End of a Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer

End of a Berlin Diary Reviews

• 
  Helga

  Peace on earth. Goodwill toward men. When? How? Ever?
  
  End of a Berlin Diary covers Shirer’s return to a defeated Germany, the last days of Hitler, his death, the end of the war and the Nuremberg trials, including a number of speeches and confiscated documents.
  
• 
  Gremrien

  After reading “Berlin Diary,” I discovered that there is also a continuation of this book, “End of a Berlin Diary,” written in the last months of WW2 and immediately after WW2. Naturally, I stopped reading what I already read at the moment and found this book.
  
  Well, it’s definitely not the same thing as “Berlin Diary,” both in terms of mood/dynamics and in its contents. While “Berlin Diary” was very vigorous, dynamic, ironic, even slightly cynical, “End of a Berlin Diary” is very slow, melancholic, depressing, lacks any structure whatsoever, and apparently has no clear purpose. “Berlin Diary” was highly interesting because it showed how a journalist day after day discovers new facts about Germany’s aggression against the whole world and interprets/analyses these facts very cleverly. “End of a Berlin Diary” is mostly just a reprinting of well-known facts about the progress of the war and its ending without any analytics. Besides this, it contains some very strange and irrelevant to us today reflections, but all this is very far from what we can find in “Berlin Diary.”
  
  In the first half of the book, Shirer mostly just recorded his day-to-day reactions to various events during the last year of the war and reprinted the most important (from his point of view) news regarding the war. This part is just awful, in my opinion, and I seriously considered ditching the book here. It’s just very empty, uninformative, uninteresting.
  
  The second half of the book was somewhat redeeming, although I wasn’t happy about it either. Here, Shirer returned to Europe in 1944 for the first time after leaving it in 1940. He was sent there as an American journalist to cover the end of the war when it was clear to the whole world that the war is close to ending. After the war, he stayed in Germany for a while and reported also on the Nuremberg Trials.
  
  I expected some valuable observations about the changes he could have seen in Germany and German society at the time, and he indeed made some interesting remarks about this, but there are very few of them. Instead, he is looking at lots of documents — apparently those that gradually were becoming available to the occupying forces and shown to journalists. It looks like Shirer still does not know what he could think/say about all this, so he just reprints these documents for his “diary” (in full or abbreviated, or sometimes as a shortened “retelling” of their contents). I don’t think that this reprinting has anything with “a diary” and felt very skeptical about an objective of such a book, but I appreciated that I had an opportunity to read some of these documents. They are still not very well-known to us, or are known mostly in very general form, as part of Nazi’s ideas and activities. For example, when I watched the movie “Der Untergang” (“Бункер”) (2004), I wondered how historically true everything shown there was and from which sources we learned about all this. Well, among other things, Shirer reprints memoirs of Hanna Reitsch (a famous German woman aviator, Hitler’s admirer and close collaborator) about the last days of Hitler’s life in his bunker, and it looks like almost everything shown in the movie is based on this Hanna Reitsch’s account (she was represented in the movie as well). It was very interesting indeed. There were also many other documents about various Nazi politics, Hitler’s decisions, the Holocaust, etc., that I read with interest. However, the whole reading of these reprints after reprints, many, many pages of them, looked somewhat ridiculous — it’s definitely not “a diary” and not something that I expected from Shirer after “Berlin Diary.”
  
  It should be said that William Shirer was writing “End of a Berlin Diary” after his first book, “Berlin Diary,” had been already published and become an incredibly popular bestseller. Alas, “End of a Berlin Diary” looks like an awkward attempt to repeat this success without any real understanding of what exactly made the original “Berlin Diary” such a cool book. Yes, it feels like these two books were written by two different people, and one of them has no idea what to do but he tries his best to do something using the materials available.
  
  So it was not a completely useless reading but I would happily live without about 80% of this large book, and I regret the time I spent on it.
  
  What was the most interesting (and true to the meaning of the diary) for me was Shirer’s observations about German people after the war. I found them amazingly relevant for today and believe that we should keep these words in mind when we try to imagine what would happen with Russian society after our current war. And no, it’s not a matter of “denazification.” It’s something much deeper and more serious.
  
  “Berlin, Saturday, November 3
  So this is the end of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich! The end of the awful tyranny, the bloody war, the whole long nightmare of a storm that some of us American correspondents began covering a decade ago from this once proud capital.
  It is something to see — here where it ended. And it is indescribable.
  How can you find words to convey truthfully and accurately the picture of a great capital destroyed almost beyond recognition; of a once mighty nation that has ceased to exist; of a conquering people who were so brutally arrogant and so blindly sure of their mission as the master race when I departed from here five years ago, and whom you now see poking about their ruins, broken, dazed, shivering, hungry human beings without will or purpose or direction, reduced like animals to foraging for food and seeking shelter in order to cling to life for another day?
  Ah, you say, this is not a pretty thing to observe, but at least these people have learned one thing — that war does not pay. Surely they are now sorry they started this one and are determined never to do it again. Alas, one cannot report for certain that this is so.
  What the German people regret, you soon find, is not that they made this war, but that they lost it. If only Hitler had listened to his generals during the Russian campaign; if only he hadn’t declared war on the United States; if only the whole world hadn’t ganged up on poor Germany, they whimper, Germany would have won and been spared the present sufferings. There is no sense of guilt or even remorse. Most Germans you talk to merely think they have been unlucky.”
  
  *
  
  “And yet how many Germans realized why this misery had come? Didn’t they blame the foreign enemy for it? Wasn’t the only blame they had for Hitler merely that he had lost, not won, the war? Walter and Howard, who have been here some time, saying that it was. The German people they had talked to, they said, blamed the Nazis not for starting this incredibly destructive war, but merely for having lost it. As a German woman, with hungry eyes, I fell to talking to at the Press Club last night kept saying: “If only Hitler had let the generals run the war; if only we hadn’t attacked Russia, or, if after we had, you Americans had not come in to help them, we might have won and been spared this.”
  The German people, I fear, have not — by a hell of a long way — learned the lessons of this terrible war. They have no sense of guilt and are sorry only that they were beaten and must now suffer the consequences. They are sorry only for themselves; not at all for those they murdered and tortured and tried to wipe off this earth.”
  
  *
  
  “The picture is so black. Are there no shadings? Could I not find some? Are there no “good Germans,” for instance, on which to build one’s hopes ? Ah, surely! Was there not the poet Adam Kuckhoff, who did not give in? Who was convicted of “high treason”? Who was hanged on the gallows at Plötzensee on the morning of August 5, 1943? Who, before he was led away, wrote his wife, Greta, one of the most moving poems and one of the most courageous letters ever penned by man? Yes, there was Kuckhoff and the poet Bonhoeffer and others in this sad land who gave their lives in the name of human decency.
  But amidst these ruins I do not hear their names. Was the sacrifice of these few of no account? Is it not rather the spirit of Hitler and Himmler that is rising again from the debris? Is it not their deaths and their deeds that count among these tragic people? And are the Germans not already waiting to follow another diabolical Führer to still another destruction? Alas, so it seems to me.��
  
  *
  
  “Last night I stumbled into a German newspaperman, an old acquaintance from the prewar days, a good anti-Nazi.
  “How are the German people taking this trial of the Nazi war criminals?” I asked.
  “They think it’s propaganda,” he said.”
  
  *
  
  “Nuremberg, Saturday, December 8
  Bitterly cold today, and snow covering the earth. The youngsters, I noticed, were skating on the canal. But for the people living in the unheated cellars under the ruins the cold was cruel. I talked to some of them today, and to some whose houses, in the outskirts, are still intact.
  The trial? Ja — propaganda! You’ll hang them anyway. So you make a trial for propaganda. Why should we pay any attention? We’re cold. We’re hungry.”
  
  *
  
  “There was so much that was true that did not make sense: the monumental apathy of the German people and their deep regret, not that they had started the war, but merely that they had lost it; their whining complaints at the lack of food and fuel and their total lack of sympathy or even interest in the worse plight of the occupied peoples, for which they bore so much responsibility; their boredom at the very mention of the Nuremberg trial, which they were convinced was only an Allied propaganda stunt; their striking unreadiness for, or interest in, democracy, which we, with typical Anglo-Saxon fervor and blindness, were trying to shove down their throats.
  Can you forget the things Germans said: Paul Lobe, the aging Social-Democrat and former President of the Reichstag, warning — yes, warning! — the Allies that they must not hold the German people responsible for Germany’s crimes, but only the Nazis?
  The poet Johannes R. Becher having the guts to go to the microphone in Berlin and tell his fellow Germans that they all bore a share of guilt for Hitler’s crimes and begging them to wake up and face the fact that “the greater part of our people have fallen into an inferno of immorality…. In the immensity of our guilt and the depth of our disgrace our defeat has no parallel in world history…. Let us face the bitter fact that we are despised and hated in the whole world.”
  Brave words, and Becher meant them, but did they not fall on barren ground.”
• 
  Federico

  Shirer's "Berlin Diary" ended pretty much when he was forced to leave Berlin in December 1940, with the other "Western" news correspondents. After the war, he went back to Germany, to cover the Nuremberg trials. He probably decided then and there to begin researching his magnus opus, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, since the all of the German archives were then open to Allied newsmen covering the trial. And while he was there, Schirer "completed" his first memoir, "Berlin Diary", with this book, called, not surprisingly "End of a Berlin Diary". Shirer shares the fresh shock the world was under, at the discovery of so much hate and scorn for human life, on the part of the German army and government. And, while describing a ruined but hopeful Europe immediately after the war, he focuses on the Nazi monsters who were on trial. A fascinating book, though a little disjointed.
• 
  Sue

  Not as moving especially as it relies on documents rather than Shirer's thoughts about events as they happened in his earlier book. Still his summing up and the fact that such detail was kept during the events is fascinating along with his observations about Nuremberg and the trials there.
• 
  Eduardo Boris Muñiz

  Regreso a Berlín 1945 a 1947 - Segunda parte del fantástico "Diario de Berlín 1936 a 1941" escrito por William L. Shirer. Se publicó en 1947 y comienza donde se quedó el anterior libro.
  En Diario de Berlín vimos las notas dejadas en su diario por el periodista norteamericano, vimos como se vivió la pre guerra y el comienzo de la guerra en Alemania y nos quedamos cuando el autor escapa de Berlín con los nazis pisandole los talones.
  Encontramos a una persona alejada durante 4 años de las zonas de guerra y añorando un poco estar en la acción. Por otro lado está contento de haberse alejado de la población Alemana, la cual encuentra como bestias que permitieron al régimen nazi crecer.
  Por otro lado lo vemos con una visión muy crítica con su gobierno y el aliado, sobre todo por el surgimiento de las Naciones Unidas y las distintas posiciones sostenidas por los aliados, vamos el comienzo del distanciamiento entre el bloque de Estados Unidos y el comunista.
  Me sorprendió encontrar una visión muy crítica con Estados Unidos e Inglaterra y más abierta a la Rusa, por lo menos se le reconoce a los rusos su fuerte participación en la Victoria.
  William teme que se cometa el mismo error cometido al final de la segunda guerra, y es no cortarle la cabeza a la víbora. Dejar a Alemania en una posición que le permita volver a recuperarse.
  Y en parte fue lo que pasó, se metió pila de plata para reconstruir Alemania cuando los países vecinos pasaban hambre y su población moría de frío, cuando ellos fueron las víctimas de la guerra.
  Luego hay una parte en que se cuenta el viaje de un mes o dos que realizó a la Berlín destruida por la guerra. De esta parte yo esperaba mucho más por el dinamismo y lo interesante que fue el diario desde Berlín de antes de la guerra y la verdad me decepcionó.
  Por qué? El autor tuvo la suerte de leer los archivos secretos encontrados de los nazis y hay mucho copio y pego, de documentos que son muy interesantes pero que no era lo que quería, yo quería el día a día de una Berlín vencida y arruinada.
  Obviamente eso que yo quería hay, pero poco. De lo poco que hay se ve a un pueblo alemán derrotado pero no vencido, no asumen sus culpas y hacen responsables a el partido pero no a sí mismos.
  Es un MUY buen libro, detallado, documentado y muy adelantado a su época con la información pero sobre todo con las opiniones vertidas, se nota que el autor sabía mucho del tema y vivió en carne propia el horror de esa época.
  Pero no está a la altura del primero, y eso hace que sea un poco decepcionante. También se nota más apresurado, me hubiera gustado que se detuviera en algunas cosas.
  Es recomendable leerlo? Sin dudas, pero primero lean el primero.
• 
  Laura

  It's very sad to see that what is going on today in Russia is more or less the same as what went on in Germany 70 years ago. They end of a Berlin diary is an absolute must to understand some for the dynamics that happened post war between Russia and the US that led to the cold war. It also details how the UN charter was written and the institution created and the excitement around it. Shirer gives us a daily review of things ongoing at the time and the emotions involved. It's history in the making.
• 
  Michele bookloverforever

  author appalled by lack of guilt among adult Germans at end of WWII. and an naivete of Russian intentions or past atrocities by Russia.. plus no mention of US systemic racism in armed forces or at home?
• 
  Alya Pozdnyakova

  Lots of unique pieces of information put together in one book like a post-war puzzle. I found the diaries of the people close to Hitler most interesting, as well as learning about the state of the world after the war and expectations of the future.
• 
  Colleen

  This should be a textbook on WWII for high school students. Amazing insights and reporting on the times that we still suffer the aftermath of.
• 
  Devon Forest

  This series gives great insight into what the world was thinking during WWII. It was disturbing in many ways reading Hitler's own words and seeing how he lied to start a war. This was the original fake news and somehow we seem to have come almost full circle. There was a part, I can't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of the author hoped we would learn from this war and fearing we'd forget the past. It feels like his fears are coming true. There were so many parallels between then and now it's scary. Reading about how the German people were more upset about losing than they were about the crimes that were committed surprised me. These are the things we don't learn about in textbooks.
  
  I was slightly disappointed when I realized there was a 4 year gap from when the last book left off skipping over the US getting involved and the concentration camps. There was a section where the confession of the commander of Auschwitz was included. The way he talked terrified me. He talked about "improving" the execution chambers.
  
  I think this really is an important series to read in order to get the true sense of what the world was like during WWII.
• 
  Nancy

  What an amazing journey. Shirer picked up back in Europe as the Allies are taking back France and heading toward Germany. He includes interviews, diaries, letters, captured notes from German meetings and conferences, court reports as well as his own observations on the ground. Compelling read.
• 
  David

  Covers late 1944 though December 1945. Also includes perspective on the Nuremberg trials from 1947. Interesting; lots of captured documents.
  
  One could say this is the third part of a trilogy beginning with Berlin Diary, then Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
• 
  Ariadne Oliver

  Lack of nuance, few insights and the inclusion of too many dry documents make this one a disappointment. Try the better 'Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41' by the same author instead.
• 
  Anne Nelson

  Underappreciated account of the last days of the Nazi regime and the immediate aftermath.
• 
  Beth

  This was not quite as good as the Berlin Diary as Shirer extensively quoted from Nazi war documents in this diary, which got tedious. He didn't have those captured war documents when he wrote his first diary so the reader got a more complete first had account of the rise of the Nazi's and the beginning of the war. I think Shirer found in so incredible that he Nazi's would write everything down that he couldn't help himself in repeating their accounts. I still found the diary interesting though. It really helps you realize how fearful Americans were of nuclear disaster after we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. It hints at the beginning of the Cold War. It also felt like history is repeating itself again with what is going on in the world today.
• 
  Sergio Uribe

  Relata los acontecimientos y perspectiva de un periodista norteamericano expulsado de la Alemania nazi que vuelve luego de terminada la guerra para cubrir el juicio de Nuremberg.
  
  Acabo de terminarlo por segunda vez y me pareció mucho mejor que la primera. Lo releí luego de terminar el monumental Russia at war de Alexander Werth. Werth, Grossman y Shirer estuvieron alli. Luego de leer varios libros de la segunda guerra, es impresionante el impacto que tuvieron estos tres periodistas en los textos que relatan este período. Y no hay nada mejor que escuchar de sus propias voces el relato. Shirer terminó apestado, como cabe esperarse, de los años que vivió en Berlin. Vió a los nazis subir hasta que fue expulsado de Alemania y luego volvió al finalizar la guerra para ver a estos superhombres sentados en un tribunal, donde le parecieron mucho menos notables, casi como oficinistas, que llevaron al mundo al peor conflicto que nunca se haya visto.