My guess is someone assigned it to him when he was in highschool or college back in the 60s and it's the only book he ever read on the topic.
Shirer is hardly an exhaustive or even an objective resource on the history of the Nazis and their motives. I didn't have to take what he said on their theories of biological superiority and the desirability of them murdering those who they held to be "unfit" because the Nazis documented that, themselves. And the Darwinian pedigree of that idea is available in incontestable lines of transmission from Darwin, through Galton and Haeckel, to their students and students of their students, directly to the eugenicists in English and in German who cited Darwin as the inspiration of their ideas. Eugenics, itself, in its original English articulation with Francis Galton and its German language variant are thoroughly and obviously Darwinian. Darwin to Haeckel to Eugen Fischer to Adolph Hitler even as he was writing Mein Kampf is only one of the fully documented lines of the transmission of that. I could fully document others going through American eugenics, and have, here in dozens of fully documented posts. If William Shirer wasn't aware of that means nothing, the record is there and always will be as long as the human species can read. I know that Simps and his audience don't exactly lead to optimism that it always will be able to, but it still can now.
The cover-up that depended on the laziness of English speaking scribblers, quite often who lied out of nothing more elevated than ideological motives, and students who couldn't be bothered to look up that record is over. That half-century of cover-up is done, for good. Enough of it is available for free online in easily searchable documents and more is coming online all the time. That case proving the Darwinian pedigree of Nazi eugenics is proved beyond any rational denial. It was so clear in the pre-war period that Darwin's own son, Leonard, expressed his pride in his father's role in "turning German thinking" on such things "in the right direction" in 1939, mere months before the killing started. There is no one who has ever lied to try to distance Charles Darwin from the results of his own articulation of natural selection in eugenics, both English and German, who has the credibility of Darwin's own children to make that connection and every one of them who left any writing about that matter did make that connection, George Darwin, Francis Darwin, Horace Darwin and Leonard Darwin all did as did everyone I looked into who knew the man and spoke to him, including Ernst Haeckel. That record isn't going to get covered up, ever again.
"Shirer wrote it, I believe it, and that settles it."
ReplyDeleteGood grief.
Says "Mr. Israel Has No Right to Exist."
DeleteHere are a few clues, Sparkles:
ReplyDelete1. Shirer's book is without doubt the definitive work on what it was like to be in Nazi Germany in the 30s during the rise of Hitler. Criticizing it for not dealing with the Holocaust is a collosal bit of illogic akin to you saying that you'd be cute if you had a different face.
2. Charles Darwin did not cause the systematic murder of six million Jews. The responsibility for that -- what was called The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem -- rests squarely on centuries of European Christian anti-semitism.
3. Go fuck yourself.
ReplyDelete"My guess is someone assigned it [BERLIN DIARY] to him [me]when he was in highschool
or college back in the 60s and it's the only book he ever read on the
topic."
And as usual your guess is totally wrong, Sparkles. I read it because as a young Jewish kid I was interested in the history of Nazi Germany. Can't even imagine why that would be the case, obviously.
Since I read the book from the library, decades ago, I had to download a copy from an internet archive of a PDF or the book the first time we went through this. Looking in it your "definitive" work on what it was like to be in Germany in the 1930s" would seem to have missed such tiny little details as Kristallnacht. I'll let you go look it up in Wikipedia so you'll know what that was.
ReplyDeleteNatural Selection was the entire basis of Nazi biological theory, Charles Darwin invented Natural Selection, Charles Darwin published a book of science that asserted that killing off the biologically "inferior" would be a benefit to the Surviving human species that killed them off about two decades before Hitler was born, about three before Goebbels was born, etc. I documented that in posts you pretended to have read. The Darwinian scientists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz continually cited Charles Darwin as the originating authority for those ideas in the very book it is fully documented that Hitler read and consulted as he was writing Mein Kampf. Shirer's book doesn't mention that vitally important fact because it wasn't covered in his experience in the six years out of the 30s he spent in Germany. I know it hurts your feelings that your plaster St. Darwin is a fraud but, as I said, that information is out, in the original documentation and it's never going to be covered up again. As I noted, Leonard Darwin and every single other person who knew him would seem to have known and acknowledged his relationship to eugenics in the pre-war period and his own son, Leonard, tied his father to Nazi eugenics in 1939, the very year the war started.
I won't discuss the murders of the Nazis in terms that leave out any of the groups targeted for extermination, unlike you, I will not think in the same terms the Nazis used. Unlike you, I don't see any of them as less significant or more significant. It perverts the memory of all of them to rank them in a Nazi like way, it implies that their murderers were on to something.
As to it being an adequate history of the prelude to the war in Germany, even his post-war work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is entirely far from "definitive". The eminent historian of German in the 19th and 20th century, Richard J. Evans said about it:
DeleteShirer’s book has probably sold millions of copies in the four decades or more since its appearance. It has never gone out of print and remains the first port of call for many people who want a readable general history of Nazi Germany. There are good reasons for the book’s success. Shirer was an American journalist who reported from Nazi Germany until the United States entered the war in December, 1941, and he had a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and the illuminating incident. His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter’s despatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. The emigré German scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer’s book presented an ‘unbelievably crude’ account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had ’glaring gaps’ in its coverage. It concentrated far too much on high politics, foreign policy and military events, and even in 1960 it was ‘in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period’. Getting on for half a century later, this comment is even more justified than it was in Epstein’s day. For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer’s book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.
Damn, Sparky, I saw that reply coming down Broadway.
ReplyDeleteLet me say it as simply as I can: Anti-Semitism was the reason the Nazis killed six million Jews. Any attempt at positing another reason is conclusive proof that the person positing it is an anti-Semite.
I know it hurts your feelings that your plaster St. Darwin is a fraud
ReplyDeleteMy St. Darwin? What the fuck are you talking about?
I won't discuss the murders of the Nazis in terms that leave out any of the groups targeted for extermination, unlike you, I will not think in the same terms the Nazis used. Unlike you, I don't see any of them as less significant or more significant.
ReplyDeleteDenying the centrality of the Jewish people to the Holocaust is the textbook definition of anti-Semitism. Period, full stop, end of story.
"
ReplyDeleteThe emigré German scholar Klaus
Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer’s book presented
an ‘unbelievably crude’ account of German history, making it all seem to
lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power"
You mean the way it actually happened? How unbelievably crude.
ReplyDelete"For all its virtues, therefore,
Shirer’s book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets
the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader."
If by "early twenty-first-century reader" you mean somebody who thinks anti-Semitism didn't cause the Holocaust, sure.