official member of our party. We're already cleared to go through the Khyber."
The idea of putting something over on the British seemed to appeal to him. His father, he reminded me, had beaten them when he commanded the Afghan army in the third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919.
On October 8, I boarded the Frontier Express at Bombay for Peshawar, listed as a member of His Highness's official party. There was only one bad moment — at the entrance to the Khyber Pass two days later. Our caravan of four cars and a truck with the baggage had been stopped for a final look at our papers. A bristling, young, mustached British border official told the prince, with profuse apologies, that he could not let me through.
I felt my journey coming to an end at its beginning. The prince broke in:
"I have to insist. This American gentleman is a member of our official party."
* * *
The famed Khyber Pass was awesome in its desolation and the way it wound through narrow defiles in the barren mountains that rose steeply above it, but it was scarcely romantic, as Kipling and other English writers (and later, American movies) depicted, unless you saw romance in the long camel caravans that were slowly moving with their loads of goods from Turkestan by way of Kabul toward India and its rich markets. And in the fighting that was now under way.
On the heights above the Pass, rifles were crackling and guns pounding as Indian and British troops engaged the elusive Afridis, but unlike Kipling I did not find war then, nor later, the least romantic. In this gray, bare, forlorn, rock-strewn place it seemed grim and senseless.
As we edged through the Pass, keeping an eye out for hostile tribesmen who, though armed only with rifles, were stubbornly contesting each hilltop with the British, my mind kept turning over the history of this ancient road.
Darius of the Persians had come in 510 B.C. and Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. and long before them the Aryans from Central Asia to settle permanently in India and become the great Hindu people, and after them the Tatars, Moguls, Scythians, Afghans, Turks and Arabs. Probably no other mountain pass in the world had seen so many warring, conquering peoples sweep through it nor so many bloody battles fought in its narrow confines.
All along the thirty miles of the zigzagging road we passed columns of troops. There were sentinels, in their native garb, every few yards and manned machinegun blockhouses every few hundred yards. Atop almost every mountain peak was a fortress, from which British artillery was firing. The trim sweep of their battlements made them look like grounded battleships. Running down from them were barbed-wire entanglements. We had been warned that stray Afridis might infiltrate the defenses and descend on our little caravan — the prince had turned down an offer of a military escort — but nothing like that happened. After a couple of hours we reached the Afghan frontier at Dakka. On the British side there was a huge sign in English: IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO CROSS THIS BORDER INTO AFGHAN TERRITORY. But a British outpost waved us through and we were greeted on the other side by a battalion of ragged Afghan troops and a makeshift band that struggled through some tune — perhaps the Afghan national anthem. Soon we were on our way again over a bumpy road full of potholes and shell-holes toward the winter capital at Jalalabad, where we put up for the night.
The royal palace was in ruins, but a small wing had been roofed and patched up. It offered at least shelter from the chilly night. Jalalabad, a town of some sixty thousand inhabitants, was the center of the fierce Shinwari tribes, and where the revolution that had toppled King Amanullah had broken out twenty months before. The battles of the ensuing civil war had left hardly a house standing.
Prince Zahir apologized for the primitive accommodations in the palace. Soldiers lugged in a large wobbly table and some half-broken chairs for our simple dinner by the light of a couple of lamps, for there was no electricity. Two orderlies spread bedrolls on the floor to sleep on. The prince also apologized for the lack of plumbing, but the makeshift toilet did not bother me. It consisted of a hole in the floor in one corner of the big room in which we ate and slept.
One of the members of the party that the prince had brought from Paris was a pleasant but fussy French archaeologist, who did not like squatting over the hole in the full view of the rest of us.
"It is unique," he said, pronouncing it "unike" (as in "bike") when he switched to English so that the prince could not catch his words.
"Not so 'unike' at that," I chided him. "There was a stand-up toilet like that in the hotel in Paris I lived in for years."
"Impossible!" he exclaimed in French. "Perhaps in the slums ..."
"The hotel, monsieur," I said, "was a stone's throw from some of the centers of French civilization: the Sorbonne, the Odeon Theatre, the Medici Palace of the Luxembourg. It was once the home of some of your greatest poets: Baudelaire, Verlaine. And you had to stand over a hole in the floor to shit."
"Very 'unike' for Paris," he muttered. I would soon learn that almost everything in this primitive land struck him as "unike."
Our little motorized caravan struggled the next day up the steep grade of the rocky road to Kabul over the 8,000-foot-high pass at Jagdalak, where a British brigade had been ambushed and destroyed in 1842 during the first Afghan war. We spent the night under tent at Fort Barikab, where Bacha-i-Saqao had annihilated the troops of Amanullah. The town below was in ruins. This, I learned, was not entirely friendly territory, and that evening the commander of the company of troops we had picked up at Jalalabad as an escort threw out strong posts on the heights above.
We made it into Kabul the afternoon of the third day. Cheering tribesmen, perhaps assembled for the purpose, greeted the crown prince. The king's brother, the prime minister, welcomed us and led our little convoy through the dusty, unpaved streets to the royal palace for tea.
I did not have much stomach for the buns and cakes. I felt a bit exhausted from three days of bumping over the roughest roads I had ever traversed. And my stomach had turned a little at a sight in the great central bazaar, past which we had driven. A dozen bodies dangled stiffly from ropes that stretched down from the roof of the dome, the heads turned slightly, as they are apt to do after a hanging, a gruesome grin on the waxen faces, the hands still tied.
"Very 'unike,'" my French friend muttered, his face turning pale, as I'm sure mine did.
That night I was put up in the Café Wali, one of the shabbiest hotels I have ever encountered. But it was the capital's only hotel left standing and I was glad to find shelter in one of its four bare rooms.
* * *
The king had requested that the festivities be kept simple, but they turned out, for me at least, to be a strange and colorful pageant, continuing for four days. Thousands of tribesmen had flocked through the passes and down the valleys from all parts of the kingdom, on foot, on their camels, horses and donkeys, brandishing their trusty rifles and often joyously discharging them into the air, as they poured into Kabul to help the new ruler celebrate. However hard and primitive their lives in the desolate hills, they had a capacity for laughter and high spirits, shouting wildly the opening day at the parade grounds as they dashed past the reviewing stand on their mounts; cheering their favorites at the races, of which there were three different kinds (one for elephants — the first and last time I saw this particular sport — a second for camels and a third for horses); working themselves up to fine fettle in their dances, which resembled those I had seen among American Indians, with the same beat of the drums; and gazing wild-eyed at the fireworks that blazed each night from the lofty mountains of the Hindu-Kush that encircled the capital. There was no drinking, since Moslems are forbidden alcohol by Islamic law and in Afghanistan particularly this was strictly enforced. But there was no need. The special occasion was enough to give them all the pleasures they wanted.
Formal dress, grotesque as that seemed in this wild place, had been requested for the opening ceremonies at the parade grounds, where the king, in a scarlet uniform, received the diplomatic corps, tribal chiefs and a scattering of European visitors, delivered a speech to the nation, and reviewed the forces, some twenty thousand men. The royal request for formal dress brought out the oddest assortment of clothing I had ever seen. The tribal Sardars stuck to their native garb, long coats or robes, with baggy Turkish trousers, daggers hanging from their embroidered cartridge belts and various types of turbans on their heads. Most of them wore shoes of some sort, but their followers were largely barefoot despite the crisp autumn air. The British minister and his aides were resplendent in gold-embroidered uniforms, white topis and long swords. The French wore brown topis and long afternoon coats, the Turks ordinary jackets and ordinary felt hats, as did the Russian minister, who sported a beautifully beat-up fedora. A Chicago businessman, who had flown in from Russia to try to get some mineral concessions from the new king, showed up in white tie and tails and a silk hat. I borrowed a dinner jacket from the French legation.
Several hundred tribesmen stared at the unveiled wife of the Turkish minister striding with her husband from their car toward the royal enclosure. She was the only woman present, and the minister had purposely brought her, I was told, to remind the Afghans that Turkey under the great Kemal Ataturk had, as Amanullah had proposed to do, cast off the old orthodox Moslem ways, chased the caliph from Constantinople, curbed the mullahs and their religious hold on the people, decreed Western dress and taken the veils off the women (as well as the fezes off the men). The Turkish lady was attired in a chic Parisian hat and dress.
Watching her reminded me that since reaching Kabul I had scarcely seen a woman except for some of the veiled ladies in the Amir of Bukhara's famed harem. The numerous men of the royal family kept their women out of sight. The wives and secretaries in the various legations had long since been evacuated.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940"
by .
Copyright © 2014 William L. Shirer.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Book One The Road to Berlin, 1930–1934,
Chapter One Home to Vienna from India (I), 1930,
Chapter Two Home to Vienna from India (II), 1930,
Chapter Three Married, Fired, Vienna, 1931–1932,
Chapter Four The Year Off in Spain, 1933,
Chapter Five Return to Paris, 1934,
Book Two Life and Work in the Third Reich, 1934–1937,
Chapter Six Hitler and the Third Reich: First Impressions, 1934–1935,
Chapter Seven Life in the Third Reich, 1934–1937,
Chapter Eight The Men Around Hitler,
Book Three The Road to Armageddon, 1935–1938,
Chapter Nine The First Stretch, 1935–1936,
Chapter Ten Time Off to Live, 1935–1937,
Chapter Eleven A New Job in a New Field, 1937,
Chapter Twelve Return to Vienna. Anschluss. The End of Austria. A Breakthrough in Broadcasting the News, 1937–1938,
Chapter Thirteen Munich, 1938,
Book Four The Coming of World War II, 1939–1940,
Chapter Fourteen The Last Months of Peace, 1939,
Chapter Fifteen War! The Conquest of Poland, Sitzkrieg in the West. The Overrunning of Denmark and Norway, 1939–1940,
Chapter Sixteen Conquest of the West, 1940,
Chapter Seventeen Sea Lion and the Battle of Britain, 1940,
Epilogue The End of the Third Reich — Judgment at Nuremberg, 1945–1946,
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