Reading William Shirer's Berlin Diary

This is mostly his daily diary from 1934-1941 as he watched firsthand (sometimes as Hitler walked past him in restaurants) the Gleichschaltung in Germany and then the cowardly turning over of Sudetenland Czechoslovakia to Germany. 

I have read much about this over the years. Watching the Biden Administration was uncomfortably similar, although the resistance of some news organizations to the effort is a counterpoint. To be fair, the National Socialist suppression of alternative points of view was imposed with force, in a way that was unneeded with the fascist leanings of most American news organizations. 

One other very important difference was the courage of Elon Musk spending an incomprehensible amount of money to buy Twitter and open it up to alternative points of view. If there had been any similar courage and alternative media in 1933 Germany, think of the lives not lost, the bright and creative outputs not going up chimneys in German extermination camps. Think of Eastern Europe not suffering under decades of Soviet tyranny. 

While I think it important not to suffer from the mindless optimism of Francis Fuyukama's "The End of History," imagine the resources wasted during World War Ii and the Cold War spent on human development.   

Of course, without those wars, we would never have landed on the Moon, put satellites in orbit, invented Teflon, and arguably the U.S. Civil Rights Movement might have been delayed decades. World War 2 also hastened the end of European imperialism. I confess whatever the justice of the resulting devolution of power, it is not clear that this was a win for the hundreds of millions who suffered and still suffer under corrupt and brutal thugs in the Third World.

Shirer's diary has a depressing immediacy as he describes day-to-day at the front events. If you want to write historical fiction for this time, here is where you go for the daily living that will add versimiltude to your book. Where did correspondents eat dinner, what did they do in their office hours, how did Getapo intimidate citizens of neutral nations?

There are events that even having read Shirer's magisterial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were new to me.  They seem small in the larger scheme of this disaster.  There was an American Jew who was arrested entering Germany with a suitcase of bombs and guns and was beheaded for it. His German lawyer argued unsuccessfully that he may not have known what he had been asked to take to Germany. I confess I would find that implausible. Just an event that was, to my surprise,unknown to me.