Shirer, William Lawrence

(1904-1993)

   Journalist and historian William L. Shirer was born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was the European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1932 and then joined the Berlin office of the Universal News Service. In 1937, Edward R. Murrow recruited him for CBS’s European Bureau, and working from Vienna, and then Berlin, he reported on the Anschluss with Austria, the German march into the Sudetenland, and the invasion of Poland. He also provided the American audience with an insight into Nazi Germany. He was with the German troops when they invaded France and provided first-hand reports of the signing of the armistice between France and Germany on 22 June 1940. Rather than submit to Nazi controls, Shirer fled from Germany in December 1940. He published his Berlin Diary in 1941. At the end of the war, he reported on the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials.

   In 1947, after a difference with Murrow, Shirer left CBS. He worked as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and gave public lectures and broadcasts. In 1960, he published his best-selling volume, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, establishing his reputation as one of the foremost historians of Nazi Germany. He subsequently published a number of other historical studies, including The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1961), Sinking the Bismarck (1962), and several works of fiction.