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The last section of Shirer's book has the smothered, nightmare quality of a man held prisoner by an enemy who will tell him nothing about what he wants most desperately to know—the fate of England. British air raids exhilarated him as they did the Belgians who "kept hoping the British bombers would come over. They did not seem to mind if the British bumped them off if only the R.A.F. got the Germans too."
Wrote Shirer in Berlin: "We had our first big air raid of the war last night. . . . For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. . . . Not a plane was brought down. . . , There was a pellmell, frightened rush to the cellars by the five million people who live in this town."
Again & again Author Shirer urges the British to bomb Berlin regularly even if they can spare only a few planes. He says the Germans simply cannot take it.
The Germans, he says, are far from hungry; in general their morale is good. He gives three reasons why: 1) Hitler has satisfied the "millennium-old longing of Germans for political unification"; 2) the German people feel they have . . . revenged the terrible defeat of 1918; 3) their fear of the consequences of defeat.
At last the Nazi censors made it impossible for Shirer to broadcast anything but propaganda. They made it hard for him to broadcast even that. A favorite trick was for the censors to hold his copy until it was too late to go on the air. Once when this happened, the German Broadcasting Co. cabled New York: "Regret Shirer arrived too late today to do broadcast." So Shirer went home. As his ship moved out of Lisbon harbor, he observed that European civilization had shrunk to little more than the coast he was escaping from. Why?
Moral Vacuum. One advantage of a diary is its informal catching of passing moods, backgrounds, people. Sandwiched among the great disasters in this book are many casual entries about the European civilization which Shirer loved. They are revealing. There is the usual chitchat about El Greco's greens, The Decline of the West and The Magic Mountain, "a tremendous novel." There is a murmuring of the evocative names of storied cities. There is gnashing of teeth, impotent anger, weeping, physical illness at each new Nazi success.
But European civilization, as Shirer's people embody it, has become a complex of nostalgias, apathies, pleasant habits. As a moral force to counteract the Nazis' immoral force, it is a mere buzz. Another reason for the swift Nazi successes is made clearer: the Nazis found a moral vacuum, rushed in to fill it with a workable immorality. Europe could not save itself.
The question Shirer's book poses: Can what is left of civilization save itself? For it is the nature of men in crises that they usually prefer what is strong and effective, no matter how brutal, to what is weak and ineffectual, no matter how exalted.
* Wife of famed Correspondent Marcel W. Fodor, author of Plot and Counter-Plot in Central Europe.