Those reading my blogs know that I have a special affection for William L. Shirer (see here, here, and here). He, along with few others, such as William Dodd, American Ambassador to Germany (1933-1937), realized early on how deadly Hitler and Naziism would prove to be, and through his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, spread that message to millions.
But, alas, Shirer was no clairvoyant.
In his memoir, End of a Berlin Diary, Shirer relates the euphoria that gripped everyone everywhere 81 years ago today, on May 7, 1945, when Germany finally surrendered unconditionally, effective the following day (May 8, or VE-Day).
Here is what he wrote:
“All day I had to rub my eyes to believe it: to realize that this is really the end of the nightmare that began for me personally (to be shamefully egotistic about it) on that gray morning in Berlin of September 1, 1939, five and a half years ago. It seems a long time—ages—and some twenty-five million human beings who were alive on that day and relatively happy have perished, slaughtered on the battlefields, wiped out by bombs, tortured to death in the Nazi horror camps.*
I have to rub my eyes too this memorable day to try to get it through my head that Nazism at last lies in ruin and that this monstrous thing that I have had to live with rather closely for most of my adult life is no more and that—what is really important, since one own’s life is not—it will never again degrade man, such as he is, on this sorry planet. No doubt there will be other things to degrade him—injustice, intolerance, greed, poverty, and other evils that we shall always have with us—but at least not Nazism, which was a fouler thing than most Americans who never got close to it, will ever know.”
But as we know, the ghost of Nazism lives on.
As Primo Levi once said: “It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Perhaps Levi was the better clairvoyant.
*The final death toll of WWII would of course prove to be much higher.
