How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
This may not have been "art," but it was propaganda of the highest order. The Nazis now had a symbol which no other party could match. The hooked cross seemed to possess some mystic power of its own, to beckon to action in a new direction the insecure lower middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years. They began to flock under its banner. (1.2.65)
Here's the first of many comparisons between the German public and "herds" or "flocks" of animals—mindless and just following the leader.
Quote #2
In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders' apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany's defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people. This was a shabby trick, one which the merest child would be expected to see through, but in Germany it worked. (1.3.4)
Shirer implies that the German people were unable to see through a "shabby trick" so obvious that anyone would have recognized it right away. Unless you were part of a herd of cattle or other "dumb" animals.
Quote #3
Hitler's obsession with race leads to his advocacy of the "folkish" state. Exactly what kind of state that was—or was intended to be—I never clearly understood despite many rereadings of Mein Kampf and listening to dozens of addresses on the subject by the Fuehrer himself, though more than once I heard the dictator declare that it was the central point of his whole thinking. The German word Volk cannot be translated accurately into English. Usually it is rendered as "nation" or "people," but in German there is a deeper and somewhat different meaning that connotes a primitive, tribal community based on blood and soil. (1.4.45)
When a language has a word that doesn't translate easily into another language, it usually means that the word is particularly embedded in a specific culture, and therefore has connotations specific to that culture. Shirer's suggesting that Hitler's ideas of racial purity were falling on fertile soil in Germany, ideas of a tribal people that were unique and familiar to German culture.
Quote #4
A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fantasy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler—all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain—had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history. (1.4.55)
As we mentioned earlier, this argument provoked considerable criticism of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In your view, how justified is Shirer's attempt to describe Germany's national character in this way?
Quote #5
Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. […] This political backwardness of the Germans, divided as they were into so many petty states and isolated in them from the surging currents of European thought and development, set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the West. There was no natural growth of a nation. (1.4.62)
The "setback" that Shirer refers to in this passage is the legacy of the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 concluded Germany's part in the Thirty Years' War. Shirer describes Germany as reverting to a feudal society under the Peace. It was a society that he characterizes as a "barbarous" conglomeration of petty states in which "[t]he peasants, the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude" (1.4.61-62). He believes this resulted in Germany's arrested development as a state and influenced events as far as three centuries into the future.
Quote #6
Bismarck's unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. (1.4.68)
That's a pretty strong condemnation of Germany. Reading this passage, what would you say are some of Shirer's basic social values?
Quote #7
In Berlin too a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels' expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi "co-ordination" of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. (3.16.103)
Is Shirer giving the German people a break, rather than blaming them for going along blindly with Nazi ideology? After all, they were cut off from any other reality by the total crackdown on the free press.
Quote #8
At this point, according to my diary, Hitler had to pause because of the hysterical applause of the German women listeners. […] the young ladies were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically […] the young German women hopped to their feet and, their breasts heaving, screamed their approval […] the raving maidens kept their heads sufficiently to break their wild shouts of joy with a chorus of "Never! Never!" (4.22.152-55)
Speaking of feverish hysterics . . .These excerpts are from Shirer's description of a speech that Hitler gave to a room filled mainly with "women nurses and social workers" on the eve of Germany's attempted invasion of Great Britain. It's hard to know what's more over-the-top: the women's adulation for Hitler, or the language that Shirer uses to describe their "phrenetic" frenzies.
Quote #9
At this point the deputies of the Reichstag leaped to their feet cheering, and the Fuehrer's words were drowned in the bedlam. (4.25.158)
This is the reaction of the Nazi statesmen in the Reichstag when Hitler announced, in December 1941, that Germany considered itself at war with the U.S.A. Shirer's use of the word "bedlam" is important, because the word connotes "madness" and "frenzy." It comes from the name of the first British "asylum for the mentally ill —St. Mary's of Bethlehem. (Source) It fits well with the author's fondness for describing the Nazis—and the German people more generally—as crazy hysterics.
Quote #10
By a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people to the last. It was inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle but also with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation. (5.29.379)
There's that "flock" and "herd" imagery again. It's moo-sic to Shirer's ears. Sorry. Even worse, we can't resist one more "lemmings" cartoon.