How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond could satisfy not only his passion to serve his beloved country in what he says he believed was a fight for its existence […] but he could escape from all the failures and frustrations of his personal life.
"To me," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "those hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. […] For me, as for every German, there now began the most memorable period of my life." (1.1.153-154)
So, if Hitler had only had a good job and a girlfriend, he'd never have evolved into the Fuehrer? That's a massive over-simplification, natch, but Shirer sees Hitler's joining the army as basically a solution to his aimless, unfulfilled life at the time. Many American WWII-era vets look back on their service as a formative event, but they sure didn't sign up as a solution to their failed lives.
Quote #2
For Hitler the preservation of culture "is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard—that is how it is!" (1.4.32)
For Hitler (as he wrote in Mein Kampf), the desire to wage war was not only natural, but admirable. It was a sign of one's instinct to live. He was merciless with the generals who wanted to retreat when they were surrounded by enemy troops and sure to be destroyed.
Quote #3
War is the great purifier. In Hegel's view, it makes for "the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm." (1.4.88)
In Shirer's view, the philosopher Hegel's thoughts were among the "weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century," and which had such a huge influence on Hitler's own thinking later. War as a purifier? How can a long peace corrupt the ethical health of a people? What do you think he's saying? (1.4.83)
Quote #4
There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman—and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quote him on almost every conceivable subject, and did. (1.4.96)
Like Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche makes Shirer's greatest-hits list of intellectuals who paved the way for Hitler's glorification of war. He's building his case that Germans grew up with this kind of philosophy.
Quote #5
Because he was a cripple he could not serve in the war and thus was cheated of the experience which seemed, at least in the beginning, so glorious for the young men of his generation and which was a prerequisite for leadership in the Nazi Party. (2.5.31)
Shirer is describing Paul Joseph Goebbels—the young man who'd eventually become one of Hitler's most trusted and faithful followers, not to mention the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Notice how this passage takes note of the fact that military service was a necessary qualification for leadership in the Nazi Party. Not only did Nazi ideology glorify war, but party leaders were expected to have proven their character at the front. Maybe that's what Hegel meant by "ethical health."
Quote #6
The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic "nonsense" and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. (2.6.151)
One of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles was that Germany was disarmed. In this passage, Shirer is describing the goals of the conservative classes who helped to boost Hitler into his appointment as Chancellor of the German Reich. Note how Germany's "place in the sun" is thought to hinge on its military might.
Quote #7
Within a few minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, the first taste of sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experienced on any great scale on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror which would become dreadfully familiar to hundreds of millions of men, women, and children in Europe and Asia during the next six years, and whose shadow, after the nuclear bombs came, would haunt all mankind with the threat of utter extinction. (3.17.2)
As Shirer describes the death and destruction caused by the German Luftwaffe during the invasion of Poland, he tells us that air warfare on this scale was unprecedented. Like the First World War before it, the Second World War introduced forms of violence that had previously been unimaginable. Technical "progress," right?
Quote #8
This was their—and the world's—first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flame and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the rutty Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorized wheels […]. (4.18.3)
In this remarkable passage, which fills a full quarter of a page with one long, steamrolling sentence, Shire's writing mirrors the very intense attack he describes. It's one of the most artfully-crafted passages in the book, but one of the grimmest as well.
Quote #9
The skill of British Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From the moment they took off from their bases in Western Europe the German aircraft were spotted on British radar screens, and their course so accurately plotted that Fighter Command knew exactly where and when they could best be attacked. This was something new in warfare and it puzzled the Germans, who were far behind the British in the development and use of this electronic device. (4.22.122)
Shirer has more than one opportunity to point out important "firsts" that came along with the Second World War. This newfangled technology—radar—was a huge advantage for the British.
Quote #10
The people were there, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. (6.31.240)
This is what it came to for the citizens of Germany. Shirer shows us what war really is. It's not the glorious experience Hitler's vision of great and glorious war. The nation and its people that Hitler had promised to raise to new heights, was pounded into rubble and misery. No "ethical health" or "purification" that we can see here.