End of _End of a Berlin Diary_

I finished reading Shirer's book. A few observations:

There are places where his comments especially in the Postscript reflect the immediate postwar liberal consensus: Germany is a fundamentally warlike and brutal nation which can never be trusted with industry again. The U.S. should focus on propaganda to defeat the Soviet Union, not military aid to the nations that were fighting Communist insurrectionists. Free enterprise was an outmoded concept; democratic socialism was the only way forward. The Great Depression was still widely blamed on capitalism and it seemed like a plausible suspect at the time. The failure of the New Deal was not sufficiently obvious at that time.

There are many pieces of information that he lists that were new to me: I did not know that General Beck actually had the wheels turning for a military coup d'etat against Hitler that was derailed by Chamberlain's betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

There are facts that I have often seen asserted without any specific documentary evidence. Shirer points to specific documents that demonstrate that the German General Staff recognized that preoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 if resisted by France would have led to a humiliating defeat for Hitler. Similarly, the General Staff believed that if Britain, France and the Czechs had put up any military resistance to Sudetenland land invasion, Germany would have lost