How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German-Austrian nationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sinking into a "foul morass." It could be saved only if the master race, the Germans, reasserted their old absolute authority. The non-German races, especially the Slavs and above all the Czechs, were an inferior people. It was up to the Germans to rule them with an iron hand. (1.1.113)
The Nazi belief in the racial superiority of Aryans is well known, but Shirer shows how Hitler's racism was tied to concerns that were social, political, and economic—for instance, his deep frustration regarding non-Germanic peoples' access to resources, economic security, wealth, and power that should have belonged to Aryans alone. "Inferior" races didn't deserve it.
Quote #2
One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. "I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?" (1.1.141)
As Shirer records, after reading all anti-Semitic literature which was readily available in Vienna at the time, Hitler went out to check out the Jews himself. He really hadn't known many. He writes in Mein Kampf that the Jewish men and women he saw on the streets now began to look different from the rest of humanity. His racial hatred propelled him from the question "Is this a Jew?" to "Is this a German?" and, finally, to "Is this a human?"
Quote #3
He was to remain a blind and fanatical [anti-Semite] to the bitter end; his last testament, written a few hours before his death, would contain a final blast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing him and the Third Reich. This burning hatred, which was to infect so many Germans in that empire, would lead ultimately to a massacre so horrible and on such a scale as to leave an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as man on earth. (1.1.146)
Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Germany—and in Europe more broadly—for centuries, well before Hitler's rise to power. What were some of the crucial differences between the anti-Semitism that existed popularly throughout Germany and Europe, and the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime?
Quote #4
Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff. (1.4.42)
Shirer quotes this passage verbatim from Mein Kampf, in an effort to illustrate both the historical inaccuracy of Hitler's views on human development as well as the deep-seated hatred that Hitler had for all those whom he excluded from his "master race."
Quote #5
To Hitler, as he had publicly declared a thousand times, the Jews were not Germans, and though he did not exterminate them at once (only a relative few—a few thousand, that is—were robbed, beaten or murdered during the first months), he issued laws excluding them from public service, the universities and the professions. And on April 1, 1933, he proclaimed a national boycott of Jewish shops. (3.7.80)
The robberies, beatings, and murders of a few thousand Jews in Germany in 1933 was a drop in the bucket compared to the millions who were massacred later. Hitler's policy was to gradually remove Jews from public life in Germany before settling on the "Final Solution." If you want to destroy a people, first you have to designate them as the "other."
Quote #6
Even one returning to Germany for the first time since the death of the Republic could see that, whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions, which had long been pent up in the German people. (3.7.201)
Here's a good example of how Shirer believed that Hitler was successful because Germans already believed much of what he was preaching based on their history of anti-Semitism and belief in German superiority.
Quote #7
In the background, to be sure, there lurked the terror of the Gestapo and the fear of the concentration camp for those who got out of line or who had been Communists or Socialists or too liberal or too pacifist, or who were Jews. […] Yet the Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. (2.8.2)
What gives rise to that kind of complacency? Is it hatred? Ignorance? Fear?
Quote #8
The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen—subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of their German masters. (5.27.2)
The Nazi view that Jewish and Slavic peoples were less-than-human was one of things that made it easy for the Nazis to engage in genocide with hardly a thought. No right to live—that's chilling.
Quote #9
Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished. (5.27.4-5)
This is Heinrich Himmler, chief of the S.S., lecturing his officers. This cold indifference is almost scarier than Hitler's hateful rantings.
Quote #10
At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger. (5.27.120)
Himmler's referring to the "tens and hundreds of thousands" of Russian prisoners whom the Nazis allowed to die in the early months of their war on the Eastern front. As you can see, he didn't care about the value of those tens and hundreds of thousands of people as human beings, but rather as "raw material, as labor." It was a waste of potential slaves to have killed them.
Quote #11
There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers. (5.27.301)
Shirer offers a few different estimates as to the number of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah. Although he hesitates to endorse one number over another, most of the estimates come close to the figure that's generally agreed upon today: six million Jews killed. This was the ultimate result of Hitler's hate, but Shirer again gets in his idea that the German people were complicit.