Hate Mail - A Definitively Dumb-assed Thing To Say

None of Williams Shirer's books on Germany during the rise of Nazism and on to its fall are nearly "the definitive account of the Nazi period".   While he certainly had important observations to make, especially while he was there, on the ground, working as a reporter, the fact is that the most influential of them is more than a half-century old, huge areas of research into that period were either unknown or uncovered by him.  The one you refer to is three-quarters of a century old and it is based, pretty much entirely on either his first-hand observation or what he was told by others before the war.  Some of it is useful and it is well written but it hardly "defines" the period in the period it covers.  Considering how much of what happened in that period which had to await the fall of the Nazi government and finding records and gathering testimony from eye-witnesses, the idea that such a book could be what you proclaim it to be is extremely stupid.

As a gay man I've got to say that this criticism of his major work, The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich must be considered as crucial in evaluating the "definitive" nature of his work.

Shirer portrays homosexuals as protagonists in the fascist state, while remaining silent about the gay victims of Nazism. This is to turn history upon its head. The truth is that only a handful of senior Nazis were gay and most of them were murdered on Hitler's orders in 1934.

Yet the book is regarded as being authoritative. Since it was first published in 1960, critics have been unstinting in their praise: "Documented, reasoned, objective ... The classic history of Nazism", Hugh Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre) wrote at the time of first publication. "Perfectly balanced ... a great record", Bernard Levin wrote.

It cannot be argued that Shirer did not know about the persecution of homosexuals. As a foreign correspondent in Germany from 1926 to 1941, Shirer was an eyewitness to Nazi terror. For example, the ransacking of the headquarters of the German homosexual rights movement by fascist students and stormtroopers on 6 May 1933 made headlines in the national press, yet it does not rate even a footnote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer does, of course, cite the notorious Nazi book burning in Berlin four days later, but he fails to acknowledge that most of the 20,000 volumes consumed in that particular fire were stolen from the trashed headquarters of the homosexual movement, the Institute for Sexual Science.

Shirer ignores the outlawing of gay rights groups, the closure of gay bars and magazines, the criminalisation of the intent to commit homosexuals acts, the creation of the Reich Office for combating Abortion and Homosexuality and the compiling of "pink lists" by the Gestapo. Also missing from his history are the mass deportations of homosexuals to concentration camps and the introduction of the death penalty for gay sex.

It would have been easy for Shirer to slip in a few brief references to these acts of terror, but he never bothered. The persecution and mass murder of such people did not apparently constitute either an outrage or a worthy historical fact.

We know that Shirer had access to source material which detailed the Nazi policy of terror towards homosexuals. His own bibliography cites Eugen Kogon's book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, published in 1950. Written by an ex-Buchenwald political prisoner, it documents the fate of homosexuals. They "had to slave in the quarry", Kogon wrote. "This consigned them to the lowest caste in the camp during the most difficult years ... virtually all of them perished."

Shirer should also have been aware of the recollections of Himmler's doctor, published in 1947 and again in 1957 as The Memoirs of Dr Felix Kersten. This devotes a chapter to Himmler's obsession with the extermination of gay people.

In 1959 Rudolf Hoess, a leading Nazi, explained in his book Kommandant in Auschwitz how he sought to "cure" homosexuality by forcing gay inmates to undertake hard labour and compelling them to have sex with female prostitutes.

Shirer would surely have read these books, yet he makes no reference to the slaughter of gay men that they document. He describes the gruesome medical experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates, but he never mentions the experiments on homosexuals in Buchenwald. These included castration and hormonal implants by the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer, Dr Carl Vaernet (medical abuses which were never cited during the Nuremburg doctor's trial and for which no-one was ever prosecuted).

It is difficult to believe that all Shirer's omissions are mere oversights. All writing, even historical writing, is a reflection of the time in which it is written, and the 1950s were more intolerant of homosexuality than the 1990s. But Shirer's choosing to ignore the horrors Hitlerism inflicted on gay people is more significant than that; taken together with his disparaging references to homosexuality, it must be seen as a homophobic bias.

If Shirer had excluded the destruction of the Jews from his book, few people would have hesitated to condemn him as a revisionist historian, and his enormous study would be both notorious and reviled. Yet when he excises from history the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, his revisionism passes unchallenged. At the very least the publishers of the new edition, Mandarin, should withdraw the book until it is amended to present an accurate history of the Nazi terror.

No one book about that period can be considered "definitive."   That word, "definitive" when applied to one or two or a series of a dozen books about something so huge, so complex, so incomprehensible in its evil is most likely to mean "it's the only book I've read on the topic".  Given the fact that Shirer, as any author has their particular point of view and that there are other, legitimate points of view, which will include things they don't - especially after more than fifty years of work by professional historians and others with more knowledge than Shirer had available to him, calling his works "definitive" is just plain dumb.   Considering the criticism in this article, it is also offensive to those whose role as targets of the death machine were left out of Shirer's account while leaving in those few Nazis who were gay, most of whom were, indeed, murdered shortly after Hitler took power.