My Kindle Clippings/2015

2015

January

January 13, 2015

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight Loc. 132-38  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 08:10 AM

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 587-90  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:23 PM

Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life. I had set foot in this town while still half a boy and I left it a man, grown quiet and grave. In this period there took shape within me a world picture and a philosophy which became the granite foundation of all my acts. In addition to what I then created, I have had to learn little; and I have had to alter nothing. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 598-600  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:24 PM

The Danube monarchy was dying of indigestion. For centuries a minority of German–Austrians had ruled over the polyglot empire of a dozen nationalities and stamped their language and their culture on it. But since 1848 their hold had been weakening. The minorities could not be digested. Austria was not a melting pot. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 607-11  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:26 PM

To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German–Austrian nationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sinking into a “foul morass.” It could be saved only if the master race, the Germans, reasserted their old absolute authority. The non-German races, especially the Slavs and above all the Czechs, were an inferior people. It was up to the Germans to rule them with an iron hand. The Parliament must be abolished and an end put to all the democratic “nonsense.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 620-22  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:28 PM

And yet he was already intelligent enough to quench his feelings of rage against this party of the working class in order to examine carefully the reasons for its popular success. He concluded that there were several reasons, and years later he was to remember them and utilize them in building up the National Socialist Party of Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 632-38  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:30 PM

I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty… I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 655-56  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:40 PM

But it was the failure of the Pan-Germans to arouse the masses, their inability to even understand the psychology of the common people, that to Hitler constituted their biggest mistake. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 658-61  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:40 PM

There was another mistake of the Pan-Germans which Hitler was not to make. That was the failure to win over the support of at least some of the powerful, established institutions of the nation—if not the Church, then the Army, say, or the cabinet or the head of state. Unless a political movement gained such backing, the young man saw, it would be difficult if not impossible for it to assume power. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 690-95  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:43 PM

Dr. Karl Lueger had been a brilliant orator, but the Pan-German Party had lacked effective public speakers. Hitler took notice of this and in Mein Kampf makes much of the importance of oratory in politics. The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 704-10  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:45 PM

I even took them [the Jews] for Germans.” 56 According to Hitler’s boyhood friend, this is not the truth. “When I first met Adolf Hitler,” says August Kubizek, recalling their days together in Linz, “his anti-Semitism was already pronounced… Hitler was already a confirmed anti-Semite when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Vienna might have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it.” 57 “Then,” says Hitler, “I came to Vienna.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 744-48  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:47 PM

In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 778-79  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 05:49 PM

The war, which now would bring death to so many millions, brought for him, at twenty-five, a new start in life. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 1019-21  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 07:37 PM

That evening he returned to the barracks to “face the hardest question of my life: should I join?” Reason, he admits, told him to decline. And yet… The very unimportance of the organization would give a young man of energy and ideas an opportunity “for real personal activity.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 1022-25  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 07:37 PM

That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most bearable part of it, but it was harder that I was numbered among the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom chance permits to live or summons out of existence without even their closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. In addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my lack of schooling. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 1060-61  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 07:41 PM

Such was the weird assortment of misfits who founded National Socialism, who unknowingly began to shape a movement which in thirteen years would sweep the country, the strongest in Europe, and bring to Germany its Third Reich. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 1061-64  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 07:41 PM

The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political party. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 1098-1102  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 10:50 PM

They are certainly a hodgepodge, a catchall for the workers, the lower middle class and the peasants, and most of them were forgotten by the time the party came to power. A good many writers on Germany have ridiculed them, and the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them. Yet, as in the case of the main principles laid down in Mein Kampf, the most important of them were carried out by the Third Reich, with consequences disastrous to millions of people, inside and outside of Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 1102-3  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 10:50 PM

The very first point in the program demanded the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1131-33  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 10:53 PM

What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1139-43  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 10:55 PM

Hitler organized a bunch of roughneck war veterans into “strong-arm” squads, Ordnertruppe, under the command of Emil Maurice, an ex-convict and watchmaker. On October 5, 1921, after camouflaging themselves for a short time as the “Gymnastic and Sports Division” of the party to escape suppression by the Berlin government, they were officially named the Sturmabteilung, from which the name S.A. came. The storm troopers, outfitted in brown uniforms, were recruited largely from the freebooters of the free corps and placed under the command of Johann Ulrich Klintzich, 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 1326-28  | Added on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 11:12 PM

There was, however, little time for rest and recreation in the stormy years between 1921 and 1923. There was a party to build and to keep control of in the face of jealous rivals as unscrupulous as himself. The N.S.D.A.P. was but one of several right-wing movements in Bavaria struggling for public attention and support, and beyond, in the rest of Germany, there were many others. 
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January 14, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1538-41  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 11:42 AM

But what hurt most was that Versailles virtually disarmed Germany * and thus, for the time being anyway, barred the way to German hegemony in Europe. And yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that which Germany had imposed on Russia, left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 1517-23  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 11:43 AM

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to March 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British historian, writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a “humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history.” 2 It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks. The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of 1919. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 59 | Loc. 1556-58  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 02:28 PM

The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. On June 16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, they had given the Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be accepted by June 24 or the armistice agreement would be terminated and the Allied powers would “take such steps as they think necessary to enforce their terms.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1608-16  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 02:35 PM

The mark, as we have seen, had begun to slide in 1921, when it dropped to 75 to the dollar; the next year it fell to 400 and by the beginning of 1923 to 7,000. Already in the fall of 1922 the German government had asked the Allies to grant a moratorium on reparation payments. This the French government of Poincaré had bluntly refused. When Germany defaulted in deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from the rest of the country. This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people momentarily as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of the Ruhr declared a general strike and received financial support from the government in Berlin, which called for a campaign of passive resistance. With the help of the Army, sabotage and guerrilla warfare were organized. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1617-21  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 02:35 PM

The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1629-32  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 02:36 PM

From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr. Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in worthless marks. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1634-35  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 02:37 PM

The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much the industrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of the currency. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1654-59  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:34 PM

The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal of German hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of nationalism, complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people behind the republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France. This was the last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the Republic. France could be taken care of after Germany had had its nationalist revolution and established a dictatorship. Against a strong current of public opinion Hitler dared to take an unpopular line: “No—not down with France, but down with the traitors of the Fatherland, down with the November criminals! That must be our slogan.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1726-29  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:44 PM

He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to Hitler and the armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposed by force. But for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. His rabid followers were demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner, one of his S.A. commanders, urged him to strike at once. “The day is coming,” he warned, “when I won’t be able to hold the men back. If nothing happens now, they’ll run away from us.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1760-66  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:46 PM

Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first was that he suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation of Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the Buergerbräukeller meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on November 4: the chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at the point of a pistol force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the revolution. Hitler decided to act at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization were called off; the storm troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer hall. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 68 | Loc. 1768-73  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:47 PM

S.A. troops surrounded the Buergerbräukeller and Hitler pushed forward into the hall. While some of his men were mounting a machine gun in the entrance, Hitler jumped up on a table and to attract attention fired a revolver shot toward the ceiling. Kahr paused in his discourse. The audience turned around to see what was the cause of the disturbance. Hitler, with the help of Hess and of Ulrich Graf, the former butcher, amateur wrestler and brawler and now the leader’s bodyguard, made his way to the platform. A police major tried to stop him, but Hitler pointed his pistol at him and pushed on. Kahr, according to one eyewitness, had now become “pale and confused.” He stepped back from the rostrum and Hitler took his place. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 68 | Loc. 1784-87  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:48 PM

The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,” he cried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed. It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1803-6  | Added on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 07:50 PM

He was getting nowhere with his own talk. Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands had agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government. 
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January 15, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1931-33  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 12:24 AM

Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1983-93  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 12:29 AM

thirteen years later after he had achieved his goal, he told his old followers, assembled at the Buergerbräukeller to celebrate the anniversary of the putsch, “I can calmly say that it was the rashest decision of my life. When I think back on it today, I grow dizzy… If today you saw one of our squads from the year 1923 marching by, you would ask, ‘What workhouse have they escaped from?’… But fate meant well with us. It did not permit an action to succeed which, if it had succeeded, would in the end have inevitably crashed as a result of the movement’s inner immaturity in those days and its deficient organizational and intellectual foundation… We recognized that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be ready to one’s hand… In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a State by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.” How to build the new Nazi State was already in his mind as he fenced with the judges and his prosecutors during the trial. For one thing, he would have to have the German Army with him, not against him, the next time. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 2014-20  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 12:32 AM

in the face of the law—Article 81 of the German Penal Code—which declared that “whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprisonment,” Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the old fortress of Landsberg. Even then the lay judges protested the severity of the sentence, but they were assured by the presiding judge that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after he had served six months. Efforts of the police to get Hitler deported as a foreigner—he still held Austrian citizenship—came to nothing. The sentences were imposed on April 1, 1924. A little less than nine months later, on December 20, Hitler was released from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 2085-89  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:32 AM

In his first year of office Mein Kampf sold a million copies, and Hitler’s income from the royalties, which had been increased from 10 to 15 per cent after January 1, 1933, was over one million marks (some $300,000), making him the most prosperous author in Germany and for the first time a millionaire. * Except for the Bible, no other book sold as well during the Nazi regime, when few family households felt secure without a copy on the table. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 2099-2101  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:34 AM

As we have seen, Hitler’s basic ideas were formed in his early twenties in Vienna, and we have his own word for it that he learned little afterward and altered nothing in his thinking. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 2108-12  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:35 AM

a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying. What makes it important is that it was embraced so fanatically by so many millions of Germans and that if it led, as it did, to their ultimate ruin it also led to the ruin of so many millions of innocent, decent human beings inside and especially outside Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 2125-28  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:38 AM

The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking colonies in Africa. “Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, “but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 2161-65  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:42 AM

Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the Jews. “The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans. Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Note on Page 85 | Loc. 2182  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:45 AM

while this isnt a very american idea, he does have a point. econmic power doesnt always translate into stronger ideals. and economic flourishing can tend to erode ieals andlay foundaions for complacency.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 2210-12  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:48 AM

And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in Mein Kampf we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s Weltanschauung, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has its roots deep in German history and thought. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 2212-15  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:48 AM

Like Darwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongest ruled—a “world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 2327-30  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 02:49 PM

The implication of the continuity of German history, culminating in Hitler’s rule, was not lost upon the multitude. The very expression “the Third Reich” also served to strengthen this concept. The First Reich had been the medieval Holy Roman Empire; the Second Reich had been that which was formed by Bismarck in 1871 after Prussia’s defeat of France. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2334-37  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 02:50 PM

by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2338-40  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 02:51 PM

the disaster of religious differences which followed the Reformation. There is not space in this book to recount adequately the immense influence that Martin Luther, the Saxon peasant who became an Augustinian monk and launched the German Reformation, had on the Germans and their subsequent history. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2350-55  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 02:53 PM

The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended it, brought the final catastrophe to Germany, a blow so devastating that the country has never fully recovered from it. This was the last of Europe’s great religious wars, but before it was over it had degenerated from a Protestant–Catholic conflict into a confused dynastic struggle between the Catholic Austrian Hapsburgs on the one side and the Catholic French Bourbons and the Swedish Protestant monarchy on the other. In the savage fighting, Germany itself was laid waste, the towns and countryside were devastated and ravished, the people decimated. It has been estimated that one third of the German people perished in this barbarous war. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 2362-66  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 07:19 PM

Now, after the Peace of Westphalia, it was reduced to the barbarism of Muscovy. Serfdom was reimposed, even introduced in areas where it had been unknown. The towns lost their self-government. The peasants, the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude. The pursuit of learning and the arts all but ceased. The greedy rulers had no feeling for German nationalism and patriotism and stamped out any manifestations of them in their subjects. Civilization came to a standstill in Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 2368-70  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 07:19 PM

Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. The idea of democracy, of rule by parliament, which made such rapid headway in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which exploded in France in 1789, did not sprout in Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 2382-86  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 07:21 PM

By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 2414-16  | Added on Thursday, January 15, 2015, 07:25 PM

“The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, “will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.” 
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“In 1866,” the eminent German political scientist Wilhelm Roepke once wrote, “Germany ceased to exist.” Prussia annexed outright all the German states north of the Main which had fought against her, except Saxony; these included Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, Frankfurt and the Elbe duchies. All the other states north of the Main were forced into the North German Confederation. Prussia, which now stretched from the Rhine to Koenigsberg, completely dominated it, and within five years, with the defeat of Napoleon III’s France, the southern German states, with the considerable kingdom of Bavaria in the lead, would be drawn into Prussian Germany. 
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There had been among the Germans, to be sure, some of the most elevated minds and spirits of the Western world—Leibnitz, Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven—and they had made unique contributions to the civilization of the West. But the German culture which became dominant in the nineteenth century and which coincided with the rise of Prussian Germany, continuing from Bismarck through Hitler, rests primarily on Fichte and Hegel, to begin with, and then on Treitschke, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and a host of lesser lights not the least of whom, strangely enough, were a bizarre Frenchman and an eccentric Englishman. 
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January 16, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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And the happiness of the individual on earth? Hegel replies that “world history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness,” he declares, “are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement, without conflict.” War is the great purifier. In Hegel’s view, it makes for “the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm.” 
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As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of “heroes,” those great agents who are fated by a mysterious Providence to carry out “the will of the world spirit,” seems to have inspired Hitler, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, with his own overpowering sense of mission. 
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Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. 
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There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman—and in the most telling aphorisms? 
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On the State, power and the jungle world of man: “Society has never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to strength, power and order. The State [is] unmorality organized… the will to war, to conquest and revenge… Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher duties… There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm.” 
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It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over as their own. 
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Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen—these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves. With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs—an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Goetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. 
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It is probably no exaggeration to say, as I have heard more than one follower of Hitler say, that Chamberlain was the spiritual founder of the Third Reich. This singular Englishman, who came to see in the Germans the master race, the hope of the future, worshiped Richard Wagner, one of whose daughters he eventually married; he venerated first Wilhelm II and finally Hitler and was the mentor of both. At the end of a fantastic life he could hail the Austrian corporal—and this long before Hitler came to power or had any prospect of it—as a being sent by God to lead the German people out of the wilderness. Hitler, not unnaturally, regarded Chamberlain as a prophet, as indeed he turned out to be. 
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But the Republic had weathered the storms. It was beginning to thrive. While Hitler was in prison a financial wizard by the name of Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had been called in to stabilize the currency, and he had succeeded. The ruinous inflation was over. The burden of reparations was eased by the Dawes Plan. Capital began to flow in from America. The economy was rapidly recovering. 
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Stresemann was succeeding in his policy of reconciliation with the Allies. The French were getting out of the Ruhr. A security pact was being discussed which would pave the way for a general European settlement (Locarno) and bring Germany into the League of Nations. For the first time since the defeat, after six years of tension, turmoil and depression, the German people were beginning to have a normal life. 
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chapter 4 finished 1/16
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Between 1924 and 1930 German borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars and most of it came from American investors, who gave little thought to how the Germans might make eventual repayment. The Germans gave even less thought to it. 
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Industry, which had wiped out its debts in the inflation, borrowed billions to retool and to rationalize its productive processes. Its output, which in 1923 had dropped to 55 per cent of that in 1913, rose to 122 per cent by 1927. For the first time since the war unemployment fell below a million—to 650,000—in 1928. 
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In the elections of May 20, 1928, the Nazi Party polled only 810,000 votes out of a total of thirty-one million cast and had but a dozen of the Reichstag’s 491 members. The conservative Nationalists also lost heavily, their vote falling from six million in 1924 to four million, and their seats in Parliament diminished from 103 to 73. In contrast, the Social Democrats gained a million and a quarter votes in the 1928 elections, and their total poll of more than nine million, with 153 seats in the Reichstag, made them easily the largest political party in Germany. Ten years after the end of the war the German Republic seemed at last to have found its feet. 
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Though some of the party roughnecks, veterans of street fighting and beerhouse brawls, opposed bringing women and children into the Nazi Party, Hitler soon provided organizations for them too. The Hitler Youth took in youngsters from fifteen to eighteen who had their own departments of culture, schools, press, propaganda, “defense sports,” etc., and those from ten to fifteen were enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk. For the girls there was the Bund Deutscher Maedel and for the women the N. S. Frauenschaften. Students, teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers, jurists—all had their separate organizations, and there was a Nazi Kulturbund to attract the intellectuals and, artists. 
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But the brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. 
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“We recognized,” he said, in recalling the days when the party was being reformed after the putsch, “that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be practically ready to one’s hand…. 
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Hitler was furious. Several of these former rulers had kicked in with contributions to the party. Moreover, a number of big industrialists were beginning to become financially interested in Hitler’s reborn movement precisely because it promised to be effective in combating the Communists, the Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and Goebbels got away with their plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately dry up. 
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When Goebbels left Munich on April 17 he was Hitler’s man and was to remain his most loyal follower to his dying breath. On April 20 he wrote the Fuehrer a birthday note: “Dear and revered Adolf Hitler! I have learned so much from you… You have finally made me see the light…” And that night in his diary: “He is thirty-seven years old. Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple. These are the characteristics of the genius.” 
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encomiums 
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For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed to be incapable of love of any other human being, this passion of Hitler’s for the youthful Geli Raubal stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life. 
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It was known that he demanded, and received, a high fee for the many articles which he wrote in those days for the impoverished Nazi press. There was much grumbling in party circles over the high cost of Hitler. These items are absent from his tax declarations. As the Twenties neared their end, money started to flow into the Nazi Party from a few of the big Bavarian and Rhineland industrialists who were attracted by Hitler’s opposition to the Marxists and the trade unions. 
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beginning with 1930, when his book royalties suddenly tripled from the previous year to some $12,000 and money started pouring in from big business, any personal financial worries he may have had were over for good. He could now devote his fierce energies and all his talents to the task of fulfilling his destiny. The time for his final drive for power, for the dictatorship of a great nation, had arrived. 
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Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. 
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on October 24, the stock market in Wall Street crashed. The results in Germany were soon felt—and disastrously. The cornerstone of German prosperity had been loans from abroad, principally from America, and world trade. When the flow of loans dried up and repayment on the old ones became due the German financial structure was unable to stand the strain. 
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The whole Western world was stricken by forces which its leaders did not understand and which they felt were beyond man’s control. How was it possible that suddenly there could be so much poverty, so much human suffering, in the midst of so much plenty? 
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The hard-pressed people were demanding a way out of their sorry predicament. The millions of unemployed wanted jobs. The shopkeepers wanted help. Some four million youths who had come of voting age since the last election wanted some prospect of a future that would at least give them a living. To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. He would make Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations, repudiate the Versailles Treaty, stamp out corruption, bring the money barons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every German had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry men seeking not only relief but new faith and new gods, the appeal was not without effect. 
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It was clear that the Nazis had captured millions of adherents from the other middle-class parties. 
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The month of September 1930 marked a turning point in the road that was leading the Germans inexorably toward the Third Reich. The surprising success of the Nazi Party in the national elections convinced not only millions of ordinary people but many leaders in business and in the Army that perhaps here was an upsurge that could not be stopped. 
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Now that the trial was over and Hitler had spoken, the generals felt better disposed toward a movement which they had previously regarded as a threat to the Army. 
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Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which they had been supporting hitherto. 
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In fact the coal and steel interests were the principal sources of the funds that came from the industrialists to help Hitler over his last hurdles to power in the period between 1930 and 1933. But Funk named other industries and concerns whose 
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industrialists who knowthat war is good for business...
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Baron Kurt von Schroeder, the Cologne banker, who was to play a pivotal role in the final maneuver which hoisted Hitler to power; 
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Dr. Schacht, who resigned his presidency of the Reichsbank in 1930 because of his opposition to the Young Plan, met Goering in that year and Hitler in 1931 and for the next two years devoted all of his considerable abilities to bringing the Fuehrer closer to his banker and industrialist friends and ever closer to the great goal of the Chancellor’s seat. By 1932 this economic wizard, whose responsibility for the coming of the Third Reich and for its early successes proved to be so immeasurably great, was writing Hitler: “I have no doubt that the present development of things can only lead to your becoming Chancellor… Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory cannot elude you long… No matter where my work may take me in the near future, even if someday you should see me imprisoned in a fortress, you can always count on me as your loyal supporter.” One of the two letters from which these words are taken was signed: “With a vigorous ‘Heil.’” 16 One “so strong a truth” of the Nazi movement, which Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends. It would be some time before the genial Reichsbank president, as he would again become under Hitler, and his associates in industry and finance would wake up to this. And since this history, like all history, is full of sublime irony, it would not be too long a time before Dr. Schacht proved himself to be a good prophet not only about Hitler’s chancellorship but about the Fuehrer’s seeing him imprisoned, if not in a fortress then in a concentration camp, which was worse, and not as Hitler’s “loyal supporter”—here he was wrong—but in an opposite capacity. 
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corpulent 
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In 1928 Hitler chose Goering as one of the twelve Nazi deputies to represent the party in the Reichstag, of which he became President when the Nazis became the largest party in 1932. It was in the official residence of the Reichstag President that many of the meetings were held and intrigues hatched which led to the party’s ultimate triumph, and it was here—to jump ahead in time a little—that a plan was connived that helped Hitler to stay in power after he became Chancellor: to set the Reichstag on fire. 
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At the time Roehm took over the S.A., Gregor Strasser was undoubtedly the Number Two man in the Nazi Party. A forceful speaker and a brilliant organizer, he was the head of the party’s most important office, the Political Organization, a post which gave him great influence among the provincial and local leaders whose labors he supervised. With his genial Bavarian nature, he was the most popular leader in the party next to Hitler, and, unlike the Fuehrer he enjoyed the personal trust and even liking of most of his political opponents. 
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Heinrich Himmler, the poultry farmer, who, with his pince-nez, might be mistaken for a mild, mediocre schoolmaster—he had a degree in agronomy from the Munich Technische Hochschule—was gradually building up Hitler’s praetorian guard, the black-coated S.S. But he worked under the shadow of Roehm, who was commander of both the S.A. and the S.S., and he was little known, even in party circles, outside his native Bavaria. 
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Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the National Socialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors. And they had two advantages over their opponents: They were led by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthless enough, and opportunist enough, to go to any lengths to help him get it. 
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Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in German means “intriguer” or “sneak.” 
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he was a key figure in the confidential negotiations with Moscow which led to the camouflaged training of German tank and air officers in Soviet Russia and in the establishment of German-run arms factories there. 
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the last shackle of the peace treaty would be thrown off and Germany would emerge as an equal among the big powers. This would be not only a boon to the Republic but might launch, Bruening thought, a new era of confidence in the Western world that would put an end to the economic depression which had brought the German people such misery. And it would take the wind out of the Nazi sails. 
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But the aged President was not interested. He, whose duty it had been as Commander of the Imperial Army to tell the Kaiser on that dark fall day of November 1918 at Spa that he must go, that the monarchy was at an end, would not consider any Hohenzollern’s resuming the throne except the Emperor himself, who still lived in exile at Doom, in Holland. 
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now forcing him into bitter conflict with the very nationalist forces which had elected him President in 1925 against the liberal–Marxist candidates. Now he could win only with the support of the Socialists and the trade unions, for whom he had always had an undisguised contempt. 
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All the traditional loyalties of classes and parties were upset in the confusion and heat of the electoral battle. 
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Hitler himself had much to ponder. He had made an impressive showing. He had doubled the Nazi vote in two years. And yet a majority still eluded him—and with it the political power he sought. Had he reached the end of this particular road? 
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The cabinet met on April 10, in the midst of the polling, and decided to immediately suppress Hitler’s private armies. There was some difficulty in getting Hindenburg to sign the decree—Schleicher, who had first approved it, began to whisper objections in the President’s ear—but he finally did so on April 13 and it was promulgated on April 14. This was a stunning blow to the Nazis. 
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Schleicher had another objective in mind. He wanted the S.A. attached to the Army, where he could control it; but he also wanted Hitler, the only conservative nationalist with any mass following, in the government—where he could control him. The Verbot of the S.A. hindered progress toward both objectives. 
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Papen’s first act was to honor Schleicher’s pact with Hitler. On June 4 he dissolved the Reichstag and convoked new elections for July 31, and after some prodding from the suspicious Nazis, he lifted the ban on the S.A. on June 15. A wave of political violence and murder such as even Germany had not previously seen immediately followed. The storm troopers swarmed the streets seeking battle and blood and their challenge was often met, especially by the Communists. In Prussia alone between June 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched battles in the streets which cost eighty-two lives and seriously wounded four hundred men. In July, thirty-eight Nazis and thirty Communists were listed among the eighty-six persons killed in riots. On Sunday, July 10, eighteen persons were done to death in the streets, and on the following Sunday, when the Nazis, under police escort, staged a march through Altona, a working-class suburb of Hamburg, nineteen persons were shot dead and 285 wounded. The civil war which the barons’ cabinet had been called in to halt was growing steadily worse. All the parties save the Nazis and the Communists demanded that the government take action to restore order. 
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Martial law was proclaimed in Berlin and General von Rundstedt, the local Reichswehr commander, sent a lieutenant and a dozen men to make the necessary arrests. This was a development which was not lost on the men of the Right who had taken over the federal power, nor did it escape Hitler’s notice. There was no need to worry any longer that the forces of the Left or even of the democratic center would put up serious resistance to the overthrow of the democratic system. 
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The Reichstag elections of July 31 were the third national elections held in Germany within five months, but, far from being weary from so much electioneering, the Nazis threw themselves into the campaign with more fanaticism and force than ever before. 
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From the size of the crowds that turned out to see Hitler it was evident that the Nazis were gaining ground. In one day, July 27, he spoke to 60,000 persons in Brandenburg, to nearly as many in Potsdam, and that evening to 120,000 massed in the giant Grunewald Stadium in Berlin while outside an additional 100,000 heard his voice by loudspeaker. The polling on July 31 brought a resounding victory for the National Socialist Party. With 13,745,000 votes, the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag, making them easily the largest party in Parliament though still far short of a majority in a house of 608 members. 
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The Reichstag quickly recognized its dissolution, and new elections were set for November 6. For the Nazis they presented certain difficulties. For one thing, as Goebbels noted, the people were tired of political speeches and propaganda. Even the party workers, as he admitted in his diary of October 15, had “become very nervous as the result of these everlasting elections. They are overworked…” 
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lugubriously 
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Fate, and the German electorate, decided on November 6 a number of things, none of them conclusive for the future of the crumbling Republic. The Nazis lost two million votes and 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducing them to 196 deputies. The Communists gained three quarters of a million votes and the Social Democrats lost the same number, with the result that the Communist seats rose from 89 to 100 and the Socialist seats dropped from 133 to 121. The German National Party, the sole one which had backed the government, won nearly a million additional votes—obviously from the Nazis—and now had 52 seats instead of 37. Though the National Socialists were still the largest party in the country, the loss of two million votes was a severe setback. For the first time the great Nazi tide was ebbing, and from a point far short of a majority. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 4287-91  | Added on Friday, January 16, 2015, 10:52 PM

Hindenburg was shocked at such an idea and, turning to Papen, asked him then and there to go ahead with the forming of a new government. “Schleicher,” says Papen, “appeared dumfounded.” They had a long argument after they had left the President but could reach no agreement. As they parted, Schleicher, in the famous words addressed to Luther as he set out for the fateful Diet of Worms, said to Papen, “Little Monk, you have chosen a difficult path.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 4312-16  | Added on Friday, January 16, 2015, 10:57 PM

On December 2 Kurt von Schleicher became Chancellor, the first general to occupy that post since General Count Georg Leo von Caprivi de Caprara de Montecuccoli, who had succeeded Bismarck in 1890. Schleicher’s tortuous intrigues had at last brought him to the highest office at a moment when the depression, which he little understood, was at its height; when the Weimar Republic, which he had done so much to undermine, was already crumbling; when no one any longer trusted him, not even the President, whom he had manipulated so long. His days on the heights, it seemed obvious to almost everyone but himself, were strictly numbered. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 4327-29  | Added on Friday, January 16, 2015, 10:59 PM

“I stayed in power only fifty-seven days,” Schleicher remarked once in the hearing of the attentive French ambassador, “and on each and every one of them I was betrayed fifty-seven times. Don’t ever speak to me of ‘German loyalty’!” 
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January 17, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 4336-43  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:26 AM

There were simply no funds to meet the payroll of thousands of party functionaries or to maintain the S.A., which alone cost two and a half million marks a week. The printers of the extensive Nazi press were threatening to stop the presses unless they received payment on overdue bills. Goebbels had touched on this in his diary on November 11: “The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.” And in December he was regretting that party salaries would have to be cut. Finally, the provincial elections in Thuringia on December 3, the day Schleicher called in Strasser, revealed a loss of 40 per cent in the Nazi vote. It had become obvious, at least to Strasser, that the Nazis would never obtain office through the ballot. He therefore urged Hitler to abandon his “all or nothing” policy and take what power he could by joining in a coalition with Schleicher. Otherwise, he feared, the party would fall to pieces. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 4367-69  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:28 AM

The party did not fall apart and Hitler did not shoot himself. Strasser might have achieved both these ends, which would have radically altered the course of history, but at the crucial moment he himself gave up. 
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- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 4374  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:29 AM

The wily Austrian had once more extricated himself from a tight fix that might easily have proved disastrous. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 4390-93  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:32 AM

Goebbels had reflected the general feeling in his diary the last week of the year: “1932 has brought us eternal bad luck… The past was difficult and the future looks dark and gloomy; all prospects and hopes have quite disappeared.” Hitler therefore was not nearly in so favorable a position to bargain for power as he had been during the previous summer and autumn. But neither was Papen; he was out of office. In their adversity, their minds met. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 4468-76  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:39 AM

On January 23, therefore, Schleicher went to see Hindenburg, admitted that he could not find a majority in the Reichstag and demanded its dissolution and emergency powers to rule by decree under Article 48 of the constitution. According to Meissner, the General also asked for the “temporary elimination” of the Reichstag and frankly acknowledged that he would have to transform his government into “a military dictatorship.” 18 Despite all his devious plotting, Schleicher was back where Papen had been early in December, but their roles were now reversed. Then Papen had demanded emergency powers and Schleicher had opposed him and proposed that he himself form a majority government with the backing of the Nazis. Now the General was insisting on dictatorial rule, and the sly fox Papen was assuring the Field Marshal that he himself could corral Hitler for a government that would have a majority in the Reichstag. Such are the ups and downs of rogues and intriguers! 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 4486-89  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:40 AM

On January 27 Goebbels noted: “There is still the possibility that Papen will again be made Chancellor.” The day before, Schleicher had sent the Commander in Chief of the Army, General von Hammerstein, to the President to warn him against selecting Papen. In the maze of intrigues with which Berlin was filled, Schleicher was at the last minute plumping for Hitler to replace him. Hindenburg assured the Army commander he had no intention of appointing “that Austrian corporal.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 4490-95  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:41 AM

The next day, Sunday, January 29, was a crucial one, with the conspirators playing their last desperate hands and filling the capital with the most alarming and conflicting rumors, not all of them groundless by any means. Once more Schleicher dispatched the faithful Hammerstein to stir up the brew. The Army chief sought out Hitler to warn him once again that Papen might leave him out in the cold and that it might be wise for the Nazi leader to ally himself with the fallen Chancellor and the Army. Hitler was not much interested. He returned to the Kaiserhof to have cakes and coffee with his aides and it was at this repast that Goering appeared with the tidings that the Fuehrer would be named Chancellor on the morrow. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 4515-19  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:43 AM

Blomberg went to the President, was immediately sworn in as Defense Minister, and thus was given the authority not only to put down any attempted coup by the Army but to see that the military supported the new government, which a few hours later would be named. Hitler was always grateful to the Army for accepting him at that crucial moment. Not long afterward he told a party rally, “If in the days of our revolution the Army had not stood on our side, then we would not be standing here today.” It was a responsibility which would weigh heavily on the officer corps in the days to come and which, in the end, they would more than regret. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 4520-21  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:43 AM

On this wintry morning of January 30, 1933, the tragedy of the Weimar Republic, of the bungling attempt for fourteen frustrating years of the Germans to make democracy work, had come to an end—but 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 4534-36  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:46 AM

In this way, by way of the back door, by means of a shabby political deal with the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the former tramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became Chancellor of the great nation. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 4546-51  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:47 AM

Papen himself was Vice-Chancellor of the Reich and Premier of Prussia, and Hindenburg had promised him that he would not receive the Chancellor except in the company of the Vice-Chancellor. This unique position, he was sure, would enable him to put a brake on the radical Nazi leader. But even more: This government was Papen’s conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the knowing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it. But this frivolous, conniving politician did not know Hitler—no 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 4552-57  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:48 AM

Nor did Papen, or anyone else except Hitler, quite realize the inexplicable weakness, that now bordered on paralysis, of existing institutions—the Army, the churches, the trade unions, the political parties—or of the vast non-Nazi middle class and the highly organized proletariat all of which, as Papen mournfully observed much later, would “give up without a fight.” No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 4557-59  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:48 AM

At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 4574-75  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 12:49 AM

Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries—in France, in England, in the United States—had proved to be the backbone of democracy. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 4620-25  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:20 PM

Hitler’s immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them from the driver’s seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hours when he made his first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible conservative “captors” and setting in motion a chain of events which he either originated or controlled and which at the end of six months would bring the complete Nazification of Germany and his own elevation to dictator of the Reich, unified and defederalized for the first time in German history. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 4641-43  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:21 PM

He therefore proposed that the President be asked to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. Hugenberg and Papen were trapped, but after a solemn assurance from the Nazi leader that the cabinet would remain unchanged however the elections turned out, they agreed to go along with him. New elections were set for March 5. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 4644-51  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:22 PM

For the first time—in the last relatively free election Germany was to have—the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. “Now it will be easy,” he wrote in his diary on February 3, “to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.” 2 The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its businesses as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 4659-63  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:23 PM

Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.” All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 4671-73  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:24 PM

By the beginning of February the Hitler government had banned all Communist meetings and shut down the Communist press. Social Democrat rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the leading Socialist newspapers were continually suspended. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 4677-83  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:24 PM

Goering removed hundreds of republican officials and replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers. He ordered the police to avoid “at all costs” hostility to the S.A., the S.S. and the Stahlhelm but on the other hand to show no mercy to those who were “hostile to the State.” He urged the police “to make use of firearms” and warned that those who didn’t would be punished. This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany. Just to make sure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22 established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahlhelm. Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 4708-12  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:26 PM

Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that “this is a Communist crime against the new government.” To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 4722-24  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:27 PM

The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goering. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 4752-56  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:29 PM

The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit. On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. 
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 4758-61  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:30 PM

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 4764-67  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:30 PM

Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 4772-78  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:31 PM

With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at their disposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers, the Nazis carried on an election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. For the first time the State-run radio carried the voices of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to every corner of the land. The streets, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight parades, the din of loudspeakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered with flamboyant Nazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate was in turn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by the brown terror in the streets and frightened by “revelations” about the Communist “revolution.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 4796-98  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:33 PM

On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler’s life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 4856-62  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:37 PM

Could they now hesitate to grant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed?” 12 The answer was given two days later, on March 23, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where the Reichstag convened. Before the house was the so-called Enabling Act—the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich ),” as it was officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parliament and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4890-95  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:39 PM

The vote was soon taken: 441 for, and 84 (all Social Democrats) against. The Nazi deputies sprang to their feet shouting and stamping deliriously and then, joined by the storm troopers, burst into the Horst Wessel song, which soon would take its place alongside “Deutschland ueber Alles” as one of the two national anthems: Raise high the flags! Stand rank on rank together. Storm troopers march with steady, quiet tread…. Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4898-4900  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:39 PM

It was this Enabling Act alone which formed the legal basis for Hitler’s dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler was the dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all practical purposes, by the weary old President. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 4936-41  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:42 PM

And what of Hitler’s partner in government, the German National Party, without whose support the former Austrian corporal could never have come legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, the Army, the Junkers and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, it went the way of all other parties and with the same meekness. On June 21 the police and the storm troopers took over its offices throughout the country, and on June 29 Hugenberg, the bristling party leader, who had helped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but six months before, resigned from the government and his aides “voluntarily” dissolved the party. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 5006-11  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 02:47 PM

Dr. Hans Luther, the conservative president of the Reichsbank, the key post in the German economic system, was fired by Hitler and packed off to Washington as ambassador. Into his place, on March 17, 1933, stepped the jaunty Dr. Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank and devoted follower of Hitler, who had seen the “truth and necessity” of Nazism. No single man in all of Germany would be more helpful to Hitler in building up the economic strength of the Third Reich and in furthering its rearmament for the Second World War than Schacht, who later became also Minister of Economics and Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 5038-40  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:41 PM

This he made plain to the S.A. and S.S. leaders themselves in a speech to them on July 1. What was needed now in Germany, he said, was order. “I will suppress every attempt to disturb the existing order as ruthlessly as I will deal with the so-called second revolution, which would lead only to chaos.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 5042-46  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:51 PM

The stream of revolution released must be guided into the safe channel of evolution… We must therefore not dismiss a businessman if he is a good businessman, even if he is not yet a National Socialist, and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take his place knows nothing about business. In business, ability must be the only standard… History will not judge us according to whether we have removed and imprisoned the largest number of economists, but according to whether we have succeeded in providing work… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 5057-62  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:52 PM

The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among the S.A. storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler’s mass movement, was great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of the dispossessed and the unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experience and they believed that the revolution which they had fought by brawling in the streets would bring them loot and good jobs, either in business or in the government. Now their hopes, after the heady excesses of the spring, were dashed. The old gang, whether they were party members or not, were to keep the jobs and to keep control of jobs. But this development was not the only reason for unrest in the S.A. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 5063-66  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:53 PM

From the earliest days of the Nazi movement Hitler had insisted that the storm troopers were to be a political and not a military force; they were to furnish the physical violence, the terror, by which the party could bludgeon its way to political power. To Roehm, the S.A. had been not only the backbone of the Nazi revolution but the nucleus of the future revolutionary army which would be for Hitler what the French conscript armies were to Napoleon after the French Revolution. 
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- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 5073-75  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:54 PM

Furthermore, the Nazi leader was certain that only the officer corps, with all its martial traditions and abilities, could achieve his goal of building up in a short space of time a strong, disciplined armed force. The S.A. was but a mob—good enough for street fighting but of little worth as a modern army. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 5122-32  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 05:58 PM

Germany’s position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly have been worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarily impotent. The whole world had been revolted by Nazi excesses, especially the persecution of the Jews. Germany’s neighbors, in particular France and Poland, were hostile and suspicious, and as early as March 1933, following a Polish military demonstration in Danzig, Marshal Pilsudski suggested to the French the desirability of a joint preventive war against Germany. Even Mussolini, for all his outward pose of welcoming the advent of a second fascist power, had not in fact been enthusiastic about Hitler’s coming to power. The Fuehrer of a country potentially so much stronger than Italy might soon put the Duce in the shade. A rabidly Pan-German Reich would have designs on Austria and the Balkans, where the Italian dictator had already staked out his claims. The hostility toward Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union, which had been republican Germany’s one friend in the years since 1921, was obvious. The Third Reich was indeed friendless in a hostile world. And it was disarmed, or relatively so in comparison with its highly armed neighbors. The immediate strategy and tactics of Hitler’s foreign policy therefore were dictated by the hard realities of Germany’s weak and isolated position. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 5161-63  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:42 PM

From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted. And in the Reichstag even the Socialists’ deputies, those who were not in jail or in exile, voted without dissent to make the assembly’s approval of Hitler’s foreign policy declaration unanimous. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 5175-81  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:43 PM

It is obvious from Blomberg’s orders that the German generals, at least, had no illusions that the defenses of the Reich could be held for any time at all. This, then, was the first of many crises over a period that would extend for three years—until after the Germans reoccupied the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine in 1936—when the Allies could have applied sanctions, not for Hitler’s leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League but for violations of the disarmament provisions of Versailles which had been going on in Germany for at least two years, even before Hitler. That the Allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 5193-5200  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:45 PM

The response of the German people, after fifteen years of frustration and of resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almost unanimous. Some 96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballots and 95 per cent of these approved Germany’s withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the single Nazi list for the Reichstag (which included Hugenberg and a half-dozen other non-Nazis) was 92 per cent. Even at the Dachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted for the government which had incarcerated them! It is true that in many communities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who voted the wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast his vote against the regime might be detected and punished. Yet even with these reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was a staggering victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defying the outside world as he had done, he had the overwhelming support of the German people. 
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- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 5218-20  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:47 PM

The German people, with their traditional hatred of the Poles, might not understand, but to Hitler one of the advantages of a dictatorship over democracy was that unpopular policies which promised significant results ultimately could be pursued temporarily without internal rumpus. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 5225-30  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:48 PM

When Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, he could look back on a year of achievement without parallel in German history. Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and “co-ordinated” under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 5256-59  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 07:50 PM

conservative forces in Germany were in favor of a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy as soon as the Field Marshal had passed away. He himself had other plans, and when early in April the news was secretly but authoritatively conveyed to him and Blomberg from Neudeck that the President’s days were numbered, he realized that a bold stroke must soon be made. To ensure its success he would need the backing of the officer corps; to obtain that support he was prepared to go to almost any length. 
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- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 5268-72  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:25 PM

on May 16, and after the “Pact of the Deutschland” had been explained to them, the highest officers of the German Army unanimously endorsed Hitler as the successor to President Hindenburg. 27 For the Army this political decision was to prove of historic significance. By voluntarily offering to put itself in the unrestrained hands of a megalomaniacal dictator it was sealing its own fate. As for Hitler, the deal would make his dictatorship supreme. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 5273-74  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:26 PM

The price he paid for this elevation to supreme power was paltry: the sacrifice of the S.A. He did not need it, now that he had all the authority. It was a raucous rabble that only embarrassed him. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 5274-76  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:27 PM

Hitler’s contempt for the narrow minds of the generals must have risen sharply that spring. They could be had, he must have thought, for surprisingly little. It was a judgment that he held, unaltered, except for one bad moment in June, to the end—his end and theirs. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 5282-84  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:27 PM

Within the Nazi Party itself there was a new and ruthless struggle for power. Roehm’s two most powerful enemies, Goering and Himmler, were uniting against him. On April 1 Himmler, chief of the black-coated S.S., which was still an arm of the S.A. and under Roehm’s command, was named by Goering to be chief of the Prussian Gestapo, and he immediately began to build up a secret-police empire of his own. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 5336-38  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:31 PM

In May he had seen the ailing President off to Neudeck—it was the last time he was to see his protector alive—and the grizzly but enfeebled old Field Marshal had said to him: “Things are going badly, Papen. See what you can do to put them right.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 5376-82  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:39 PM

And yet, in that last crucial week of June, Hitler hesitated—as least as to how drastic to be with the S.A. chiefs to whom he owed so much. But now Goering and Himmler helped him to make up his mind. They had already drawn up the scores they wanted to settle, long lists of present and past enemies they wished to liquidate. All they had to do was convince the Fuehrer of the enormity of the “plot” against him and of the necessity for swift and ruthless action. According to the testimony at Nuremberg of Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and one of Hitler’s most faithful followers, it was Himmler who finally succeeded in convincing Hitler that “Roehm wanted to start a putsch. The Fuehrer,” Frick added, “ordered Himmler to suppress the putsch.” Himmler, he explained, was instructed to put it down in Bavaria, and Goering in Berlin. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 5386-89  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 08:40 PM

publishing a signed article on June 29 in the Voelkischer Beobachter, affirming that “the Army… stands behind Adolf Hitler… who remains one of ours.” The Army, then, was pressing for the purge, but it did not want to soil its own hands. That must be done by Hitler, Goering and Himmler, with their black-coated S.S. and Goering’s special police. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 221 | Loc. 5424-31  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 09:03 PM

Shortly after dawn Hitler and his party sped out of Munich toward Wiessee in a long column of cars. They found Roehm and his friends still fast asleep in the Hanslbauer Hotel. The awakening was rude. Heines and his young male companion were dragged out of bed, taken outside the hotel and summarily shot on the orders of Hitler. The Fuehrer, according to Otto Dietrich’s account, entered Roehm’s room alone, gave him a dressing down and ordered him to be brought back to Munich and lodged in Stadelheim prison, where the S.A. chief had served time after his participation with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. After fourteen stormy years the two friends, who more than any others were responsible for the launching of the Third Reich, for its terror and its degradation, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in the moments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a parting of the ways, and the scar-faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazism had come to the end of his violent life. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 221 | Loc. 5431-35  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 09:03 PM

Hitler, in a final act of what he apparently thought was grace, gave orders that a pistol be left on the table of his old comrade. Roehm refused to make use of it. “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself,” he is reported to have said. Thereupon two S.A. officers, according to the testimony of an eyewitness, a police lieutenant, given twenty-three years later in a postwar trial at Munich in May 1957, entered the cell and fired their revolvers at Roehm point-blank. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 5438-41  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 09:04 PM

like hundreds of others who were slaughtered that day—like Schneidhuber, who was reported to have cried, “Gentlemen, I don’t know what this is all about, but shoot straight”—without any clear idea of what was happening, or why, other than that it was an act of treachery which he, who had lived so long with treachery and committed it so often himself, had not expected from Adolf Hitler. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 5454-58  | Added on Saturday, January 17, 2015, 09:05 PM

When Papen went to protest to Goering, the latter, who at that moment had no time for idle talk, “more or less,” he later recalled, threw him out, placing him under house arrest at his villa, which was surrounded by heavily armed S.S. men and where his telephone was cut and he was forbidden to have any contact with the outside world—an added humiliation which the Vice-Chancellor of Germany swallowed remarkably well. For within less than a month he defiled himself by accepting from the Nazi murderers of his friends a new assignment as German minister to Vienna, where the Nazis had just slain Chancellor Dollfuss. 
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January 18, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 5483-88  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:34 PM

At first Hitler accused Roehm and Schleicher of having sought the backing of a “foreign power”—obviously France—and charged that General von Bredow was the intermediary in “foreign policy.” This was part of the indictment of them as “traitors.” And though Hitler repeated the charges in his Reichstag speech and spoke sarcastically of “a foreign diplomat [who could have been no other than François-Poncet, the French ambassador] explaining that the meeting with Schleicher and Roehm was of an entirely harmless character,” he was unable to substantiate his accusations. It was crime enough, he said lamely, for any responsible German in the Third Reich even to see foreign diplomats without his knowledge. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 5489-91  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:34 PM

When three traitors in Germany arrange… a meeting with a foreign statesman… and give orders that no word of this meeting shall reach me, then I shall have such men shot dead even when it should prove true that at such a consultation which was thus kept secret from me they talked of nothing more than the weather, old coins and like topics. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 5500-5505  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:35 PM

Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the party, that a large number of his closest and most important followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers. It was common talk, for instance, that Heines used to send S.A. men scouring all over Germany to find him suitable male lovers. These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man’s personal morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement. Now, on June 30, 1934, he professed to be shocked by the moral degeneration of some of his oldest lieutenants. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 5519-24  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:38 PM

In making common cause with the lawlessness, indeed the gangsterism, of Hitler on June 30, 1934, the generals were putting themselves in a position in which they could never oppose future acts of Nazi terrorism not only at home but even when they were aimed across the frontiers, even when they were committed against their own members. For the Army was backing Hitler’s claim that he had become the law, or, as he put it in his Reichstag speech of July 13, “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge [oberster Gerichtsherr] of the German people.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 5547-50  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:41 PM

It was an oath which was to trouble the conscience of quite a few high officers when their acknowledged leader set off on a path which they felt could only lead to the nation’s destruction and which they opposed. It was also a pledge which enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of a Supreme Commander whose true nature they had seen for themselves in the butchery of June 30. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 5613-15  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:49 PM

And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage—or the desire—to vote “No.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 5698-5702  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:58 PM

For Nazi Germany, much more than Soviet Russia, was open for all the world to see. * The tourist business thrived and brought in vast sums of badly needed foreign currency. Apparently the Nazi leaders had nothing to hide. A foreigner, no matter how anti-Nazi, could come to Germany and see and study what he liked—with the exception of the concentration camps and, as in all countries, the military installations. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 5708-12  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:59 PM

The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it. The signs “Juden unerwuenscht” (Jews Not Welcome) were quietly hauled down from the shops, hotels, beer gardens and places of public entertainment, the persecution of the Jews and of the two Christian churches temporarily halted, and the country put on its best behavior. No previous games had seen such a spectacular organization nor such a lavish display of entertainment. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 5716-18  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 04:59 PM

And yet underneath the surface, hidden from the tourists during those splendid late-summer Olympic days in Berlin and indeed overlooked by most Germans or accepted by them with a startling passivity, there seemed to be—to a foreigner at least—a degrading transformation of German life. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Note on Page 233 | Loc. 5718  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:00 PM

like cuba
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 5729-34  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:04 PM

In many a town the Jew found it difficult if not impossible to purchase food. Over the doors of the grocery and butcher shops, the bakeries and the dairies, were signs, “Jews Not Admitted.” In many communities Jews could not procure milk even for their young children. Pharmacies would not sell them drugs or medicine. Hotels would not give them a night’s lodging. And always, wherever they went, were the taunting signs “Jews Strictly Forbidden in This Town” or “Jews Enter This Place at Their Own Risk.” At a sharp bend in the road near Ludwigshafen was a sign, “Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve! Jews 75 Miles an Hour!” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 5783-89  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:07 PM

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther. * The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and, furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed… and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies… in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us”—advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 5796-97  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:08 PM

In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 237 | Loc. 5811-12  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:10 PM

the “elections” returned a majority of “German Christians,” who in September at the synod in Wittenberg, where Luther had first defied Rome, elected Mueller Reich Bishop. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 5848-53  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:13 PM

The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism… National Socialism is the doing of God’s will… God’s will reveals itself in German blood… Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen [the Catholic bishop of Muenster] have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh… No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed… True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity… The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 5899-5904  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:17 PM

On the evening of May 10, 1933, some four and a half months after Hitler became Chancellor, there occurred in Berlin a scene which had not been witnessed in the Western world since the late Middle Ages. At about midnight a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended at a square on Unter den Linden opposite the University of Berlin. Torches were put to a huge pile of books that had been gathered there, and as the flames enveloped them more books were thrown on the fire until some twenty thousand had been consumed. Similar scenes took place in several other cities. The book burning had begun. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 247 | Loc. 6060-64  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:29 PM

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 6077-80  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:33 PM

For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 6114-19  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:37 PM

The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been so pre-eminent for generations, deteriorated rapidly. Great teachers such as Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or retired. Those who remained, many of them, were bitten by the Nazi aberrations and attempted to apply them to pure science. They began to teach what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics. Indeed, in 1937 there appeared a journal called Deutsche Mathematik, and its first editorial solemnly proclaimed that any idea that mathematics could be judged nonracially carried “within itself the germs of destruction of German science.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 6129-34  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:38 PM

To him Einstein, with his theory of relativity, was the archvillain. The Einstein theory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor “directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 6136-41  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:39 PM

To Professor Ludwig Bieberback, of the University of Berlin, Einstein was “an alien mountebank.” Even to Professor Lenard, “the Jew conspicuously lacks understanding for the truth… being in this respect in contrast to the Aryan research scientist with his careful and serious will to truth… Jewish physics is thus a phantom and a phenomenon of degeneration of fundamental German Physics.” 7 And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded Nobel Prizes for their contributions to science. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 6168-72  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:41 PM

Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, especially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb. The story of the successful efforts of Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to hamstring the atomic-energy program is too long and involved to be recounted here. It was one of the ironies of fate that the development of the bomb in the United States owed so much to two men who had been exiled because of race from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein from Germany and Fermi from Italy. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 6178-83  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:42 PM

His chief lieutenant for this task was a handsome young man of banal mind but of great driving force, Baldur von Schirach, who, falling under Hitler’s spell, had joined the party in 1925 at the age of eighteen and in 1931 had been named Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. Among the scar-faced, brawling Brownshirts, he had the curious look of an American college student, fresh and immature, and this perhaps was due to his having had, as we have seen, American forebears (including two signers of the Declaration of Independence). 10 Schirach was named “Youth Leader of the German Reich” in June 1933. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 6258-60  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:47 PM

In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and death in the Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, their regular schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as their rearing went, the boys and the girls, the young men and women, seemed immensely happy, filled with a zest for the life of a Hitler Youth. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Note on Page 256 | Loc. 6260  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:47 PM

like the mormons.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 6267-70  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 05:49 PM

I thought of that later, in the May days of 1940, when along the road between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrast between the German soldiers, bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth—tragic examples of the youth that England had neglected so irresponsibly in the years between the wars. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 6273-76  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:26 PM

Agricultural income in 1932–33 had fallen to a new low, more than a billion marks below the worst postwar year, 1924–25. The farmers were in debt to the amount of twelve billions, almost all of it incurred in the last eight years. Interest on these debts took some 14 per cent of all farm income, and to this was added a comparable burden in taxes and contributions to social services. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 6293-98  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:28 PM

With Hugenberg’s dismissal in June 1933, Darré became Minister of Food and Agriculture. By September he was ready with his plans to make over German agriculture. Two basic laws promulgated in that month reorganized the entire structure of production and marketing, with a view to ensuring higher prices for farmers, and at the same time put the German peasant on a new footing—accomplishing this, paradoxically, by putting him back on a very old footing in which farms were entailed, as in feudal days, and the farmer and successive inheritors compulsorily attached to their particular plot of soil (provided they were Aryan Germans) to the end of time. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 6305-7  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:28 PM

Thus the heavily indebted German farmer, at the beginning of the Third Reich, was protected from losing his property by foreclosures or from seeing it shrink in size (there being no necessity to sell a piece of it to repay a debt), but at the same time he was bound to the soil as irrevocably as the serfs of feudal times. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 6322-24  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:29 PM

The foundation of Hitler’s success in the first years rested not only on his triumphs in foreign affairs, which brought so many bloodless conquests, but on Germany’s economic recovery, which in party circles and even among some economists abroad was hailed as a miracle. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 6324-26  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:29 PM

Unemployment, the curse of the Twenties and early Thirties, was reduced, as we have seen, from six million in 1932 to less than a million four years later. National production rose 102 per cent from 1932 to 1937 and the national income was doubled. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 259 | Loc. 6331-33  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:30 PM

But the real basis of Germany’s recovery was rearmament, to which the Nazi regime directed the energies of business and labor—as well as of the generals—from 1934 on. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 6353-56  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:31 PM

He also pointed out with some glee that the funds confiscated from the enemies of the State (mostly Jews) and others taken from blocked foreign accounts had helped pay for Hitler’s guns. “Thus,” he cracked, “our armaments are partially financed with the credits of our political enemies.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 6357-59  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:31 PM

Though at his trial at Nuremberg he protested in all innocence against the accusations that he had participated in the Nazi conspiracy to make aggressive war—he had done just the contrary, he proclaimed—the fact remains that no single person was as responsible as Schacht for Germany’s economic preparation for the war which Hitler provoked in 1939. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 6365-71  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:34 PM

He negotiated amazingly profitable (for Germany) barter deals with dozens of countries and to the astonishment of orthodox economists successfully demonstrated that the more you owed a country the more business you did with it. His creation of credit in a country that had little liquid capital and almost no financial reserves was the work of genius, or—as some said—of a master manipulator. His invention of the so-called “Mefo” bills was a good example. These were simply bills created by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the State and used to pay armament manufacturers. The bills were accepted by all German banks and ultimately discounted by the Reichsbank. Since they appeared neither in the published statements of the national bank nor in the government’s budget they helped maintain secrecy as to the extent of Germany’s rearmament. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 6384-87  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:35 PM

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 6400-6405  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:36 PM

The little businessmen, who had been one of the party’s chief supports and who expected great things from Chancellor Hitler, soon found themselves, many of them, being exterminated and forced back into the ranks of wage earners. Laws decreed in October 1937 simply dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000. This quickly disposed of one fifth of all small business firms. On the other hand the great cartels, which even the Republic had favored, were further strengthened by the Nazis. In fact, under a law of July 15, 1933, they were made compulsory. The Ministry of Economics was empowered to organize new compulsory cartels or order firms to join existing ones. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 6414-16  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:37 PM

Despite his harassed life, however, the businessman made good profits. The heavy industries, chief beneficiaries of rearmament, increased theirs from 2 per cent in the boom year of 1926 to 6½ per cent in 1938, the last full year of peace. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 6420-23  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:38 PM

Besides his pleasant profits, the businessman was also cheered by the way the workers had been put in their place under Hitler. There were no more unreasonable wage demands. Actually, wages were reduced a little despite a 25 per cent rise in the cost of living. And above all, there were no costly strikes. In fact, there were no strikes at all. Such manifestations of unruliness were verboten in the Third Reich. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 6424-26  | Added on Sunday, January 18, 2015, 09:38 PM

Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 6460-63  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:06 AM

Finally, the take-home pay of the German worker shrank. Besides stiff income taxes, compulsory contributions to sickness, unemployment and disability insurance, and Labor Front dues, the manual worker—like everyone else in Nazi Germany—was constantly pressured to make increasingly large gifts to an assortment of Nazi charities, the chief of which was Winterhilfe (Winter Relief). Many a workman lost his job because he failed to contribute to Winterhilfe or because his contribution was deemed too small. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 6465-66  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:07 AM

In the mid-Thirties it was estimated that taxes and contributions took from 15 to 35 per cent of a worker’s gross wage. Such a cut out of $6.95 a week did not leave a great deal for rent and food and clothing and recreation. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 6471-76  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:08 AM

Various government decrees beginning with the law of May 15, 1934, severely restricted a worker’s freedom of movement from one job to another. After June 1935 the state employment offices were given exclusive control of employment; they determined who could be hired for what and where. The “workbook” was introduced in February 1935, and eventually no worker could be hired unless he possessed one. In it was kept a record of his skills and employment. The workbook not only provided the State and the employer with up-to-date data on every single employee in the nation but was used to tie a worker to his bench. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 6481-85  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:09 AM

Tied down by so many controls at wages little above the subsistence level, the German workers, like the Roman proletariat, were provided with circuses by their rulers to divert attention from their miserable state. “We had to divert the attention of the masses from material to moral values,” Dr. Ley once explained. “It is more important to feed the souls of men than their stomachs.” So he came up with an organization called Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”). This provided what can only be called regimented leisure. 
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- Highlight on Page 266 | Loc. 6508-10  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:11 AM

As the largest single party organization in the country, with twenty-five million members, the Labor Front became a swollen bureaucracy, with tens of thousands of full-time employees. In fact, it was estimated that from 20 to 25 per cent of its income was absorbed by administration expense. 
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- Highlight on Page 266 | Loc. 6510-13  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:11 AM

One particular swindle perpetrated by Hitler on the German workers deserves passing mention. This had to do with the Volkswagen (the “People’s Car”)—a brainstorm of the Fuehrer himself. Every German, or at least every German workman, he said, should own an automobile,-just as in the United States. 
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- Note on Page 266 | Loc. 6513  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:12 AM

where u gonna ge gas for it
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- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 6534-36  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:14 AM

But the greatest cause of his acceptance of his role in Nazi Germany was, without any doubt at all, that he had a job again and the assurance that he would keep it. An observer who had known something about his precarious predicament during the Republic could understand why he did not seem to be desperately concerned with the loss of political freedom and even of his trade unions as long as he was employed full-time. 
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- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 6536-40  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:14 AM

In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class, probably the most skillful and industrious and disciplined in the Western world. It was a backing given not to his half-baked ideology or to his evil intentions, as such, but to what counted most: the production of goods for war. 
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- Note on Page 267 | Loc. 6540  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:14 AM

freedom to starve. grand inquisitor. 
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 6607-9  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:21 AM

An obscure post office employee who had been asked to furnish a franking stamp for the new bureau suggested that it be called the Geheime Staatspolizei, simply the “Secret State Police”—GESTAPO for short—and thus unwittingly created a name the very mention of which was to inspire terror first within Germany and then without. 
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- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 6633-35  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:24 AM

The S.S. Fuehrer saw more clearly than the Minister that the purpose of the concentration camps was not only to punish enemies of the regime but by their very existence to terrorize the people and deter them from even contemplating any resistance to Nazi rule. 
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- Highlight on Page 271 | Loc. 6636-39  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:24 AM

Shortly after the Roehm purge, Hitler turned the concentration camps over to the control of the S.S., which proceeded to organize them with the efficiency and ruthlessness expected of this elite corps. Guard duty was given exclusively to the Death’s-Head units (Totenkopfverbaende) whose members were recruited from the toughest Nazi elements, served an enlistment of twelve years and wore the familiar skull-and-bones insignia on their black tunics. 
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- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 6645-48  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:25 AM

But at the beginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler’s men were as yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi “medical research,” had to wait for the war. 
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- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 6662-65  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:26 AM

Originally formed by Himmler in 1932 as the intelligence branch of the S.S., and placed by him under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, later internationally renowned as “Hangman Heydrich,” its initial function had been to watch over members of the party and report any suspicious activity. In 1934 it became also the intelligence unit for the secret police, and by 1938 a new law gave it this function for the entire Reich. 
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- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 6682-87  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:28 AM

Copy is attached enumerating the persons who cast “No” votes or invalid votes at Kappel. The control was affected in the following way: some members of the election committee marked all the ballots with numbers. During the balloting a voters’ list was made up. The ballots were handed out in numerical order, therefore it was possible afterward… to find out the persons who cast “No” votes or invalid votes. The marking was done on the back of the ballot with skimmed milk. The ballot cast by the Protestant parson Alfred Wolfers is also enclosed. 
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- Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 6698-6706  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 02:29 AM

It will be remembered that the aged President was bamboozled into signing the decree the day after the Reichstag fire when Hitler assured him that there was grave danger of a Communist revolution. The decree, which suspended all civil rights, remained in force throughout the time of the Third Reich, enabling the Fuehrer to rule by a sort of continual martial law. The Enabling Act too, which the Reichstag had voted on March 24, 1933, and by which it handed over its legislative functions to the Nazi government, was the second pillar in the “constitutionality” of Hitler’s rule. Each four years thereafter it was dutifully prolonged for another four-year period by a rubber-stamp Reichstag, for it never occurred to the dictator to abolish this once democratic institution but only to make it nondemocratic. It met only a dozen times up to the war, “enacted” only four laws, * held no debates or votes and never heard any speeches except those made by Hitler. 
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- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 6846-51  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:11 AM

A visitor to the Ruhr and Rhineland industrial areas in those days might have been struck by the intense activity of the armament works, especially those of Krupp, chief German gunmakers for three quarters of a century, and I. G. Farben, the great chemical trust. Although Krupp had been forbidden by the Allies to continue in the armament business after 1919, the company had really not been idle. As Krupp would boast in 1942, when the German armies occupied most of Europe, “the basic principle of armament and turret design for tanks had already been worked out in 1926… Of the guns being used in 1939–41, the most important ones were already fully complete in 1933.” 
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- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 6852-57  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:11 AM

Now under Hitler the trust set out to make Germany self-sufficient in two materials without which modern war could not be fought: gasoline and rubber, both of which had had to be imported. The problem of making synthetic gasoline from coal had actually been solved by the company’s scientists in the mid-Twenties. After 1933, the Nazi government gave I. G. Farben the go-ahead with orders to raise its synthetic oil production to 300,000 tons a year by 1937. By that time the company had also discovered how to make synthetic rubber from coal and other products of which Germany had a sufficiency, and the first of four plants was set up at Schkopau for large-scale production of buna, as the artificial rubber became known. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6884-87  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:14 AM

On March 10, Hitler sent up a trial balloon to test the mettle of the Allies. The accommodating Ward Price was called in and given an interview with Goering, who told him officially what all the world knew, that Germany had a military Air Force. Hitler confidently awaited the reaction in London to this unilateral abrogation of Versailles. It was just what he expected. Sir John Simon told the Commons that he still counted on going to Berlin. 
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- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 6893-95  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:15 AM

Sunday, March 17, was a day of rejoicing and celebration in Germany. The shackles of Versailles, symbol of Germany’s defeat and humiliation, had been torn off. No matter how much a German might dislike Hitler and his gangster rule, he had to admit that the Fuehrer had accomplished what no republican government had ever dared attempt. 
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- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 6924-30  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:17 AM

He rejected the very idea of war; it was senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror. The blood shed on the European continent in the course of the last three hundred years bears no proportion to the national result of the events. In the end France has remained France, Germany Germany, Poland Poland, and Italy Italy. What dynastic egotism, political passion and patriotic blindness have attained in the way of apparently far-reaching political changes by shedding rivers of blood has, as regards national feeling, done no more than touched the skin of the nations. It has not substantially altered their fundamental characters. If these states had applied merely a fraction of their sacrifices to wiser purposes the success would certainly have been greater and more permanent. 
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- Highlight on Page 287 | Loc. 6965-68  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 09:20 AM

A little after ten in the evening, Hitler came to his peroration: Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We, however, live in the firm conviction that in our time will be fulfilled not the decline but the renaissance of the West. That Germany may make an imperishable contribution to this great work is our proud hope and our unshakable belief. 
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- Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 7005-11  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 06:56 PM

For it was obvious to the most simple mind in Berlin that by agreeing to Germany’s building a navy a third as large as the British, the London government was giving Hitler free rein to build up a navy as fast as was physically possible—one that would tax the capacity of his shipyards and steel mills for at least ten years. It was thus not a limitation on German rearmament but an encouragement to expand it, in the naval arm, as rapidly as Germany could find the means to do so. To add insult to the injury already done France, the British government, in fulfillment of a promise to Hitler, refused to tell her closest ally what kind of ships and how many Great Britain had agreed that Germany should build, except that the German submarine tonnage—the building of submarines in Germany was specifically forbidden by Versailles—would be 60 per cent of Britain’s and, if exceptional circumstances arose, might be 100 per cent. 
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- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 7049-52  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 07:01 PM

All through the winter of 1935–36 Hitler bided his time. France and Britain, he could not help but note, were preoccupied with stopping Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia, but Mussolini seemed to be getting by with it. Despite its much-publicized sanctions, the League of Nations was proving itself impotent to halt a determined aggressor. 
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- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 7067-71  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 07:03 PM

“Hitler struck his adversary in the face,” François-Poncet wryly observed, “and as he did so declared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’” 20 Indeed, two hours later the Fuehrer was standing at the rostrum of the Reichstag before a delirious audience, expounding on his desire for peace and his latest ideas of how to maintain it. I went over to the Kroll Opera House to see the spectacle, which I shall never forget, for it was both fascinating and gruesome. 
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- Highlight on Page 293 | Loc. 7104-10  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 07:06 PM

As Jodl testified at Nuremberg, “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” 24 It could have—and had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco. Hitler himself admitted as much. “A retreat on our part,” he conceded later, “would have spelled collapse.” 25 It was Hitler’s iron nerves alone, which now, as during many crises that lay ahead, saved the situation and, confounding the reluctant generals, brought success. But it was no easy moment for him. 
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- Highlight on Page 293 | Loc. 7110-13  | Added on Monday, January 19, 2015, 07:06 PM

“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland,” Paul Schmidt, his interpreter, heard him later say, “were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.” 
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- Bookmark on Page 295 | Loc. 7153  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:16 AM


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- Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 7151-60  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:16 AM

In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact—as we have seen Hitler admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by. For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany’s feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco–German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications while the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 7203-5  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:21 AM

On May 2, 1936, Italian forces entered the Abyssinian capital, Addis Ababa, and on July 4 the League of Nations formally capitulated and called off its sanctions against Italy. Two weeks later, on July 16, Franco staged a military revolt in Spain and civil war broke out. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 7210-14  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:22 AM

Though German aid to Franco never equaled that given by Italy, which dispatched between sixty and seventy thousand troops as well as vast supplies of arms and planes, it was considerable. The Germans estimated later that they spent half a billion marks on the venture 37 besides furnishing planes, tanks, technicians and the Condor Legion, an Air Force unit which distinguished itself by the obliteration of the Spanish town of Guernica and its civilian inhabitants. Relative to Germany’s own massive rearmament it was not much, but it paid handsome dividends to Hitler. 
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- Highlight on Page 298 | Loc. 7225-28  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:24 AM

The struggle for dominant political influence in Spain lays bare the natural opposition between Italy and France; at the same time the position of Italy as a power in the western Mediterranean comes into competition with that of Britain. All the more clearly will Italy recognize the advisability of confronting the Western powers shoulder to shoulder with Germany. 
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- Highlight on Page 299 | Loc. 7252-55  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:26 AM

But in this treaty too there was a secret protocol, specifically directed against Russia. In case of an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union against Germany or Japan, the two nations agreed to consult on what measures to take “to safeguard their common interests” and also to “take no measures which would tend to ease the situation of the Soviet Union.” 
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- Highlight on Page 301 | Loc. 7304-8  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:31 AM

on September 25, 1937, outfitted in a new uniform created especially for the occasion, he crossed the Alps into the Third Reich. Feted and flattered as a conquering hero by Hitler and his aides, Mussolini could not then know how fateful a journey this was, the first of many to Hitler’s side which were to lead to a progressive weakening of his own position and finally to a disastrous end. Hitler’s purpose was not to engage in further diplomatic conversations with his guest but to impress him with Germany’s strength and thus play on Mussolini’s obsession to cast his lot with the winning side. 
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 7322-24  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 12:33 AM

King Leopold withdrew his country from the Locarno Pact and from its alliance with Britain and France and proclaimed that henceforth Belgium would follow a strict course of neutrality. This was a serious blow to the collective defense of the West, but in April 1937 Britain and France accepted it—an action for which they, as well as Belgium, would soon pay dearly. 
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- Highlight on Page 305 | Loc. 7389-92  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 09:55 AM

The meeting began at 4:15 P.M. and lasted until 8:30, with Hitler doing most of the talking. What he had to say, he began, was the fruit of “thorough deliberation and the experiences of four and a half years of power.” He explained that he regarded the remarks he was about to make as of such importance that, in the event of his death, they should be regarded as his last will and testament. 
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- Highlight on Page 308 | Loc. 7456-60  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 10:02 AM

But now the Wehrmacht chiefs and the Foreign Minister were confronted with specific dates for actual aggression against two neighboring countries—an action which they were sure would bring on a European war. They must be ready by the following year, 1938, and at the latest by 1943–45. The realization stunned them. Not, so far as the Hossbach records show, because they were struck down by the immorality of their Leader’s proposals but for more practical reasons: Germany was not ready for a big war; to provoke one now would risk disaster. 
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- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 7710-12  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:36 PM

Jodl, whose chief source of information was Keitel, began sprinkling his diary with entries which indicated that a drastic shake-up not only in the Army Command but in the whole organization of the armed forces was being worked out which would at last bring the military to heel. 
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- Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 7722-24  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:38 PM

“It was clear to these men,” Foerster says, “that a military putsch would mean civil war and was by no means sure of success.” Then, as always, the German generals wanted to be sure of winning before taking any great risks. 
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- Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 7737-41  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:39 PM

It would be a blow too to the party and to Hitler himself; it would shake the foundations of the Third Reich so violently that the Fuehrer himself might topple over. If he tried to cover up the crime, the Army itself, with a clear conscience, now that the truth was known, would take matters in its own hands. But once again, as so often in the past five years, the generals were outsmarted by the former Austrian corporal and then utterly defeated by fate, which the Leader, if not they, knew how to take advantage of for his own ends. 
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- Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 7748-52  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:42 PM

On February 4, 1938, the German cabinet met for what was to prove the last time. Whatever difficulties Hitler had experienced, he now resolved them in a manner which eliminated those who stood in his way, not only in the Army but in the Foreign Office. A decree which he hastily put through the cabinet that day and which was announced to the nation and the world on the radio shortly before midnight began: “From now on I take over personally the command of the whole armed forces.” 
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- Highlight on Page 318 | Loc. 7753-56  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:43 PM

abolished the War Ministry, over which the now moon-struck bridegroom had also presided. In its place was created the organization which was to become familiar to the world during World War II, the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), to which the three fighting services, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, were subordinated. 
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- Highlight on Page 320 | Loc. 7784-85  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:45 PM

February 4, 1938, is a major turning point in the history of the Third Reich, a milestone on its road to war. On that date the Nazi revolution, it might be said, was completed. 
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- Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 7845-48  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:48 PM

Though we observed these happenings at first hand, it is amazing how little we really knew of how they came about. The plottings and maneuvers, the treachery, the fateful decisions and moments of indecision, and the dramatic encounters of the principal participants which shaped the course of events took place in secret beneath the surface, hidden from the prying eyes of foreign diplomats, journalists and spies, and thus for years remained largely unknown to all but a few who took part in them. 
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- Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 7852-53  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:49 PM

Thus, it happened that I was in Vienna on the memorable night of March 11–12, 1938, when Austria ceased to exist. 
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- Highlight on Page 323 | Loc. 7865-69  | Added on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 06:52 PM

on January 25, 1938, Austrian police raided the Vienna headquarters of a group called the Committee of Seven, which had been set up to bring about peace between the Nazis and the Austrian government, but which in reality served as the central office of the illegal Nazi underground. There they found documents initialed by Rudolf Hess, the Fuehrer’s deputy, which made it clear that the Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revolt in the spring of 1938 and that when Schuschnigg attempted to put it down, the German Army would enter Austria to prevent “German blood from being shed by Germans.” 
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- Highlight on Page 326 | Loc. 7940-42  | Added on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 09:59 AM

and this mission I will fulfill because Providence has destined me to do so… who is not with me will be crushed… I have chosen the most difficult road that any German ever took; I have made the greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater than any other German. 
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- Highlight on Page 329 | Loc. 8021-26  | Added on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 10:04 AM

I have decided to change my mind—for the first time in my life [Hitler said]. But I warn you this is your very last chance. I have given you three additional days to carry out the agreement. 12 That was the extent of the German dictator’s concessions, and though the wording of the final draft was somewhat softened, the changes, as Schuschnigg later testified, were inconsequential. Schuschnigg signed. It was Austria’s death warrant. 
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- Highlight on Page 344 | Loc. 8366-72  | Added on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 07:07 PM

And what stand were Great Britain and France and the League of Nations taking at this critical moment to halt Germany’s aggression against a peaceful neighboring country? None. For the moment France was again without a government. On Thursday, March 10, Premier Chautemps and his cabinet had resigned. All through the crucial day of Friday, March 11, when Goering was telephoning his ultimatums to Vienna, there was no one in Paris who could act. It was not until the Anschluss had been proclaimed on the thirteenth that a French government was formed under Léon Blum. And Britain? On February 20, a week after Schuschnigg had capitulated at Berchtesgaden, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had resigned, principally because of his opposition to further appeasement of Mussolini by Prime Minister Chamberlain. He was replaced by Lord Halifax. 
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- Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 8417-18  | Added on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 07:10 PM

It may have been that even the astute Czech President, Eduard Beneš, did not have time to realize that evening that Austria’s end meant Czechoslovakia’s as well. 
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- Highlight on Page 349 | Loc. 8484-87  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:19 AM

The Fuehrer wound up his election campaign in Vienna on April 9, on the eve of the polling. The man who had once tramped the pavements of this city as a vagabond, unwashed and empty-bellied, who but four years before had assumed in Germany the powers of the Hohenzollern kings and had now taken upon himself those of the Hapsburg emperors, was full of a sense of God-given mission. 
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- Highlight on Page 350 | Loc. 8514-16  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:21 AM

Vienna became just another city of the Reich, a provincial district administrative center, withering away. The former Austrian tramp become dictator had wiped his native land off the map and deprived its once glittering capital of its last shred of glory and importance. Disillusionment among the Austrians was inevitable. 
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- Highlight on Page 351 | Loc. 8519-23  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:22 AM

Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrines and the toilets of the barracks where the S.A. and the S.S. were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen. I myself, from our apartment in the Plosslgasse, watched squads of S.S. men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door. Baron Louis de Rothschild himself was later able to buy his way out of Vienna by turning over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works. 
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- Highlight on Page 351 | Loc. 8524-28  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:23 AM

This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the “Office for Jewish Emigration,” which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the country. Administered from the beginning to the end by an Austrian Nazi, a native of Hitler’s home town of Linz by the name of Karl Adolf Eichmann, it was to become eventually an agency not of emigration but of extermination and to organize the slaughter of more than four million persons, mostly Jews. 
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- Highlight on Page 353 | Loc. 8581-84  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:27 AM

The British Prime Minister, it became clear to Hitler, was unwilling not only to employ force but even to concert with the other Big Powers about halting Germany’s future moves. On March 17 the Soviet government had proposed a conference of powers, within or without the League of Nations, to consider means of seeing that there was no further German aggression. Chamberlain took a chilly view of any such meeting and on March 24, in the House of Commons, publicly rejected it. 
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- Highlight on Page 354 | Loc. 8609-13  | Added on Thursday, January 22, 2015, 09:29 AM

On the second day, March 18, the trial was concluded with the inevitable verdict: “Proven not guilty as charged, and acquitted.” It was a personal exoneration for General von Fritsch but it did not restore him to his command, nor the Army to its former position of some independence in the Third Reich. Since the trial was held in camera, the public knew nothing of it or of the issues involved. 
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- Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 8772-76  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 02:04 PM

Even the Slovaks, who formed a quarter of the ten million Czechoslovaks, wanted some measure of autonomy. Although racially and linguistically closely related to the Czechs, the Slovaks had developed differently—historically, culturally and economically—largely due to their centuries-old domination by Hungary. An agreement between Czech and Slovak émigrés in America signed in Pittsburgh on May 30, 1918, had provided for the Slovaks’ having their own government, parliament and courts. But the government in Prague had not felt bound by this agreement and had not kept it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 8802-4  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 02:07 PM

Thus, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was for Hitler merely a pretext, as Danzig was to be a year later in regard to Poland, for cooking up a stew in a land he coveted, undermining it, confusing and misleading its friends and concealing his real purpose. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 8836-41  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 02:10 PM

the “May crisis.” During the ensuing forty-eight hours, the governments in London, Paris, Prague and Moscow were panicked into the belief that Europe stood nearer to war than it had at any time since the summer of 1914. This may have been largely due to the possibility that new plans for a German attack on Czechoslovakia, which were drawn up for Hitler by OKW and presented to him on that Friday, leaked out. At any rate, it was believed at least in Prague and London that Hitler was about to launch aggression against Czechoslovakia. In this belief the Czechs began to mobilize and Britain, France and Russia displayed a firmness and a unity in the face of what their governments feared to be an imminent German threat which they were not to show again until a new world war had almost destroyed them. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 8846-51  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:10 PM

The new directive for “Green,” dated Berlin, May 20, 1938, is an interesting and significant document. It is a model of the kind of Nazi planning for aggression with which the world later became acquainted. It is not my intention [it began] to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the immediate future without provocation, unless an unavoidable development… within [emphasis in the original] Czechoslovakia forces the issue, or political events in Europe create a particularly favorable opportunity which may perhaps never recur. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 362 | Loc. 8854-59  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:10 PM

Operations preferably will be launched, either: (a) after a period of increasing diplomatic controversies and tension linked with military preparations, which will be exploited so as to shift the war guilt on the enemy. (b) by lightning action as the result of a serious incident which will subject Germany to unbearable provocation and which, in the eyes of at least a part of world opinion, affords the moral justification for military measures. Case (b) is more favorable, both from a military and a political point of view. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 362 | Loc. 8871-77  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:11 PM

Propaganda warfare [emphasis in the original] must on the one hand intimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power of resistance; on the other hand it must give the national minorities indications as to how to support our military operations and influence the neutrals in our favor. Economic warfare has the task of employing all available economic resources to hasten the final collapse of the Czechs… In the course of military operations it is important to help to increase the total economic war effort by rapidly collecting information about important factories and setting them going again as soon as possible. For this reason the sparing—as far as military operations permit—of Czech industrial and engineering establishments may be of decisive importance to us. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 363 | Loc. 8880-89  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:12 PM

Shortly after noon on May 20, the German minister in Prague sent an “urgent and most secret” wire to Berlin reporting that the Czech Foreign Minister had just informed him by telephone that his government was “perturbed by reports of concentration of [German] troops in Saxony.” He had replied, he said, “that there were absolutely no grounds for anxiety,” but he requested Berlin to inform him immediately what, if anything, was up. This was the first of a series of feverish diplomatic exchanges that weekend which shook Europe with a fear that Hitler was about to move again and that this time a general war would follow. The basis for the information received by British and Czech intelligence that German troops were concentrating on the Czech border has never, so far as I know, come to light. To a Europe still under the shock of the German military occupation of Austria there were several straws in the wind. On May 19 a newspaper in Leipzig had published a report of German troop movements. Henlein, the Sudeten Fuehrer, had announced the breaking off of his party’s negotiations with the Czech government on May 9 and it was known that on his return from London on the fourteenth he had stopped off at Berchtesgaden to see Hitler and that he was still there. There were shooting affrays in the Sudetenland. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 8917-20  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:14 PM

In all these British communications the Germans did not fail to note, as Ambassador von Dirksen pointed out in a dispatch after seeing Halifax, that the British government, while certain that France would go to the aid of Czechoslovakia, did not affirm that Britain would too. The furthest the British would go was to warn, as Dirksen says Halifax did, that “in the event of a European conflict it was impossible to foresee whether Britain would not be drawn into it.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 8922-25  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:15 PM

It was this writer’s impression in Berlin from that moment until the end that had Chamberlain frankly told Hitler that Britain would do what it ultimately did in the face of Nazi aggression, the Fuehrer would never have embarked on the adventures which brought on the Second World War—an impression which has been immensely strengthened by the study of the secret German documents. This was the well-meaning Prime Minister’s fatal mistake. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 8950-57  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:18 PM

The details of the new directive on Case Green which Hitler signed on May 30 do not differ essentially from those of the version submitted to Hitler nine days before. But there are two significant changes. Instead of the opening sentence of May 21, which read: “It is not my intention to smash Czechoslovakia in the near future,” the new directive began: “It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.” What the “near future” meant was explained by Keitel in a covering letter. “Green’s execution,” he ordered, “must be assured by October 1, 1938, at the latest.” 15 It was a date which Hitler would adhere to through thick and thin, through crisis after crisis, and at the brink of war, without flinching. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 367 | Loc. 8984-87  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:21 PM

Beck was convinced, he wrote in his May 5 memorandum, that a German attack on Czechoslovakia would provoke a European war in which Britain, France and Russia would oppose Germany and in which the United States would be the arsenal of the Western democracies. Germany simply could not win such a war. Its lack of raw materials alone made victory impossible. In fact, he contended, Germany’s “military-economic situation is worse than it was in 1917–18,” when the collapse of the Kaiser’s armies began. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 9014-24  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:24 PM

On July 16 he penned his last memorandum to Brauchitsch. He demanded that the Army tell Hitler to halt his preparations for war. In full consciousness of the magnitude of such a step but also of my responsibilities I feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces [Hitler] call off his preparations for war, and abandon the intention of solving the Czech question by force until the military situation is fundamentally changed. For the present I consider it hopeless, and this view is shared by all the higher officers of the General Staff. Beck took his memorandum personally to Brauchitsch and augmented it orally with further proposals for unified action on the part of the Army generals should Hitler prove recalcitrant. Specifically, he proposed that in that case the ranking generals should all resign at once. And for the first time in the Third Reich, he raised a question which later haunted the Nuremberg trials: Did an officer have a higher allegiance than the one to the Fuehrer? At Nuremberg dozens of generals excused their war crimes by answering in the negative. They had to obey orders, they said. But Beck on July 16 held a different view, which he was to press, unsuccessfully for the most part, to the end. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 9038-39  | Added on Friday, January 23, 2015, 08:25 PM

Beck was too naïve politically to realize that Hitler, more than any other single man, was responsible for the very conditions in Germany which now revolted him. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 9109-11  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 01:21 AM

After five and a half years of National Socialism it was evident to the few Germans who opposed Hitler that only the Army possessed the physical strength to overthrow him. The workers, the middle and upper classes, even if they had wanted to, had no means of doing it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 9126-29  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 01:23 AM

The light came a little later to two other eventual conspirators, Johannes Popitz, Prussian Minister of Finance, and Dr. Schacht. Both had received the Nazi Party’s highest decoration, the Golden Badge of Honor, for their services in shaping Germany’s economy for war purposes. Both had begun to wake up to what Hitler’s real goal was in 1938. Neither of them seems to have been fully trusted by the inner circle of the opposition because of their past and their character. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 9336-42  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:44 PM

The information he brought on the evening of September 5 to Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s confidential adviser, seemed so important and urgent that this official spirited him by a back way to Downing Street and the chambers of the British Foreign Secretary. There he bluntly informed Lord Halifax that Hitler was planning to order a general mobilization on September 16, that the attack on Czechoslovakia had been fixed for October 1 at the latest, that the German Army was preparing to strike against Hitler the moment the final order for attack was given and that it would succeed if Britain and France held firm. Halifax was also warned that Hitler’s speech closing the Nuremberg Party Rally on September 12 would be explosive and might precipitate a showdown over Czechoslovakia and that that would be the moment for Britain to stand up against the dictator. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 9356-58  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:45 PM

In these crisis-ridden years that have followed World War II it is difficult to recall the dark and almost unbearable tension that gripped the capitals of Europe as the Nuremberg Party Rally, which had begun on September 6, approached its climax on September 12, when Hitler was scheduled to make his closing speech and expected to proclaim to the world his final decision for peace or war with Czechoslovakia. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 388 | Loc. 9499-9506  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:52 PM

Lord Runciman was summoned from Prague to make his recommendations. They were astonishing. Runciman, in his zeal to appease the Germans, went further than Hitler. He advocated transferring the predominantly Sudeten territories to Germany without bothering about a plebiscite. He strongly recommended the stifling of all criticism of Germany in Czechoslovakia “by parties or persons” through legal measures. He demanded that Czechoslovakia, even though deprived of her mountain barrier and fortifications—and thus left helpless—should nevertheless “so remodel her foreign relations as to give assurances to her neighbors that she will in no circumstances attack them or enter into any aggressive action against them arising from obligations to other States.” For even Runciman to be concerned at this hour with the danger of aggression from a rump Czech state against Nazi Germany seems incredible, but his fantastic recommendations apparently made a deep impression on the British cabinet and bolstered Chamberlain’s intention to meet Hitler’s demands. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 9598-9600  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:56 PM

But the Fuehrer was unmoved by the personal plight of the British Prime Minister. The Sudeten area, he demanded, must be occupied by Germany at once. The problem “must be completely and finally solved by October first, at the latest.” He had a map handy to indicate what territories must be ceded immediately. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 9608-13  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:57 PM

For Adolf Hitler himself was caught in a dilemma. Though Chamberlain did not know it, the Fuehrer’s real objective, as he had laid it down in his OKW directive after the May crisis, was “to destroy Czechoslovakia by military action.” To accept the Anglo–French plan, which the Czechs already had agreed to, however reluctantly, would not only give Hitler his Sudeten Germans but would effectively destroy the Czech state, since it would be left defenseless. But it would not be by military action, and the Fuehrer was determined not only to humiliate President Beneš and the Czech government, which had so offended him in May, but to expose the spinelessness of the Western powers. For that, at least a military occupation was necessary. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 9626-29  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:58 PM

Hitler presented his demands in the form of a memorandum with an accompanying map. Chamberlain found himself confronted with a new time limit. The Czechs were to begin the evacuation of the ceded territory by 8 A.M. on September 26—two days hence—and complete it by September 28. “But this is nothing less than an ultimatum!” Chamberlain exclaimed. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 9629-31  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:58 PM

“Nothing of the sort,” Hitler shot back. When Chamberlain retorted that the German word Diktat applied to it, Hitler answered, “It is not a Diktat at all. Look, the document is headed by the word ‘Memorandum.’” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 9632-44  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 05:59 PM

At this moment an adjutant brought in an urgent message for the Fuehrer. He glanced at it and tossed it to Schmidt, who was interpreting. “Read this to Mr. Chamberlain.” Schmidt did. “Beneš has just announced over the radio a general mobilization in Czechoslovakia.” The room, Schmidt recalled afterward, was deadly still. Then Hitler spoke: “Now, of course, the whole affair is settled. The Czechs will not dream of ceding any territory to Germany.” Chamberlain, according to the Schmidt minutes, disagreed. In fact, there followed a furious argument. The Czechs had mobilized first [said Hitler]. Chamberlain contradicted this. Germany had mobilized first… The Fuehrer denied that Germany had mobilized. And so the talks continued into the early-morning hours. Finally, after Chamberlain had inquired whether the German memorandum “was really his last word” and Hitler had replied that it was indeed, the Prime Minister answered that there was no point in continuing the conversations. He had done his utmost; his efforts had failed. He was going away with a heavy heart, for the hopes with which he had come to Germany were destroyed. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 9673-77  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:00 PM

Premier Daladier, arrived in London on Sunday, September 25, the two governments were apprised of the formal rejection of the Godesberg proposals by the Czech government. * There was nothing for the French to do but affirm that they would honor their word and come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if attacked. But they had to know what Britain would do. Finally cornered, or so it seemed, Chamberlain agreed to inform Hitler that if France became engaged in war with Germany as a result of her treaty obligations to the Czechs, Britain would feel obliged to support her. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 9753-58  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:03 PM

The good people of Berlin simply did not want to be reminded of war. In my diary that night I noted down the surprising scene. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column [of troops] was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them… But today they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence… It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 400 | Loc. 9766-70  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:04 PM

The news from Paris was graver. From the German military attaché there came a telegram marked “Very Urgent” and addressed not only to the Foreign Ministry but to OKW and the General Staff. It warned that France’s partial mobilization was so much like a total one “that I reckon with the completion of the deployment of the first 65 divisions on the German frontier by the sixth day of mobilization.” Against such a force the Germans had, as Hitler knew, barely a dozen divisions, half of them reserve units of doubtful value. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 402 | Loc. 9824-26  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:07 PM

Thus Chamberlain was putting the responsibility for peace or war no longer on Hitler but on Beneš. And he was giving a military opinion which even the German generals, as we have seen, held as irresponsible. However, he did add, at the end of his message, that he would not assume the responsibility of telling the Czechs what they must now do. It was up to them. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 9880-83  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:09 PM

Deep gloom hung over Berlin, Prague, London and Paris as “Black Wednesday,” September 28, dawned. War seemed inevitable. “A Great War can hardly be avoided any longer,” Jodl quoted Goering as saying that morning. “It may last seven years, and we will win it.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 9883-9919  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:12 PM

68 In London the digging of trenches, the evacuation of school children, the emptying of hospitals, continued. In Paris there was a scramble for the choked trains leaving the city, and the motor traffic out of the capital was jammed. There were similar scenes in western Germany. Jodl jotted in his diary that morning reports of German refugees fleeing from the border regions. At 2 P.M. Hitler’s time limit for Czechoslovakia’s acceptance of the Godesberg proposals would run out. There was no sign from Prague that they would be accepted. There were, however, certain other signs: great activity in the Wilhelmstrasse; a frantic coming and going of the French, British and Italian ambassadors. But of these the general public and indeed the German generals remained ignorant. To some of the generals and to General Halder, Chief of the General Staff, above all, the time had come to carry out their plot to remove Hitler and save the Fatherland from plunging into a European war which they felt it was doomed to lose. All through September the conspirators, according to the later accounts of the survivors, * had been busy working out their plans. General Halder was in close touch with Colonel Oster and his chief at the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, who tried to keep him abreast of Hitler’s political moves and of foreign intelligence. The plotters, as we have seen, had warned London of Hitler’s resolve to attack Czechoslovakia by the end of September and had begged the British government to make clear that Britain, along with France, would answer German aggression by armed force. For some months General von Witzleben, who commanded the Berlin Military District, and who would have to furnish most of the troops to carry out the coup, had been hesitant because he suspected that London and Paris had secretly given Hitler a free hand in the East and would therefore not go to war over Czechoslovakia—a view shared by several other generals and one which Hitler and Ribbentrop had encouraged. If this were true, the plot to depose Hitler, in the opinion of generals such as Witzleben and Halder, was senseless. For, at this stage of the Third Reich, they were concerned only with getting rid of the Fuehrer in order to avert a European war which Germany had no chance of winning. If there were really no risk of a big war, if Chamberlain were going to give Hitler what he wanted in Czechoslovakia without a war, then they saw no point in trying to carry out a revolt. To assure the generals that Britain and France meant business, Colonel Oster and Gisevius arranged for General Halder and General von Witzleben to meet Schacht, who, besides having prestige with the military hierarchy as the man who financed German rearmament and who still was in the cabinet, was considered an expert on British affairs. Schacht assured them that the British would fight if Hitler resorted to arms against the Czechs. The news that had reached Erich Kordt, one of the conspirators, in the German Foreign Office late on the night of September 13, that Chamberlain urgently proposed “to come over at once by air” to seek a peaceful solution of the Czech crisis, had caused consternation in the camp of the plotters. They had counted on Hitler’s returning to Berlin from the Nuremberg Party Rally on the fourteenth and, according to Kordt, had planned to carry out the putsch on that day or the next. But the Fuehrer did not return to the capital. * Instead, he went to Munich and on the fourteenth continued on to Berchtesgaden, where he awaited the visit of the British Prime Minister the next day. There were double grounds for the feeling of utter frustration among the plotters. Their plans could be carried out only if Hitler were in Berlin, and they had been confident that, since the Nuremberg rally had only sharpened the Czech crisis, he would certainly return immediately to the capital. In the second place, although some of the members of the conspiracy complacently assumed, as did the people of Britain, that Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgaden to warn Hitler not to make the mistake that Wilhelm II had made in 1914 as to what Great Britain would do in the case of German aggression, Kordt knew better. He had seen the text of Chamberlain’s urgent message explaining to Hitler that he wanted to see him “with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.” Furthermore, he had seen the telegram from his brother, Theodor Kordt, counselor of the German Embassy in London, that day, confiding that the Prime Minister was prepared to go a long way to meet Hitler’s demands in the Sudetenland.† 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 9933-35  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 06:13 PM

What were the conspirators waiting for? All the conditions they themselves had set had now been fulfilled. Hitler was in Berlin. He was determined to go to war. He had set the date for the attack on Czechoslovakia as September 30—two days away now. Either the putsch must be made at once, or it would be too late to overthrow the dictator and stop the war. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 10281-83  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 09:52 PM

Moreover, the truncated and now defenseless country was forced by Berlin to install a pro-German government of obvious fascist tendencies. It was clear that from now on the Czechoslovak nation existed at the mercy of the Leader of the Third Reich. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 10284-88  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 09:52 PM

Under the terms of the Munich Agreement Hitler got substantially what he had demanded at Godesberg, and the “International Commission,” bowing to his threats, gave him considerably more. The final settlement of November 20, 1938, forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany 11,000 square miles of territory in which dwelt 2,800,000 Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Czechs. Within this area lay all the vast Czech fortifications which hitherto had formed the most formidable defensive line in Europe, with the possible exception of the Maginot Line in France. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 422 | Loc. 10288-92  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 09:52 PM

But that was not all. Czechoslovakia’s entire system of rail, road, telephone and telegraph communications was disrupted. According to German figures, the dismembered country lost 66 per cent of its coal, 80 per cent of its lignite, 86 per cent of its chemicals, 80 per cent of its cement, 80 per cent of its textiles, 70 per cent of its iron and steel, 70 per cent of its electric power and 40 per cent of its timber. A prosperous industrial nation was split up and bankrupted overnight. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 422 | Loc. 10303-9  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 09:53 PM

With the instinct of a genius rare in German history he had divined not only the weaknesses of the smaller states in Central Europe but those of the two principal Western democracies, Britain and France, and forced them to bend to his will. He had invented and used with staggering success a new strategy and technique of political warfare, which made actual war unnecessary. In scarcely four and a half years this man of lowly origins had catapulted a disarmed, chaotic, nearly bankrupt Germany, the weakest of the big powers in Europe, to a position where she was regarded as the mightiest nation of the Old World, before which all the others, Britain even and France, trembled. At no step in this dizzy ascent had the victorious powers of Versailles dared to try to stop her, even when they had the power to do so. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 10381-85  | Added on Sunday, January 25, 2015, 09:57 PM

It has also been argued—most positively by Ambassadors François-Poncet and Henderson—that Munich gave the two Western democracies nearly a year to catch up with the Germans in rearmament. The facts belie such an argument. As Churchill, backed up by every serious Allied military historian, has written, “The year’s breathing space said to be ‘gained’ by Munich left Britain and France in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 426 | Loc. 10402-8  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:11 AM

For France, Munich was a disaster, and it is beyond understanding that this was not fully realized in Paris. Her military position in Europe was destroyed. Because her Army, when the Reich was fully mobilized, could never be much more than half the size of that of Germany, which had nearly twice her population, and because her ability to produce arms was also less, France had laboriously built up her alliances with the smaller powers in the East on the other flank of Germany —and of Italy: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Rumania, which, together, had the military potential of a Big Power. The loss now of thirty-five well-trained, well-armed Czech divisions, deployed behind their strong mountain fortifications and holding down an even larger German force, was a crippling one to the French Army. But that was not all. After Munich how could France’s remaining allies in Eastern Europe have any confidence in her written word? What value now were alliances with France? 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 427 | Loc. 10411-13  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:12 AM

Though the Soviet Union was militarily allied to both Czechoslovakia and France, the French government had gone along with Germany and Britain, without protest, in excluding Russia from Munich. It was a snub which Stalin did not forget and which was to cost the two Western democracies dearly in the months to come. 
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- Highlight on Page 428 | Loc. 10583-88  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:21 AM

forces must be prepared at all times for the following eventualities: The securing of the frontiers of Germany. The liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. The occupation of the Memel district. Memel, a Baltic port of some forty thousand inhabitants, had been lost by Germany to Lithuania after Versailles. Since Lithuania was smaller and weaker than Austria and Czechoslovakia, the seizure of the town presented no problem to the Wehrmacht and in this directive Hitler merely mentioned that it would be “annexed.” 
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- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 10604-8  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:23 AM

Here is a new turning point for the Third Reich. For the first time Hitler is on the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands. Over the last six weeks he had been assuring Chamberlain, in private and in public, that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe. And though the British Prime Minister was gullible almost beyond comprehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was some ground for his believing that the German dictator would halt when he had digested the Germans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and were now within it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 10610  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:23 AM

turgid page in Mein Kampf 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 10620-25  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:24 AM

On the night of November 9–10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was. 5 They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—secret papers of the prewar Nazi era. 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 10637-38  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:25 AM

5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons… Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible. 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 10646-49  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:25 AM

The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to have been several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day after his preliminary report gave the number of Jewish shops looted as 7,500. There were also some cases of rape, which Major Buch’s party court, judging by its own report, considered worse than murder, since they violated the Nuremberg racial laws which forbade sexual intercourse between Gentiles and Jews. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 10658-62  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:26 AM

A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as a Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short. 
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 10677-80  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:28 AM

But the question of who was to pay for the 25 million marks’ worth of damage caused by a pogrom instigated and organized by the State was a fairly serious one, especially to Goering, who now had become responsible for the economic well-being of Nazi Germany. Hilgard, on behalf of the insurance companies, pointed out that if their policies were not honored to the Jews, the confidence of the people, both at home and abroad, in German insurance would be forfeited. On the other hand, he did not see how many of the smaller companies could pay up without going broke. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 435 | Loc. 10733-34  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:30 AM

But now, as November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalomania was getting the upper hand. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 435 | Loc. 10736-38  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:31 AM

From now on the absolute master of the Third Reich would show little of that restraint which had saved him so often before. And though his genius and that of his country would lead to further startling conquests, the poisonous seeds of eventual self-destruction for the dictator and his land had now been sown. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 441 | Loc. 10877-80  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 03:57 PM

Here again, thanks to the captured confidential minutes of the meeting, we may peer into the weird mind of the German dictator, rapidly giving way to megalomania, and watch him spinning his fantastic lies and uttering his dire threats in a manner and to an extent which he no doubt was sure would never come to public attention. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 443 | Loc. 10924-25  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 03:59 PM

The niceties of “legality,” which he had perfected so well in taking over power in Germany, would be preserved in the conquest of a non-Germanic land. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 446 | Loc. 10998-1004  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 04:04 PM

Hácha and Chvalkovsky protested against the outrage to their nation. They declared they would not sign the document of surrender. Were they to do so they would be forever cursed by their people. The German ministers [Goering and Ribbentrop] were pitiless [M. Coulondre wrote in his dispatch]. They literally hunted Dr. Hácha and M. Chvalkovsky round the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continually before them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if they continued in their refusal, half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within two hours, and that this would be only the beginning. Hundreds of bombers were waiting the order to take off, and they would receive that order at six in the morning if the signatures were not forthcoming. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 447 | Loc. 11022-26  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 04:05 PM

The conviction was unanimously expressed on both sides that the aim of all efforts must be the safeguarding of calm, order and peace in this part of Central Europe. The Czechoslovak President declared that, in order to serve this object and to achieve ultimate pacification, he confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich. The Fuehrer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and of guaranteeing them an autonomous development of their ethnic life as suited to their character. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 11098-103  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 04:10 PM

But the next day, March 15, after it had taken place, the Prime Minister used the proclamation of Slovakia’s “independence” as an excuse not to honor his country’s word. “The effect of this declaration,” he explained, “put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee. His Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.” Hitler’s strategy had thus worked to perfection. He had given Chamberlain his out and the Prime Minister had taken it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 459 | Loc. 11372-78  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:22 PM

Seizing an opportunity to gain the friendship of a country so stoutly anti-Russian and at the same time to detach her from Geneva and Paris, thus undermining the system of Versailles, Hitler had taken the initiative in bringing about the Polish–German pact of 1934. It was not a popular move in Germany. The German Army, which had been pro-Russian and anti-Polish since the days of Seeckt, resented it. But it served Hitler admirably for the time being. Poland’s sympathetic friendship helped him to get first things done first: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the destruction of independent Austria and Czechoslovakia. On all of these steps, which strengthened Germany, weakened the West and threatened the East, Beck and his fellow colonels in Warsaw looked on benevolently and with utter and inexplicable blindness. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 460 | Loc. 11393-99  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:24 PM

March 21, 1939, is a day to be remembered in the story of Europe’s march toward war. There was intense diplomatic activity that day in Berlin, Warsaw and London. The President of the French Republic, accompanied by Foreign Minister Bonnet, arrived in the British capital for a state visit. To the French Chamberlain suggested that their two countries join Poland and the Soviet Union in a formal declaration stating that the four nations would consult immediately about steps to halt further aggression in Europe. Three days before, Litvinov had proposed—as he had just a year before, after the Anschluss—a European conference, this time of France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Rumania and Turkey, which would join together to stop Hitler. But the British Prime Minister had found the idea “premature.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 462 | Loc. 11445-46  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:27 PM

Another provision of the Versailles Treaty had been torn up. Another bloodless conquest had been made. Although the Fuehrer could not know it, it was to be the last. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 11518-23  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:31 PM

the sudden British unilateral guarantee of Poland seemed incomprehensible, however welcome it might be in the lands to the west and the east of Germany. Time after time, as we have seen, in 1936 when the Germans marched into the demilitarized Rhineland, in 1938 when they took Austria and threatened a European war to take the Sudetenland, even a fortnight before, when they grabbed Czechoslovakia, Great Britain and France, backed by Russia, could have taken action to stop Hitler at very little cost to themselves. But the peace-hungry Chamberlain had shied away from such moves. Not only that: he had gone out of his way, he had risked, as he said, his political career to help Adolf Hitler get what he wanted in the neighboring lands. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 466 | Loc. 11529-33  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:32 PM

Now overnight, in his understandably bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, after having deliberately and recklessly thrown so much away, had undertaken to unilaterally guarantee an Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept “colonels” who up to this moment had closely collaborated with Hitler, who like hyenas had joined the Germans in the carving up of Czechoslovakia and whose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very German conquests which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich to achieve. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 466 | Loc. 11538-41  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 09:32 PM

From now on, apparently, Britain would stand in the way of his committing further aggression. He could no longer use the technique of taking one nation at a time while the Western democracies stood aside debating what to do. Moreover, Chamberlain’s move appeared to be the first serious step toward forming a coalition of powers against Germany which, unless it were successfully countered, might bring again that very encirclement which had been the nightmare of the Reich since Bismarck. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 471 | Loc. 11646-52  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:19 AM

The replies were potent ammunition for Hitler, and he made masterly use of them as he swung into his speech to the Reichstag on the pleasant spring day of April 28, 1939. It was, I believe, the longest major public speech he ever made, taking more than two hours to deliver. In many ways, especially in the power of its appeal to Germans and to the friends of Nazi Germany abroad, it was probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave, certainly the greatest this writer ever heard from him. For sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy, it reached a new level that he was never to approach again. And though prepared for German ears, it was broadcast not only on all German radio stations but on hundreds of others throughout the world; in the United States it was carried by the major networks. Never before or afterward was there such a world-wide audience as he had that day. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 474 | Loc. 11729-47  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:24 AM

And then came the peroration—the most eloquent for German ears, I believe, he ever made. Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere… I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to its trust in the promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of democratic governments… I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production… developed traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being gigantic new factories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and culture of our people. I have succeeded in finding useful work once more for the whole of the seven million unemployed… Not only have I united the German people politically, but I have also rearmed them. I have also endeavored to destroy sheet by sheet that treaty which in its four hundred and forty-eight articles contains the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever been expected to put up with. I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery… and, Mr. Roosevelt, without spilling blood and without bringing to my people, and consequently to others, the misery of war… You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich. From the very outset you stepped to the head of one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world… Conditions prevailing in your country are on such a large scale that you can find time and leisure to give your attention to universal problems… Your concerns and suggestions cover a much larger and wider area than mine, because my world, Mr. Roosevelt, in which Providence has placed me and for which I am therefore obliged to work, is unfortunately much smaller, although for me it is more precious than anything else, for it is limited to my people! 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 480 | Loc. 11873-76  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:31 AM

It was time, Stalin concluded, to try a new tack. * If Chamberlain could appease Hitler, could not the Russian dictator? The fact that Litvinov, a Jew, was replaced by Molotov, who, as the German Embassy had emphasized in its dispatch to Berlin, was not, might be expected to have a certain impact in high Nazi circles. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 482 | Loc. 11903-7  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:32 AM

The renewed contacts between Berlin and Moscow did not escape the watchful eyes of the French ambassador in the German capital. As early as May 7, four days after Litvinov’s dismissal, M. Coulondre was informing the French Foreign Minister that, according to information given him by a close confidant of the Fuehrer, Germany was seeking an understanding with Russia which would result in, among other things, a fourth partition of Poland. Two days later the French ambassador got off another telegram to Paris telling of new rumors in Berlin “that Germany had made, or was going to make, to Russia proposals aimed at a partition of Poland.” 
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- Highlight on Page 482 | Loc. 11913-15  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:33 AM

By mid-April, as his diary shows, 44 Ciano was alarmed by increasing signs that Germany might attack Poland at any moment and precipitate a European war for which Italy was not prepared. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 483 | Loc. 11943-46  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:35 AM

Article V provided that in the event of war neither nation would conclude a separate armistice or peace. 46 In the beginning, as it would turn out, Mussolini did not honor the first, nor, at the end, did Italy abide by the second. 
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- Highlight on Page 484 | Loc. 11954-59  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:36 AM

Apparently Hitler’s words on this occasion were regarded as such a top secret that no copies of the minutes were made; the one we have is in Schmundt’s own handwriting. 47 It is one of the most revealing and important of the secret papers which depict Hitler’s road to war. Here, before the handful of men who will have to direct the military forces in an armed conflict, Hitler cuts through his own propaganda and diplomatic deceit and utters the truth about why he must attack Poland and, if necessary, take on Great Britain and France as well. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 486 | Loc. 12021-25  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:40 AM

In former times… to conquer England it was necessary to invade her. England could feed herself. Today she no longer can. The moment England is cut off from her supplies she is forced to capitulate. Imports of food and fuel oil are dependent on naval protection. Luftwaffe attacks on England will not force her to capitulate. But if the fleet is annihilated instant capitulation results. There is no doubt that a surprise attack might lead to a quick decision. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 488 | Loc. 12052-58  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:42 AM

When the Fuehrer had first outlined his plans for aggression to the military chiefs, on November 5, 1937, Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch had protested—at least on the grounds that Germany was too weak to fight a European war.* During the following summer General Beck had resigned as Chief of the Army General Staff for the same reason. But on May 23, 1939, not a single general or admiral, so far as the record shows, raised his voice to question the wisdom of Hitler’s course. Their job, as they saw it, was not to question but to blindly obey. Already they had been applying their considerable talents to working out plans for military aggression. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 488 | Loc. 12071-81  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:43 AM

The day after the Fuehrer’s lecture to the military chiefs, on May 24, General Georg Thomas, head of the Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW, summed up that accomplishment in a confidential lecture to the staff of the Foreign Office. Whereas it had taken the Imperial Army, Thomas reminded his listeners, sixteen years—from 1898 to 1914—to increase its strength from forty-three to fifty divisions, the Army of the Third Reich had jumped from seven to fifty-one divisions in just four years. Among them were five heavy armored divisions and four light ones, a “modern battle cavalry” such as no other nation possessed. The Navy had built up from practically nothing a fleet of two battleships of 26,000 tons, * two heavy cruisers, seventeen destroyers and forty-seven submarines. It had already launched two battleships of 35,000 tons, one aircraft carrier, four heavy cruisers, five destroyers and seven submarines, and was planning to launch a great many more ships. From absolutely nothing, the Luftwaffe had built up a force of twenty-one squadrons with a personnel of 260,000 men. The armament industry, General Thomas said, was already producing more than it had during the peak of the last war and its output in most fields far exceeded that of any other country. In fact, total German rearmament, the General declared, was “probably unique in the world.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 489 | Loc. 12083-86  | Added on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 10:44 AM

Germany was still not strong enough, and probably would never be, to take on France, Britain and Russia in addition to Poland. As the fateful summer commenced, all depended on the Fuehrer’s ability to limit the war—above all, to keep Russia from forming the military alliance with the West which Litvinov, just before his fall, had proposed and which Chamberlain, though he had at first seemed to reject it, was, by May’s end, again mulling over. 
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- Highlight on Page 506 | Loc. 12484-90  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 11:17 AM

With Russia neutralized, Britain and France either would not fight for Poland or, if they did, would easily be held on the western fortifications until the Poles were quickly liquidated and the German Army could turn its full strength on the West. The astute French chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Jacques Tarbé de St. Hardouin, noticed the change of atmosphere in the German capital. On the very day, August 3, when there was so much Soviet–German diplomatic activity in Berlin and Moscow, he reported to Paris: “In the course of the last week a very definite change in the political atmosphere has been observed in Berlin… The period of embarrassment, hesitation, inclination to temporization or even to appeasement has been succeeded among the Nazi leaders by a new phase.” 
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- Highlight on Page 507 | Loc. 12510-15  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 11:19 AM

The Soviet Government would not fight against us… The Soviets would not repeat the Czar’s mistake and bleed to death for Britain. They would, however, try to enrich themselves, possibly at the expense of the Baltic States or Poland, without engaging in military action themselves. So effective was Hitler’s harangue that at the end of a second talk held the same day Count Csáky requested him “to regard the two letters written by Teleki as not having been written.” 
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- Highlight on Page 521 | Loc. 12971-75  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:30 PM

that Germany is prepared to conclude a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and, if the Soviet Government so desire, one which would be undenounceable for a term of twenty-five years. Further, Germany is ready to guarantee the Baltic States jointly with the Soviet Union. Finally, Germany is prepared to exercise influence for an improvement and consolidation of Russian–Japanese relations. All pretense was now dropped that the Reich government was not in a hurry to conclude a deal with Moscow. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 13049-54  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:34 PM

August 19 was the decisive day. Orders for the German submarines and pocket battleships to sail for British waters were being held up until word came from Moscow. The warships would have to get off at once if they were to reach their appointed stations by Hitler’s target date for the beginning of the war, September 1—only thirteen days away. The two great army groups designated for the onslaught on Poland would have to be deployed immediately. The tension in Berlin and especially on the Obersalzberg, where Hitler and Ribbentrop waited nervously for Moscow’s decision, was becoming almost unbearable. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 526 | Loc. 13082-92  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:36 PM

“Hardly half an hour after the conversation had ended,” Schulenburg reported, “Molotov sent me word asking me to call on him again at the Kremlin at 4:30 P.M. He apologized for putting me to the trouble and explained that he had reported to the Soviet Government.” Whereupon the Foreign Commissar handed the surprised but happy ambassador a draft of the nonaggression pact and told him that Ribbentrop could arrive in Moscow on August 26 or 27 if the trade treaty were signed and made public tomorrow. “Molotov did not give reasons,” Schulenburg added in his telegram, “for his sudden change of mind. I assume that Stalin intervened.” 19 The assumption was undoubtedly correct. According to Churchill, the Soviet intention to sign a pact with Germany was announced to the Politburo by Stalin on the evening of August 19. 20 A little earlier that day—between 3 P.M. and 4:30 P.M.—it is clear from Schulenburg’s dispatch, he had communicated his fateful decision to Molotov. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 526 | Loc. 13097-101  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:37 PM

“How many divisions,” Stalin had asked, “will France send against Germany on mobilization?” The answer was: “About a hundred.” He then asked: “How many will England send?” The answer was: “Two, and two more later.” “Ah, two, and two more later,” Stalin had repeated. “Do you know,” he asked, “how many divisions we shall have to put on the Russian front if we go to war with Germany?” There was a pause. “More than three hundred.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 527 | Loc. 13107-11  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:37 PM

At this crucial stage, Adolf Hitler himself intervened with Stalin. Swallowing his pride, he personally begged the Soviet dictator, whom he had so often and for so long maligned, to receive his Foreign Minister in Moscow at once. His telegram to Stalin was rushed off to Moscow at 6:45 P.M. on Sunday, August 20, just twelve hours after the receipt of Schulenburg’s dispatch. The Fuehrer instructed the ambassador to hand it to Molotov “at once.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 528 | Loc. 13141-53  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:39 PM

TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH, A. HITLER: I thank you for the letter. I hope that the German–Soviet nonaggression pact will bring about a decided turn for the better in the political relations between our countries. The peoples of our countries need peaceful relations with each other. The assent of the German Government to the conclusion of a nonaggression pact provides the foundation for eliminating the political tension and for the establishment of peace and collaboration between our countries. The Soviet Government have instructed me to inform you that they agree to Herr von Ribbentrop’s arriving in Moscow on August 23. J. STALIN 26 For sheer cynicism the Nazi dictator had met his match in the Soviet despot. The way was now open to them to get together to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on one of the crudest deals of this shabby epoch. 
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- Highlight on Page 530 | Loc. 13181-83  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:41 PM

For us it is easy to make the decision. We have nothing to lose; we can only gain. Our economic situation is such that we cannot hold out more than a few years. Goering can confirm this. We have no other choice, we must act… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 532 | Loc. 13236-41  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:44 PM

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war—never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! Eighty million people must obtain what is their right… The stronger man is right… Be harsh and remorseless! Be steeled against all signs of compassion! …Whoever has pondered over this world order knows that its meaning lies in the success of the best by means of force… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 540 | Loc. 13420-22  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:54 PM

Stalin appears to have had mental reservations about the Nazis’ keeping the pact. As Ribbentrop was leaving, he took him aside and said, “The Soviet Government take the new pact very seriously. He could guarantee on his word of honor that the Soviet Union would not betray its partner.” 
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- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 13456-63  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:57 PM

This was a definite gain for our country and a loss for fascist Germany.” But was it? The point has been debated ever since. That the sordid, secret deal gave Stalin the same breathing space—peredyshka—which Czar Alexander I had secured from Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and Lenin from the Germans at Brest Litovsk in 1917 was obvious. Within a short time it also gave the Soviet Union an advanced defensive position against Germany beyond the existing Russian frontiers, including bases in the Baltic States and Finland—at the expense of the Poles, Latvians, Estonians and Finns. And most important of all, as the official Soviet History of Diplomacy later emphasized, it assured the Kremlin that if Russia were later attacked by Germany the Western Powers would already be irrevocably committed against the Third Reich and the Soviet Union would not stand alone against the German might as Stalin had feared throughout the summer of 1939. 
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- Highlight on Page 543 | Loc. 13486-91  | Added on Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 02:59 PM

One thing was certain—to almost everyone but Chamberlain. The bankruptcy of Anglo–French diplomacy, which had faltered and tottered whenever Hitler made a move, was now complete. * Step by step, the two Western democracies had retreated: when Hitler defied them by declaring conscription in 1935, when he occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when he took Austria in 1938 and in the same year demanded and got the Sudetenland; and they had sat by weakly when he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. With the Soviet Union on their side, they still might have dissuaded the German dictator from launching war or, if that failed, have fairly quickly defeated him in an armed conflict. But they had allowed this last opportunity to slip out of their hands. 
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- Highlight on Page 549 | Loc. 13739-44  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 10:41 AM

He had purchased Stalin’s benevolent neutrality two days before by offering Russia a free hand in Eastern Europe “from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” Could he not buy Britain’s nonintervention by assuring the Prime Minister that the Third Reich would never, like the Hohenzollern Germany, become a threat to the British Empire? What Hitler did not realize, nor Stalin—to the latter’s awful cost—was that to Chamberlain, his eyes open at long last, Germany’s domination of the European continent would be the greatest of all threats to the British Empire—as indeed it would be to the Soviet Russian Empire. 
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- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 13759-66  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 10:42 AM

“It looks like war,” I scribbled on the evening of the twenty-fourth; “War is imminent,” I repeated the next day, and on both nights, I remember, the Germans we saw in the Wilhelmstrasse whispered that Hitler had ordered the soldiers to march into Poland at dawn. Their orders, we now know, were to attack at 4:30 on Saturday morning, August 26. * And up until 6 P.M. on the twenty-fifth nothing that had happened during the day, certainly not the personal assurances of Ambassadors Henderson and Coulondre that Britain and France would surely honor their commitments to Poland, had budged Adolf Hitler from his resolve to go ahead with his aggression on schedule. But about 6 P.M., or shortly afterward, there arrived news from London and Rome that made this man of apparently unshakable will hesitate. 
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- Highlight on Page 557 | Loc. 13920-24  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:19 PM

Yet it is strange that after Ambassador Henderson on this very day had again warned him that Britain would fight if Poland were attacked and that after the British government had now solemnly given its word to that effect in a formal treaty, he still believed he could, as he told Goering, “eliminate British intervention.” It is likely that his experience with Chamberlain at Munich led him to believe that the Prime Minister again would capitulate if a way out could be concocted. 
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- Highlight on Page 558 | Loc. 13943-47  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:21 PM

the one condition they themselves had made the year before to their resolve to get rid of Hitler, namely that Britain and France declare they would oppose any further Nazi aggression by armed force, had now been fulfilled. What more did they want? It is not clear from the records they have left, and one gathers the impression that they did not quite know themselves. Well-meaning though they were, they were gripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing sense of futility. Hitler’s hold on Germany—on the Army, the police, the government, the people—was too complete to be loosened or undermined by anything they could think of doing. 
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- Highlight on Page 561 | Loc. 14029-32  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:26 PM

This ignorance of the mind and character and purposes of Adolf Hitler, and indeed of the Germans, who, with a few exceptions, were ready to follow him blindly no matter where nor how, regardless of morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost the peoples led by Roosevelt and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark dearly in the months to come. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 562 | Loc. 14047-51  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:27 PM

On August 27 the government announced that rationing of food, soap, shoes, textiles and coal would begin on the following day. This announcement, I remember, above all others, woke up the German people to the imminence of war, and their grumbling about it was very audible. On Monday, August 28, the Berliners watched troops pouring through the city toward the east. They were being transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle that could be scraped up. 
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- Highlight on Page 571 | Loc. 14271-78  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:51 PM

Hitler listened without interrupting me… but then suddenly got up, and, becoming very excited and nervous, walked up and down saying, as though to himself, that Germany was irresistible… Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the room and stood there staring. His voice was blurred, and his behavior that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases: “If there should be war, then I shall build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats.” His voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large audience and shrieked: “I shall build airplanes, build airplanes, airplanes, airplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies.” He seemed more like a phantom from a storybook than a real person. I stared at him in amazement and turned to see how Goering was reacting, but he did not turn a hair. 
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- Highlight on Page 574 | Loc. 14344-45  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 02:55 PM

At this critical moment in world history the amateur Swedish diplomat had indeed become the pivotal point between Berlin and London. 
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- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 14523-26  | Added on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 03:03 PM

It may have been out of date, since the Germans chose to make it so, but what is important is that these German “proposals” were never meant to be taken seriously or indeed to be taken at all. In fact they were a hoax. They were a sham to fool the German people and, if possible, world opinion into believing that Hitler had attempted at the last minute to reach a reasonable settlement of his claims against Poland. The Fuehrer admitted as much. 
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- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 14711-13  | Added on Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:19 AM

In conducting the war against England, preparations are to be made for the use of the Luftwaffe in disrupting British supplies by sea, the armaments industry, and the transport of troops to France. A favorable opportunity is to be taken for an effective attack on massed British naval units, especially against battleships and aircraft carriers. Attacks against London are reserved for my decision. 
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- Highlight on Page 591 | Loc. 14728-31  | Added on Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:21 AM

At 6:30 A.M. Halder jotted down: “Word from the Reich Chancellery that jump-off order has been given for September 1.” At 11:30: “Gen. Stuelpnagel reports on fixing of time of attack for 0445 [4:45 A.M.]. Intervention of West said to be unavoidable; in spite of this Fuehrer has decided to attack.” An hour later the formal Directive No. 1 was issued. 
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- Highlight on Page 592 | Loc. 14763-65  | Added on Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:23 AM

I augured the worst from the fact that he was in a position at such a moment to give me so much of his time… He could scarcely have afforded at such a moment to spare time in conversation if it did not mean that everything down to the last detail was now ready for action.” 
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- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 14786-89  | Added on Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:25 AM

Had he not the week before on his Bavarian mountaintop promised the generals that he would “give a propagandist reason for starting the war” and admonished them not to “mind whether it was plausible or not”? “The victor,” he had told them, “will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.” 
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- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 14810-11  | Added on Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:26 AM

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated. 

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February

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 14841-43  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 06:25 PM

Later in the afternoon Gisevius had been summoned to OKW headquarters by Colonel Oster. This nerve center of Germany’s military might was humming with activity. Canaris drew Gisevius down a dimly lit corridor. In a voice choked with emotion he said: “This means the end of Germany.” 
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- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 15040-46  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 06:28 PM

A T DAYBREAK on September 1, 1939, the very date which Hitler had set in his first directive for “Case White” back on April 3, the German armies poured across the Polish frontier and converged on Warsaw from the north, south and west. Overhead German warplanes roared toward their targets: Polish troop columns and ammunition dumps, bridges, railroads and open cities. Within a few minutes they were giving the Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, the first taste of sudden death and destruction from the skies ever experienced on any great scale on the earth and thereby inaugurating a terror which would become dreadfully familiar to hundreds of millions of men, women and children in Europe and Asia during the next six years, and whose shadow, after the nuclear bombs came, would haunt all mankind with the threat of utter extinction. 
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- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 15127-30  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 06:32 PM

Hitler may ask to see me after Reichstag as a last effort to save the peace. 3 What peace? Peace for Britain? For six hours Germany had been waging war—with all its military might—against Britain’s ally. 
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- Highlight on Page 610 | Loc. 15366-69  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 07:01 PM

But on September 2, when the British pressed for an ultimatum to be presented to Hitler at midnight, General Gamelin and the French General Staff held back. After all, it was the French who alone would have to do the fighting if the Germans immediately attacked in the West. There would not be a single British trooper to aid them. The General Staff insisted on a further forty-eight hours in which to carry out the general mobilization unhindered. 
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- Highlight on Page 611 | Loc. 15380-84  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 07:03 PM

“I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate,” said Greenwood, “at a time when Britain and all that Britain stands for, and human civilization, are in peril… We must march with the French…” That was the trouble. It was proving difficult at this moment to get the French to march. But so disturbed was Chamberlain at the angry mood of the House that he intervened in the sharp debate to plead that it took time to synchronize “thoughts and actions” by telephone with Paris. 
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- Highlight on Page 615 | Loc. 15471-78  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 07:08 PM

it rehearsed all the lies with which we are now familiar, including the one about the Polish “attacks” on German territory, blamed Britain for all that had happened, and rejected attempts “to force Germany to recall their forces which are lined up for the defense of the Reich.” It declared, falsely, that Germany had accepted Mussolini’s eleventh-hour proposals for peace and pointed out that Britain had rejected them. And after all of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler it accused the British government of “preaching the destruction and extermination of the German people.” * Henderson read the document (“this completely false representation of events,” as he later called it) and remarked “It would be left to history to judge where the blame really lay.” 
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- Highlight on Page 619 | Loc. 15565-73  | Added on Sunday, February 01, 2015, 07:13 PM

Chamberlain was fated not to live to see that day. He died, a broken man—though still a member of the cabinet—on November 9, 1940. In view of all that has been written about him in these pages it seems only fitting to quote what was said of him by Churchill, whom he had excluded from the affairs of the British nation for so long and who on May 10, 1940, succeeded him as Prime Minister. Paying tribute to his memory in the Commons on November 12, 1940, Churchill said: …It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly in utter disdain of popularity or clamor. 
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- Highlight on Page 621 | Loc. 15617-22  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 01:23 AM

Already on the first day of the German attack on Poland the Soviet government, as the secret Nazi papers would later reveal, had rendered the German Luftwaffe a signal service. Very early on that morning the Chief of the General Staff of the Air Force, General Hans Jeschonnek, had rung up the German Embassy in Moscow to say that in order to give his pilots navigational aid in the bombing of Poland—“urgent navigation tests,” he called it—he would appreciate it if the Russian radio station at Minsk would continually identify itself. By afternoon Ambassador von der Schulenburg was able to inform Berlin that the Soviet government was “prepared to meet your wishes.” 
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- Highlight on Page 622 | Loc. 15640-44  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 01:25 AM

The most gloomy German of any consequence in Berlin that Sunday noon after it became known that Britain was in the war was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the German Navy. For him the war had come four or five years too soon. By 1944–45, the Navy’s Z Plan would have been completed, giving Germany a sizable fleet with which to confront the British. But this was September 3, 1939, and Raeder knew, even if Hitler wouldn’t listen to him, that he had neither the surface ships nor even the submarines to wage effective war against Great Britain. 
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- Highlight on Page 625 | Loc. 15748-57  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 09:41 AM

At one point, racing east across the Corridor, they had been counterattacked by the Pomorska Brigade of cavalry, and this writer, coming upon the scene a few days later, saw the sickening evidence of the carnage. It was symbolic of the brief Polish campaign. Horses against tanks! The cavalryman’s long lance against the tank’s long cannon! Brave and valiant and foolhardy though they were, the Poles were simply overwhelmed by the German onslaught. This was their—and the world’s—first experience of the blitzkrieg: the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flame and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the rutty Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorized wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone and telegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanized juggernaut such as the earth had never seen. 
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- Highlight on Page 626 | Loc. 15763-65  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 09:42 AM

In one week the Polish Army had been vanquished. Most of its thirty-five divisions—all that there had been time to mobilize—had been either shattered or caught in a vast pincers movement that closed in around Warsaw. 
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- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 15914-16  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 09:51 AM

So Poland, like Austria and Czechoslovakia before it, disappeared from the map of Europe. But this time Adolf Hitler was aided and abetted in his obliteration of a country by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had posed for so long as the champion of the oppressed peoples. 
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- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 15919-22  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 09:52 AM

Hitler fought and won the war in Poland, but the greater winner was Stalin, whose troops scarcely fired a shot. ‡ The Soviet Union got nearly half of Poland and a stranglehold on the Baltic States. It blocked Germany more solidly than ever from two of its main long-term objectives: Ukrainian wheat and Rumanian oil, both badly needed if Germany was to survive the British blockade. 
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- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 15924-28  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 09:52 AM

Why did Hitler pay such a high price to the Russians? It is true that he had agreed to it in August in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the Allied camp and out of the war. But he had never been a stickler for keeping agreements and now, with Poland conquered by an incomparable feat of German arms, he might have been expected to welsh, as the Army urged, on the August 23 pact. If Stalin objected, the Fuehrer could threaten him with attack by the most powerful army in the world, as the Polish campaign had just proved it to be. Or could he? Not while the British and French stood at arms in the West. 
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- Highlight on Page 633 | Loc. 15941-44  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 02:09 PM

Hardly a shot had been fired. The German man in the street was beginning to call it the “sit-down war”— Sitzkrieg. In the West it would soon be dubbed the “phony war.” Here was “the strongest army in the world [the French],” as the British General J. F. C. Fuller would put it, “facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!” 
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- Highlight on Page 634 | Loc. 15975-81  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 02:13 PM

The success against Poland was only possible [said General Halder] by almost completely baring our Western border. If the French had seen the logic of the situation and had used the engagement of the German forces in Poland, they would have been able to cross the Rhine without our being able to prevent it and would have threatened the Ruhr area, which was the most decisive factor of the German conduct of the war. 4 …. If we did not collapse in 1939 [said General Jodl] that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions. 
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- Highlight on Page 635 | Loc. 15986-97  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 02:15 PM

Why then did not the French Army (the first two British divisions were not deployed until the first week of October), which had overwhelming superiority over the German forces in the west, attack, as General Gamelin and the French government had promised in writing it would? There were many reasons: the defeatism in the French High Command, the government and the people; the memories of how France had been bled white in the First World War and a determination not to suffer such slaughter again if it could be avoided; the realization by mid-September that the Polish armies were so badly defeated that the Germans would soon be able to move superior forces to the west and thus probably wipe out any initial French advances; the fear of German superiority in arms and in the air. Indeed, the French government had insisted from the start that the British Air Force should not bomb targets in Germany for fear of reprisal on French factories, though an all-out bombing of the Ruhr, the industrial heart of the Reich, might well have been disastrous to the Germans. It was the one great worry of the German generals in September, as many of them later admitted. Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attack Germany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. “This battle,” he wrote, “had been lost some years before.” 7 
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- Highlight on Page 644 | Loc. 16208-11  | Added on Monday, February 02, 2015, 02:37 PM

which Hitler read out to his military chiefs before presenting them the directive is one of the most impressive papers the former Austrian corporal ever wrote. It showed not only a grasp of history, from the German viewpoint, and of military strategy and tactics which is remarkable but, as a little later would be proved, a prophetic sense of how the war in the West would develop and with what results. 
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- Highlight on Page 657 | Loc. 16506-7  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 12:54 AM

One might accuse me of wanting to fight and fight again. In struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under. 
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- Highlight on Page 658 | Loc. 16548-51  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 12:58 AM

In many ways November 23, 1939, was a milestone. It marked Hitler’s final, decisive triumph over the Army, which in the First World War had shunted Emperor Wilhelm II aside and assumed supreme political as well as military authority in Germany. From that day on the onetime Austrian corporal considered not only his political but his military judgment superior to that of his generals and therefore refused to listen to their advice or permit their criticism—with results ultimately disastrous to all. 
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- Highlight on Page 662 | Loc. 16628-32  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 01:06 AM

A dark, dapper, bouncy fellow, father of five children, his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg, * was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man. Apparently it omitted none of his barbaric utterances. 
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- Highlight on Page 662 | Loc. 16641-47  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 01:08 AM

By May 30, as his own journal shows, he could boast in a pep talk to his police aides of good progress—the lives of “some thousands” of Polish intellectuals taken, or about to be taken. “I pray you, gentlemen,” he asked, “to take the most rigorous measures possible to help us in this task.” Confidentially he added that these were “the Fuehrer’s orders.” Hitler, he said, had expressed it this way: “The men capable of leadership in Poland must be liquidated. Those following them… must be eliminated in their turn. There is no need to burden the Reich with this… 
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- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 16688-92  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 01:12 AM

Already on February 21, 1940, S.S. Oberfuehrer Richard Gluecks, the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, scouting around near Cracow, had informed Himmler that he had found a “suitable site” for a new “quarantine camp” at Auschwitz, a somewhat forlorn and marshy town of twelve thousand inhabitants in which was situated, besides some factories, a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Work was commenced immediately and on June 14 Auschwitz was officially opened as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners whom the Germans wished to treat with special harshness. It was soon to become a much more sinister place. 
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- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 16719-23  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:20 AM

The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany’s pro-Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army had attacked Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating position. Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially condone Russia’s unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918. 
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- Highlight on Page 666 | Loc. 16735-42  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:23 AM

But it was Germany’s deal with Russia which chiefly concerned the Italian dictator. …Without striking a blow, Russia has in Poland and the Baltic profited from the war. But I, a born revolutionist, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your Revolution to the tactical exigencies of a certain political moment… It is my duty to add that one further step in your relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy… 45 Mussolini’s letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degeneration of Italo–German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer’s honeymoon with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nerves of both parties. 
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- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 16764-69  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:27 AM

In the captured Wilhelmstrasse papers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meetings with the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail that stunned the Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheated but could be terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of the Nazi negotiators, reported to Berlin, he “became quite agitated.” The Soviet Union, Stalin reminded the Germans, had “rendered a very great service to Germany [and] had made enemies by rendering this assistance.” In return it expected some consideration from Berlin. 
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- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 16779-83  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:29 AM

Russia was to get, besides the cruiser Luetzow and the plans of the Bismarck, heavy naval guns and other gear and some thirty of Germany’s latest warplanes, including the Messerschmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88 dive bombers. In addition the Soviets were to receive machines for their oil and electric industries, locomotives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and so on. 
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- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 16784-86  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:29 AM

What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW—one million tons of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates, considerable amounts of numerous other vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons of soybeans from Manchuria. 
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- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 16790-95  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:30 AM

The Agreement [Schnurre concluded] means a wide-open door to the East for us… The effects of the British blockade will be decisively weakened. 55 This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia’s aggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, and accepted the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in the three Baltic countries (to be eventually used against whom but Germany?). 
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- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 16804-5  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:30 AM

And in his harangue to them on November 23 he had emphasized that “we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.” This was a thought which never left his restless mind. 
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- Highlight on Page 671 | Loc. 16856-62  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 10:36 AM

On the very day, January 10, that Hitler had ordered the attack through Belgium and Holland to begin on the seventeenth, a German military plane flying from Muenster to Cologne became lost in the clouds over Belgium and was forced to land near Mechelen-sur-Meuse. In it was Major Helmut Reinberger, an important Luftwaffe staff officer, and in his briefcase were the German plans, complete with maps, for the attack in the West. As Belgian soldiers closed in, the major made for some nearby bushes and lit a fire to the contents of his briefcase. Attracted by this interesting phenomenon the Belgian soldiers stamped out the flames and retrieved what was left. Taken to military quarters nearby, Reinberger, in a desperate gesture, grabbed the partly burned papers, which a Belgian officer had placed on a table, and threw them into a lighted stove. The Belgian officer quickly snatched them out. 
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- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 16966-70  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 02:02 PM

The British naval blockade stifled Imperial Germany in the first war. Between the wars the handful of German naval officers who commanded the country’s modestly sized Navy pondered this experience and this geographical fact and came to the conclusion that in any future war with Britain, Germany must try to gain bases in Norway, which would break the British blockade line across the North Sea, open up the broad ocean to German surface and undersea vessels and indeed offer an opportunity for the Reich to reverse the tables and mount an effective blockade of the British Isles. 
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- Highlight on Page 674 | Loc. 16985-87  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 02:04 PM

Germany’s very existence depended upon the import of iron ore from Sweden. For the first war year the Germans were counting on eleven million tons of it out of a total annual consumption of fifteen million tons. 
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- Highlight on Page 682 | Loc. 17174-77  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 02:30 PM

As early as February 21, according to his diary, Halder had got the impression that the attack on Denmark and Norway would not begin until after the offensive in the West had been launched and “carried to a certain point.” Hitler himself had been in doubt which operation to begin first and raised the question with Jodl on February 26. Jodl’s advice was to keep the two operations quite separate and Hitler agreed, “if it were possible.” 
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- Highlight on Page 688 | Loc. 17298-300  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 02:39 PM

The Foreign Minister explained that these documents showed specifically the sinister role of the American Ambassadors Bullitt [Paris], Kennedy [London] and Drexel Biddle [Warsaw]… They gave an intimation of the machinations of that Jewish-plutocratic clique whose influence, through Morgan and Rockefeller, reached all the way up to Roosevelt. 
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- Highlight on Page 691 | Loc. 17374-84  | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 02:44 PM

The Duce replied that once Germany had made a victorious advance he would intervene immediately… he would lose no time… when the Allies were so shaken by the German attack that it needed only a second blow to bring them to their knees. On the other hand, If Germany’s progress was slow, the Duce said that then he would wait. This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by “something deeply rooted in his make-up,” it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridiculous Italian partner that did not weaken, that indeed was strengthened when adversity and then disaster overtook the strutting, sawdust Roman Caesar. It is one of the interesting paradoxes of this narrative. 
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- Highlight on Page 692 | Loc. 17405-7  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:17 AM

Hassell and his friends wanted guarantees that if they got rid of Hitler Germany would be treated more generously than it was after the Germans had got rid of Wilhelm II. 
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- Highlight on Page 695 | Loc. 17473-79  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:22 AM

Two days later, on April 5, when the first wave of German naval supply ships was already at sea, Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed in a speech that Hitler, by failing to attack in the West when the British and French were unprepared, had “missed the bus”—a phrase he was very shortly to rue. * The British government at this moment, according to Churchill, was inclined to believe that the German build-up in the Baltic and North Sea ports was being done merely to enable Hitler to deliver a counterstroke in case the British, in mining Norwegian waters to cut off the ore shipments from Narvik, also occupied that port and perhaps others to the south. 
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- Highlight on Page 696 | Loc. 17495-98  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:24 AM

But trickery was not to be confined to the Foreign Office. The Navy was also to make use of it. On April 3, with the departure of the first vessels, Jodl reflected in his diary on the problem of how deceit could be used to hoodwink the Norwegians in case they became suspicious of the presence of so many German men-of-war in their vicinity. Actually this little matter had already been worked out by the Navy. It had instructed its warships and transports to try to pass as British craft—even if it were necessary to fly the Union Jack! 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 696 | Loc. 17501-20  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:25 AM

MOST SECRET Behavior During Entrance into the Harbor All ships darkened… The disguise as British craft must be kept as long as possible. All challenges in Morse by Norwegian ships will be answered in English. In answer, something like the following will be chosen: “Calling at Bergen for a short visit. No hostile intent.” …Challenges to be answered with names of British warships: Koeln—H.M.S. Cairo. Koenigsberg—H.M.S. Calcutta…. (etc.) Arrangements are to be made to enable British war flags to be illuminated… For Bergen… Following is laid down as guiding principle should one of our own units find itself compelled to answer the challenge of passing craft: To challenge: (in case of the Koeln) H.M.S. Cairo. To order to stop: “(1) Please repeat last signal. (2) Impossible to understand your signal.” In case of a warning shot: “Stop firing. British ship. Good friend.” In case of an inquiry as to destination and purpose: “Going Bergen. Chasing German steamers.” * And so on April 9, 1940, at 5:20 A.M. precisely (4:20 A.M. in Denmark), an hour before dawn, the German envoys at Copenhagen and Oslo, having routed the respective foreign ministers out of bed exactly twenty minutes before (Ribbentrop had insisted on a strict timetable in co-ordination with the arrival at that hour of the German troops), presented to the Danish and Norwegian governments a German ultimatum demanding that they accept on the instant, and without resistance, the “protection of the Reich.” The ultimatum was perhaps the most brazen document yet composed by Hitler and Ribbentrop, who were such masters and by now so experienced in diplomatic deceit. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 700 | Loc. 17587-95  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:31 AM

For nearly four years, until the tide of war had changed, the Danish King and his people, a good-natured, civilized and happy-go-lucky race, offered very little trouble to the Germans. Denmark became known as the “model protectorate.” The monarch, the government, the courts, even the Parliament and the press, were at first allowed a surprising amount of freedom by their conquerors. Not even Denmark’s seven thousand Jews were molested—for a time. But the Danes, later than most of the other conquered peoples, finally came to the realization that further “loyal co-operation,” as they called it, with their Teutonic tyrants, whose brutality increased with the years and with the worsening fortunes of war, was impossible—if they were to retain any shred of self-respect and honor. They also began to see that Germany might not win the war after all and that little Denmark was not inexorably condemned, as so many had feared at first, to be a vassal state in Hitler’s unspeakable New Order. Then resistance began. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 701 | Loc. 17604-8  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 10:33 AM

Three hundred Norwegian sailors—almost the entire crews of the two vessels—perished. By 8 A.M. Narvik was in the hands of the Germans, taken by ten destroyers which had slipped through a formidable British fleet, and occupied by a mere two battalions of Nazi troops under the command of Brigadier General Eduard Dietl, an old Bavarian crony of Hitler since the days of the Beer Hall Putsch, who was to prove himself a resourceful and courageous commander when the going at Narvik got rough, as it did beginning the next day. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Sola airfield, near the port of Stavanger on the southwest coast, was taken by German parachute troops after the Norwegian machine gun emplacements—there was no real antiaircraft protection—were silenced. This was Norway’s biggest airfield and strategically of the highest importance to the Luftwaffe, since from here bombers could range not only against the British fleet along the Norwegian coast but against the chief British naval bases in northern Britain. Its seizure gave the Germans immediate air superiority in Norway and spelled the doom of any attempt by the British to land sizable forces. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 702 | Loc. 17630-33  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 02:09 PM

By noon, then, or shortly afterward, the five principal Norwegian cities and ports and the one big airfield along the west and south coasts that ran for 1,500 miles from the Skagerrak to the Arctic were in German hands. They had been taken by a handful of troops conveyed by a Navy vastly inferior to that of the British. Daring, deceit and surprise had brought Hitler a resounding victory at very little cost. But at Oslo, the main prize, his military force and his diplomacy had run into unexpected trouble. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 706 | Loc. 17723-29  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 02:19 PM

The Nazi reaction to this rebuff by such a small and now helpless country was immediate and in character. The Germans had failed, first, to capture the King and the members of the government and, then, to persuade them to surrender. Now the Germans tried to kill them. Late on April 11, the Luftwaffe was sent out to give the village of Nybergsund the full treatment. The Nazi flyers demolished it with explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunned those who tried to escape the burning ruins. The Germans apparently believed at first that they had succeeded in massacring the King and the members of the government. The diary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway, had this entry for April 11: “Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. Alles vernichtet.” (Oslo government. Completely wiped out.) 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 708 | Loc. 17772-76  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 02:33 PM

conveyed to Tromsö, far above the Arctic Circle and north of Narvik, where on May Day the provisional capital was set up. By then the southern half of Norway, comprising all the cities and main towns, had been irretrievably lost. But northern Norway seemed secure. On May 28 an Allied force of 25,000 men, including two brigades of Norwegians, a brigade of Poles and two battalions of the French Foreign Legion, had driven the greatly outnumbered Germans out of Narvik. There seemed no reason to doubt that 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The Wehrmacht commanders—Goering, Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, Jodl, Raeder and the rest—had for the first time had a foretaste during the Norwegian campaign of how their demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military successes, the tide of war changed, and it would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 710 | Loc. 17802-8  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 02:39 PM

the quick conquest of Denmark and Norway had been an important victory for Hitler and a discouraging defeat for the British. It secured the winter iron ore route, gave added protection to the entrance to the Baltic, allowed the daring German Navy to break out into the North Atlantic and provided them with excellent port facilities there for submarines and surface ships in the sea war against Britain. It brought Hitler air bases hundreds of miles closer to the main enemy. And perhaps most important of all it immensely enhanced the military prestige of the Third Reich and correspondingly diminished that of the Western Allies. Nazi Germany seemed invincible. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and now Denmark and Norway had succumbed easily to Hitler’s force, or threat of force, and not even the help of two major allies in the West had been, in the latter cases, of the slightest avail. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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There were military lessons, too, to be learned from Hitler’s lightning conquest of the two Scandinavian countries. The most significant was the importance of air power and its superiority over naval power when land bases for bombers and fighters were near. Hardly less important was an old lesson, that victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative. The German Navy and Air Force had been both, and Dietl at Narvik had shown a resourcefulness of the German Army which the Allies had lacked. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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S HORTLY AFTER DAWN on the fine spring day of May 10, 1940, the ambassador of Belgium and the minister of the Netherlands in Berlin were summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse and informed by Ribbentrop that German troops were entering their countries to safeguard their neutrality against an imminent attack by the Anglo–French armies—the same shabby excuse that had been made just a month before with Denmark and Norway. A formal German ultimatum called upon the two governments to see to it that no resistance was offered. If it were, it would be crushed by all means and the responsibility for the bloodshed would “be borne exclusively by the Royal Belgian and the Royal Netherlands Government.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The German Army [Spaak said, not attempting to hold back his feeling of outrage] has just attacked our country. This is the second time in twenty-five years that Germany has committed a criminal aggression against a neutral and loyal Belgium. What has happened is perhaps even more odious than the aggression of 1914. No ultimatum, no note, no protest of any kind has ever been placed before the Belgian Government. It is through the attack itself that Belgium has learned that Germany has violated the undertakings given by her… The German Reich will be held responsible by history. Belgium is resolved to defend herself. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 717 | Loc. 18051-60  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:03 AM

The original German plan of attack in the West had been drastically changed since it fell into the hands of the Belgians and, as the Germans suspected, of the French and British, in January. Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), as the operation was called, had been hastily concocted in the fall of 1939 by the Army High Command under the pressure of Hitler’s order to launch the offensive in the West by mid-November. There is much dispute among military historians and indeed among the German generals themselves whether this first plan was a modified version of the old Schlieffen plan or not; Halder and Guderian have maintained that it was. It called for the main German drive on the right flank through Belgium and northern France, with the object of occupying the Channel ports. It fell short of the famous Schlieffen plan, which had failed by an ace of success in 1914 and which provided not only for the capture of the Channel ports but for a continuation of a great wheeling movement which would bring the German right-wing armies through Belgium and northern France and across the Seine, after which they would turn east below Paris and encircle and destroy the remaining French forces. Its purpose had been to quickly put an end to armed French resistance so that Germany, in 1914, could then turn on Russia with the great bulk of its military might. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 718 | Loc. 18075-80  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:04 AM

Thus a German attempt to sweep through Belgium—and perhaps Holland—to flank the Maginot Line would be met very early in the game by the entire B.E.F., the bulk of the French Army, the twenty-two divisions of the Belgians and the ten divisions of the Dutch—a force numerically equal, as it turned out, to that of the Germans. It was to avoid such a head-on clash and at the same time to trap the British and French armies that would speed forward so far that General Erich von Manstein (born Lewinski), chief of staff of Rundstedt’s Army Group A on the Western front, proposed a radical change in Fall Gelb. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 718 | Loc. 18080-84  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:05 AM

Manstein was a gifted and imaginative staff officer of relatively junior rank, but during the winter he succeeded in getting his bold idea put before Hitler over the initial opposition of Brauchitsch, Halder and a number of other generals. Manstein’s proposal was that the main German assault should be launched in the center through the Ardennes with a massive armored force which would then cross the Meuse just north of Sedan and break out into the open country and race to the Channel at Abbeville. Hitler, always attracted by daring and even reckless solutions, was interested. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 718 | Loc. 18095-99  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:07 AM

Somewhere along the line, incidentally, the plan for the conquest of the Netherlands, which had been dropped from Fall Gelb in a revision on October 29, 1939, was reinstated on November 14 at the urging of the Luftwaffe, which wanted the Dutch airfields for use against Britain and which offered to supply a large batch of airborne troops for this minor but somewhat complicated operation. On such considerations are the fates of little nations sometimes decided. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 719 | Loc. 18100-18104  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:07 AM

And so as the campaign in Norway approached its victorious conclusion and the first warm days of the beginning of May arrived, the Germans, with the most powerful army the world had ever seen up to that moment, stood poised to strike in the West. In mere numbers the two sides were evenly matched—136 German divisions against 135 divisions of the French, British, Belgian and Dutch. The defenders had the advantage of vast defensive fortifications: the impenetrable Maginot Line in the south, the extensive line of Belgian forts in the middle and fortified water lines in Holland in the north. Even in the number of tanks, the Allies matched the Germans. But they had not concentrated them as had the latter. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The Germans had a unified command, the initiative of the attacker, no moral scruples against aggression, a contagious confidence in themselves and a daring plan. They had had experience in battle in Poland. There they had tested their new tactics and their new weapons in combat. They knew the value of the dive bomber and the mass use of tanks. And they knew, as Hitler had never ceased to point out, that the French, though they would be defending their own soil, had no heart in what lay ahead. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Hitler, accompanied by Keitel, Jodl and others of the OKW staff, arrived at headquarters, which he had named Felsennest (Eyrie), near Muenstereifel just as dawn was breaking on May 10. Twenty-five miles to the west German forces were hurtling over the Belgian frontier. Along a front of 175 miles, from the North Sea to the Maginot Line, Nazi troops broke across the borders of three small neutral states, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, in brutal violation of the German word, solemnly and repeatedly given. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Winston Churchill himself, who had taken over as Prime Minister on the first day of battle, was dumfounded. He was awakened at half past seven on the morning of May 15 by a telephone call from Premier Paul Reynaud in Paris, who told him in an excited voice, “We have been defeated! We are beaten!” Churchill refused to believe it. The great French Army vanquished in a week? It was impossible. “I did not comprehend,” he wrote later, “the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving armor.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Tanks—seven divisions of them concentrated at one point, the weakest position in the Western defenses, for the big breakthrough—that was what did it. That and the Stuka dive bombers and the parachutists and the airborne troops who landed far behind the Allied lines or on the top of their seemingly impregnable forts and wrought havoc. And yet we who were in Berlin wondered why these German tactics should have come as such a shattering surprise to the Allied leaders. Had not Hitler’s troops demonstrated their effectiveness in the campaign against Poland? 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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in Norway, a month before the onslaught in the West, they had been prodigious, capturing Oslo and all the airfields, and reinforcing the isolated small groups that had been landed by sea at Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik and thereby enabling them to hold out. Hadn’t the Allied commanders studied these campaigns and learned their lessons? 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 721 | Loc. 18150-52  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:11 AM

Only one division of panzers could be spared by the Germans for the conquest of the Netherlands, which was accomplished in five days largely by parachutists and by troops landed by air transports behind the great flooded water lines which many in Berlin had believed would hold the Germans up for weeks. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 722 | Loc. 18168-72  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:13 AM

There was some hope that the Germans might be stopped short of the Moerdijk bridges by General Giraud’s French Seventh Army, which had raced up from the Channel and reached Tilburg on the afternoon of May 11. But the French, like the hard-pressed Dutch, lacked air support, armor, and antitank and antiaircraft guns, and were easily pushed back to Breda. This opened the way for the German 9th Panzer Division to cross the bridges at Moerdijk and Dordrecht and, on the afternoon of May 12, arrive at the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas across from Rotterdam, where the German airborne troops still held the bridges. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 722 | Loc. 18178-82  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:13 AM

Political as well as military considerations require that this resistance be broken speedily.” How? He commanded that detachments of the Air Force be taken from the Sixth Army front in Belgium “to facilitate the rapid conquest of Fortress Holland.” 7 Specifically he and Goering ordered a heavy bombing of Rotterdam. The Dutch would be induced to surrender by a dose of Nazi terror—the kind that had been applied the autumn before at beleaguered Warsaw. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 722 | Loc. 18183-89  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 10:14 AM

On the morning of May 14 a German staff officer from the XXXIXth Corps had crossed the bridge at Rotterdam under a white flag and demanded the surrender of the city. He warned that unless it capitulated it would be bombed. While surrender negotiations were under way—a Dutch officer had come to German headquarters near the bridge to discuss the details and was returning with the German terms—bombers appeared and wiped out the heart of the great city. Some eight hundred persons, almost entirely civilians, were massacred, several thousand wounded and 78,000 made homeless. * This bit of treachery, this act of calculated ruthlessness, would long be remembered by the Dutch, though at Nuremberg both Goering and Kesselring of the Luftwaffe defended it on the grounds that Rotterdam was not an open city but stoutly defended by the Dutch. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The next day, May 14, the avalanche broke. An army of tanks unprecedented in warfare for size, concentration, mobility and striking power, which when it had started through the Ardennes Forest from the German frontier on May 10 stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles far behind the Rhine, broke through the French Ninth and Second armies and headed swiftly for the Channel, behind the Allied forces in Belgium. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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On both sides of Dinant on the Meuse the French gave way to General Hermann Hoth’s XVth Armored Corps, one of whose two tank divisions was commanded by a daring young brigadier general, Erwin Rommel. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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This feat, along with the capture of the bridges and the violence of the attack mounted by General von Reichenau’s Sixth Army, which was sustained by General Hoepner’s XVIth Armored Corps of two tank divisions and one mechanized infantry division, convinced the Allied High Command that now, as in 1914, the brunt of the German offensive was being carried out by the enemy’s right wing and that they had taken the proper means to stop it. In fact, as late as the evening of May 15 the Belgian, British and French forces were holding firm on the Dyle line from Antwerp to Namur. This was just what the German High Command wanted. It had now become possible for it to spring the Manstein plan and deliver the haymaker in the center. General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, saw the situation—and his opportunities—very clearly on the evening of May 13. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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By the 24th, then, the British, French and Belgian armies in the north were compressed into a relatively small triangle with its base along the Channel from Gravelines to Terneuzen and its apex at Valenciennes, some seventy miles inland. There was now no hope of breaking out of the trap. The only hope, and it seemed a slim one, was possible evacuation by sea from Dunkirk. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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It was at this juncture, on May 24, that the German armor, now within sight of Dunkirk and poised along the Aa Canal between Gravelines and St.-Omer for the final kill, received a strange—and to the soldiers in the field inexplicable—order to halt their advance. It was the first of the German High Command’s major mistakes in World War II and became a subject of violent controversy, not only between the German generals themselves but among the military historians, as to who was responsible and why. We shall return to that question in a moment in the light of a mass of material now available. Whatever the reasons for this stop order, it provided a miraculous reprieve to the Allies, and especially to the British, leading as it did to the miracle of Dunkirk. But it did not save the Belgians. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 731 | Loc. 18387-93  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:43 PM

Suddenly on the evening of May 24 came the peremptory order from the High Command, issued at the insistence of Hitler with the prompting of Rundstedt and Goering but over the violent objections of Brauchitsch and Halder, that the tank forces should halt on the canal line and attempt no further advance. This furnished Lord Gort an unexpected and vital reprieve which he and the British Navy and Air Force made the most of and which, as Rundstedt later perceived and said, led “to one of the great turning points of the war.” How did this inexplicable stop order on the threshold of what seemed certain to be the greatest German victory of the campaign come about? What were the reasons for it? And who was responsible? 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The generals, led by Rundstedt and Halder, have put the blame exclusively on Hitler. Churchill added further fuel to the controversy in the second volume of his war memoirs by contending that the initiative for the order came from Rundstedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries of Rundstedt’s own headquarters. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Nor did he and his generals, ignorant of the sea as they were—and remained—dream that the sea-minded British could evacuate a third of a million men from a small battered port and from the exposed beaches right under their noses. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 736 | Loc. 18491-93  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:50 PM

Some of the British, he conceded, were “fighting with tooth and nail:” the others were “fleeing to the coast and trying to get across the Channel on anything that floats. Le Débâcle,” he concluded, alluding to Zola’s famous novel of the French collapse in the Franco–Prussian War. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 736 | Loc. 18504-8  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:51 PM

Though outnumbered, the new British Spitfires proved more than a match for the Messerschmitts and they mowed down the cumbersome German bombers. On a few occasions Goering’s planes arrived over Dunkirk between British sorties and did such extensive damage to the port that for a time it was unusable and the troops had to be lifted exclusively from the beaches. The Luftwaffe also pressed several strong attacks on the shipping and accounted for most of the 243—out of 861—vessels sunk. But it failed to achieve what Goering had promised Hitler: the annihilation of the B.E.F. 
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- Highlight on Page 737 | Loc. 18511-16  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:52 PM

Medium German artillery had in the meantime come within range and daytime evacuation operations had to be abandoned. The Luftwaffe at that time did not operate after dark and during the nights of June 2 and 3 the remainder of the B.E.F. and 60,000 French troops were successfully brought out. Dunkirk, still defended stubbornly by 40,000 French soldiers, held out until the morning of June 4. By that day 338,226 British and French soldiers had escaped the German clutches. They were no longer an army; most of them, understandably, were for the moment in a pitiful shape. But they were battle-tried; they knew that if properly armed and adequately covered from the air they could stand up to the Germans. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 737 | Loc. 18524-35  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:53 PM

These dismal facts were very much on the mind of Winston Churchill when he rose in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, while the last transports from Dunkirk were being unloaded, determined, as he wrote later, to show not only his own people but the world—and especially the U.S.A.—“that our resolve to fight on was based on serious grounds.” It was on this occasion that he uttered his famous peroration, which will be long remembered and will surely rank with the greatest ever made down the ages: Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 738 | Loc. 18545-49  | Added on Thursday, February 05, 2015, 02:55 PM

But it was an unequal struggle. In “victorious confusion,” as Telford Taylor has aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like a tidal wave, the confusion coming because there were so many of them and they were moving so fast and often getting in each other’s way. 20 On June 10 the French government hastily departed Paris and on June 14 the great city, the glory of France, which was undefended, was occupied by General von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“Fuehrer is working on the peace treaty… First negotiations in the Forest of Compiègne.” Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of the museum where the old wagon-lit of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918 armistice was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engineers, working with pneumatic drills, had torn the wall down and were pulling the car out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, when at the dictation of Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice. And so it was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest at Compiègne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s triumphs, of which, in the course of my work, I had seen so many over the last turbulent years. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 742 | Loc. 18620-30  | Added on Friday, February 06, 2015, 10:19 AM

It was one of the loveliest summer days I ever remember in France. A warm June sun beat down on the stately trees—elms, oaks, cypresses and pines—casting pleasant shadows on the wooded avenues leading to the little circular clearing. At 3:15 P.M. precisely, Hitler arrived in his big Mercedes, accompanied by Goering, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Raeder, Ribbentrop and Hess, all in their various uniforms, and Goering, the lone Field Marshal of the Reich, fiddling with his field marshal’s baton. They alighted from their automobiles some two hundred yards away, in front of the Alsace-Lorraine statue, which was draped with German war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I remembered from previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of the victorious Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns. Hitler glanced at the monument and strode on. I observed his face [I wrote in my diary]. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else… a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too—revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire. Hitler and his party then entered the armistice railway car, the Fuehrer seating himself in the chair occupied by Foch in 1918. Five minutes later the French delegation arrived, headed by General Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army at Sedan, and made up of an admiral, an Air Force general and one civilian, Léon Noël, the former ambassador to Poland, who was now witnessing his second debacle wrought by German arms. They looked shattered, but retained a tragic dignity. They had not been told that they would be led to this proud French shrine to undergo such a humiliation, and the shock was no doubt just what Hitler had calculated. As Halder wrote in his diary that evening after being given an eyewitness account by Brauchitsch: The French had no warning that they would be handed the terms at the very site of the negotiations in 1918. They were apparently shaken by this arrangement and at first inclined to be sullen. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, was out of the war after six weeks. German troops stood guard over most of Europe, from the North Cape above the Arctic Circle to Bordeaux, from the English Channel to the River Bug in eastern Poland. Adolf Hitler had reached the pinnacle. The former Austrian waif, who had been the first to unite the Germans in a truly national State, this corporal of the First World War, had now become the greatest of German conquerors. All that stood between him and the establishment of German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military machine the world had ever seen. 
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Churchill reiterated in the Commons Britain’s “inflexible resolve to continue the war” and in another one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded: Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: “This was their finest hour.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his generals, twelve of whom now bandied field marshals’ batons. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“I utterly reject the Navy’s proposal,” the Army General Staff Chief, usually a very calm man, fumed. “From the point of view of the Army I regard it as complete suicide. I might just as well put the troops that have landed straight through a sausage machine!” According to the Naval War Staff’s record of the meeting * Schniewind replied that it would be “equally suicidal” to attempt to transport the troops for such a broad front as the Army desired, “in view of British naval supremacy.” It was a cruel dilemma. If a broad front with the large number of troops to man it was attempted, the whole German expedition might be sunk at sea by the British Navy. If a short front, with correspondingly fewer troops, was adopted, the invaders might be hurled back into the sea by the British Army. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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If the Navy’s fears were spreading to Jodl, the OKW Operations Chief’s hesitations were having their effect on Hitler. All through the war the Fuehrer leaned much more heavily on Jodl than on the Chief of OKW, the spineless, dull-minded Keitel. It is not surprising, then, that on August 13, when Raeder saw the Supreme Commander in Berlin and requested a decision on the broad versus the narrow front, Hitler was inclined to agree with the Navy on the smaller operation. 
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If Churchill and his military chiefs had only got wind of this remarkable conference the code word “Cromwell” might not have been sent out in England on the evening of the next day, September 7, signifying “Invasion imminent” and causing no end of confusion, the endless ringing of church bells by the Home Guard, the blowing of several bridges by Royal Engineers and the needless casualties suffered by those stumbling over hastily laid mines. * But on the late afternoon of Saturday, September 7, the Germans had begun their first massive bombing of London, carried out by 625 bombers protected by 648 fighters. It was the most devastating attack from the air ever delivered up to that day on a city—the bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam were pinpricks beside it—and by early evening the whole dock-side area of the great city was a mass of flames and every railway line to the south, so vital to the defense against invasion, was blocked. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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To help bring that about, Jeschonnek of the Air Force begged to be allowed to bomb London’s residential districts, since, he said, there was no sign of “mass panic” in London while these areas were being spared. Admiral Raeder enthusiastically supported some terror bombing. Hitler, however, thought concentration on military objectives was more important. “Bombing with the object of causing a mass panic,” he said, “must be left to the last.” Admiral Raeder’s enthusiasm for terror bombing seems to have been due mainly to his lack of enthusiasm for the landings. He now intervened to stress again the “great risks” involved. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The enemy Air Force is still by no means defeated. On the contrary, it shows increasing activity. The weather situation as a whole does not permit us to expect a period of calm… The Fuehrer therefore decides to postpone “Sea Lion” indefinitely. 29 The emphasis is the Navy’s. Adolf Hitler, after so many years of dazzling successes, had at last met failure. For nearly a month thereafter the pretense was kept up that the invasion might still take place that autumn, but it was a case of whistling in the dark. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“The British,” Hitler laid it down, “must continue to believe that we are preparing an attack on a broad front.” 31 What had happened to make Adolf Hitler finally give in? Two things: the fatal course of the Battle of Britain in the air, and the turning of his thoughts once more eastward, to Russia. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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On August 12, Goering gave orders to launch Eagle the next day. As a curtain raiser heavy attacks were made on the twelfth on enemy radar stations, five of which were actually hit and damaged and one knocked out, but the Germans at this stage did not realize how vital to Britain’s defenses radar was and did not pursue the attack. On the thirteenth and fourteenth the Germans put in the air some 1,500 aircraft, mostly against R.A.F. fighter fields, and though they claimed five of them had been “completely destroyed” the damage was actually negligible and the Luftwaffe lost forty-seven planes against thirteen for the R.A.F. * 
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August 15 brought the first great battle in the skies. The Germans threw in the bulk of their planes from all three air fleets, flying 801 bombing and 1,149 fighter sorties. Luftflotten 5, operating from Scandinavia, met disaster. By sending some 800 planes in a massive attack on the south coast the Germans had expected to find the northeast coast defenseless. But a force of a hundred bombers, escorted by thirty-four twin-engined ME-110 fighters, was surprised by seven squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires as it approached the Tyneside and severely mauled. Thirty German planes, mostly bombers, were shot down without loss to the defenders. That was the end of Air Fleet 5 in the Battle of Britain. It never returned to it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Now Goering made the first of his two tactical errors. The skill of British Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From the moment they took off from their bases in Western Europe the German aircraft were spotted on British radar screens, and their course so accurately plotted that Fighter Command knew exactly where and when they could best be attacked. This was something new in warfare and it puzzled the Germans, who were far behind the British in the development and use of this electronic device. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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A second key to the successful defense of the skies over southern England was the sector station. This was the underground nerve center from which the Hurricanes and Spitfires were guided by radiotelephone into battle on the basis of the latest intelligence from radar, from ground observation posts and from pilots in the air. The Germans, as Galland noted, could hear the constant chatter over the air waves between the sector stations and the pilots aloft and finally began to understand the importance of these ground control centers. On August 24 they switched their tactics to the destruction of the sector stations, seven of which on the airfields around London were crucial to the protection of the south of England and of the capital itself. This was a blow against the very vitals of Britain’s air defenses. 
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From August 24 to September 6 the Germans sent over an average of a thousand planes a day to achieve this end. For once the Reich Marshal was right. The Battle of Britain had entered its decisive stage. Though the R.A.F. pilots, already strained from a month of flying several sorties a day, put up a valiant fight, the German preponderance in sheer numbers began to tell. Five forward fighter fields in the south of England were extensively damaged and, what was worse, six of the seven key sector stations were so severely bombed that the whole communications system seemed to be on the verge of being knocked out. This threatened disaster to Britain. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“The scales,” as Churchill later wrote, “had tilted against Fighter Command… There was much anxiety.” A few more weeks of this and Britain would have had no organized defense of its skies. The invasion would almost certainly succeed. And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error, this one comparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered, reeling R.A.F. and marked one of the major turning points of history’s first great battle in the air. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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He had never conceived—nor had anyone else up to that time—that a decisive battle could be decided in the air. Nor perhaps did he yet realize as the dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighter pilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great base for the possible reconquest of the Continent from the west at a later date. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Britain was saved. For nearly a thousand years it had successfully defended itself by sea power. Just in time, its leaders, a very few of them, despite all the bungling (of which these pages have been so replete) in the interwar years, had recognized that air power had become decisive in the mid-twentieth century and the little fighter plane and its pilot the chief shield for defense. As Churchill told the Commons in another memorable peroration on August 20, when the battle in the skies still raged and its outcome was in doubt, “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” 
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The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths. 38 He does not say specifically to what lengths, but Peter Fleming in his book on Sea Lion gives one of them. The British had decided, he says, as a last resort and if all other conventional methods of defense failed, to attack the German beachheads with mustard gas, sprayed from low-flying airplanes. It was a painful decision, taken not without much soul searching at the highest level; and as Fleming comments, the decision was “surrounded by secrecy at the time and ever since.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Stalin could be as crude and as ruthless in these matters as Hitler—and even more cynical. The press having been suppressed, the political leaders arrested and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, “elections” were staged by the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and after the respective parliaments thus “elected” had voted for the incorporation of their lands into the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of Russia “admitted” them into the motherland: Lithuania on August 3, Latvia on August 5, Estonia on August 6. 
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When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here… This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. 7 This idea lay like bedrock in Hitler’s mind, and his pact with Stalin had not changed it at all, but merely postponed acting on it. And but briefly. In fact, less than two months after the deal was signed and had been utilized to destroy Poland the Fuehrer instructed the Army that the conquered Polish territory was to be regarded “as an assembly area for future German operations.” The date was October 18, 1939, and Halder recorded it that day in his diary. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Russia needs only to hint to England that she does not wish to see Germany too strong and the English, like a drowning man, will regain hope that the situation in six to eight months will have completely changed. But if Russia is smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered. Then Germany will be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: In view of these considerations Russia must be liquidated. Spring, 1941. The sooner Russia is smashed, the better. † 
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“The questions hailed down upon Hitler,” Schmidt afterward recalled. “No foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence.” 32 What was Germany up to in Finland? Molotov wanted to know. What was the meaning of the New Order in Europe and in Asia, and what role would the U.S.S.R. be given in it? What was the “significance” of the Tripartite Pact? “Moreover,” he continued, “there are issues to be clarified regarding Russia’s Balkan and Black Sea interests with respect to Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey.” He would like, he said, to hear some answers and “explanations.” Hitler, perhaps for the first time in his life, was too taken aback to answer. He proposed that they adjourn “in view of a possible air-raid alarm,” promising to go into a detailed discussion the next day. A showdown had been postponed but not prevented, and the next morning when Hitler and Molotov resumed their talks the Russian Commissar was relentless. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“The Soviet Government,” he said, “is of the opinion that the German guarantee of Rumania is aimed against the interests of Soviet Russia—if one may express oneself so bluntly.” He had been expressing himself bluntly all day, to the growing annoyance of his hosts, and now he pressed on. He demanded that Germany “revoke” this guarantee. Hitler declined. All right, Molotov persisted, in view of Moscow’s interest in the Straits, what would Germany say “if Russia gave Bulgaria… a guarantee under exactly the same conditions as Germany and Italy had given one to Rumania”? One can almost see Hitler’s dark frown. 
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The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appeared over Berlin, as they had almost every recent night, to remind the Soviet Commissar on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germans told him, Britain was still in the war, and kicking. Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for the planes, but they had not come. Officials in the Wilhelmstrasse, who had feared the worst, were visibly relieved. But not for long. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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At any rate, for Hitler the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18,1940. Relieved to have made up his mind at last, as he later revealed, he went off to celebrate the Christmas holidays with the troops and flyers along the English Channel—as far as it was possible for him to get from Russia. Out of his mind too—as far as possible—must have been any thoughts of Charles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so many glorious conquests not unlike his own, had met disaster in the vast depths of the Russian steppes. 
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“Felix” was to be the code name for the taking of Gibraltar and the Spanish Canary Islands and the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. The Navy was also to study the possibility of occupying Portugal’s Madeira and the Azores. Portugal itself might have to be occupied. “Operation Isabella” would be the cover name for that, and three German divisions would be assembled on the Spanish–Portuguese frontier to carry it out. Finally, units of the French fleet and some troops were to be released so that France could defend her possessions in Northwest Africa against the British and De Gaulle. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The Italian armed forces have neither the leadership nor the military efficiency to carry the required operations in the Mediterranean area to a successful conclusion with the necessary speed and decision.” Therefore, the Navy concluded, this task must be carried out by Germany. The “fight for the African area,” it warned Hitler, is “the foremost strategic objective of German warfare as a whole… It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war.” But the Nazi dictator was not convinced. He had never been able to envisage the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa as anything but secondary to his main objective. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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“In view of present political developments and especially Russia’s interference in Balkan affairs,” Hitler said, “it is necessary to eliminate at all costs the last enemy remaining on the Continent before coming to grips with Britain.” From now on to the bitter end he would stick fanatically to this fundamental strategy. 
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Italy, not Spain, however, was the key to defeating Britain in the Mediterranean, but the Duce’s creaky empire was not equal to the task of doing it alone and Hitler was not wise enough to give her the means, which he had, to accomplish it. 
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Later, when catastrophe set in, Halder and his fellow generals realized that their intelligence on the Red Army had been fantastically faulty. But on February 3, 1941, they did not suspect that. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich. 
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And then, according to an underlined passage in the top-secret OKW notes of the meeting, 62 Hitler announced the most fateful decision of all. “The beginning of the Barbarossa operation” he told his generals, “will have to be postponed up to four weeks.” † This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. 
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It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final victory. Forever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued. 
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Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For three successive days and nights Goering’s bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level—for the city had no antiaircraft guns—killing 17,000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble. “Operation Punishment,” Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 827 | Loc. 20783-87  | Added on Monday, February 09, 2015, 02:53 PM

After the annihilation of the Italian armies in Libya Hitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to sending a light armored division and some Luftwaffe units to North Africa, where he arranged for General Erwin Rommel to be in over-all command of the Italo–German forces. Rommel, a dashing, resourceful tank officer, who had distinguished himself as commander of a panzer division in the Battle of France, was a type of general whom the British had not previously met in the North African desert and he was to prove an immense problem to them for two years. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 828 | Loc. 20821-26  | Added on Monday, February 09, 2015, 02:55 PM

Rommel, eager to continue his advance as soon as he had received reinforcements, sent similar pleas from North Africa. “This stroke,” Raeder told the Fuehrer, “would be more deadly to the British Empire than the capture of London!” A week later the Admiral handed Hitler a memorandum prepared by the Operations Division of the Naval War Staff which warned that, while Barbarossa “naturally stands in the foreground of the OKW leadership, it must under no circumstances lead to the abandonment of, or to delay in, the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean.” 67 But the Fuehrer already had made up his mind; 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 829 | Loc. 20833-36  | Added on Monday, February 09, 2015, 02:56 PM

Whether—and if so, by what means—it would be possible afterward to launch an offensive against the Suez Canal and eventually oust the British finally from their position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf cannot be decided until Operation Barbarossa is completed. The destruction of the Soviet Union came first; all else must wait. This, we can now see, was a staggering blunder. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian winter, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon. That gave the Germans only six months to overrun, before the onset of winter, an immense country that had never been conquered from the west. And though June had arrived, the vast army which had been turned southeast into Yugoslavia and Greece had to be brought back great distances to the Soviet frontier over unpaved roads and run-down single-track railway lines that were woefully inadequate to handle so swarming a traffic. The delay, as things turned out, was fatal. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 834 | Loc. 20953-56  | Added on Monday, February 09, 2015, 03:03 PM

It was here on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, that he received strange and unexpected news which shook him to the bone and forced him, as it did almost everyone else in the Western world, to take his mind for the moment off the war. His closest personal confidant, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, the second in line to succeed him after Goering, the man who had been his devoted and fanatically loyal follower since 1921 and, since Roehm’s murder, the nearest there was to a friend, had literally flown the coop and on his own gone to parley with the enemy! 
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Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin, Sam E. Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite accurate) and the preparations being made for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, once it was conquered. * Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German “plant.” He called in J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I, head read the report and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they were adjudged in Washington to be men who ought to know what was up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20. 
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A revised version of the timetable was issued a few days later. 109 It is a long and detailed document and shows that by the beginning of June not only were all plans for the onslaught on Russia complete but the vast and complicated movement of troops, artillery, armor, planes, ships and supplies was well under way and on schedule. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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The Red Army, despite all the warnings and the warning signs, was, as General Halder noted in his diary the first day, “tactically surprised along the entire front.” * All the first bridges were captured intact. In fact, says Halder, at most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields. † Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. It seemed like the Feldzug in Polen all over again. “It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, “that the Feldzug against Russia has been won in fourteen days.” In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 856 | Loc. 21617-25  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:41 AM

The Army High Command, led by Brauchitsch and Halder and supported by Bock, whose central army group was moving up the main highway to Moscow, and by Guderian, whose panzer forces were leading it, insisted on an all-out drive for the Soviet capital. There was much more to their argument than merely stressing the psychological value of capturing the enemy capital. Moscow, they pointed out to Hitler, was a vital source of armament production and, even more important, the center of the Russian transportation and communications system. Take it, and the Soviets would not only be deprived of an essential source of arms but would be unable to move troops and supplies to the distant fronts, which thereafter would weaken, wither and collapse. But there was a final conclusive argument which the generals advanced to the former corporal who was now their Supreme Commander. All their intelligence reports showed that the main Russian forces were now being concentrated before Moscow for an all-out defense of the capital. Just east of Smolensk a Soviet army of half a million men, which had extricated itself from Bock’s double envelopment, was digging in to bar further German progress toward the capital. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 857 | Loc. 21637-40  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:41 AM

Hitler had his hungry eyes on the food belt and industrial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fields just beyond in the Caucasus. Besides, he thought he saw a golden opportunity to entrap Budënny’s armies east of the Dnieper beyond Kiev, which still held out. He also wanted to capture Leningrad and join up with the Finns in the north. To accomplish these twin aims, several infantry and panzer divisions from Army Group Center would have to be detached and sent north and especially south. Moscow could wait. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 859 | Loc. 21688-702  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:45 AM

Reluctantly Hitler gave in to the urging of Brauchitsch, Halder and Bock and consented to the resumption of the drive on Moscow. But too late! Halder saw him on the afternoon of September 5 and now the Fuehrer, his mind made up, was in a hurry to get to the Kremlin. “Get started on the central front within eight to ten days,” the Supreme Commander ordered. (“Impossible!” Halder exclaimed in his diary.) “Encircle them, beat and destroy them,” Hitler added, promising to return to Army Group Center Guderian’s panzer group, then still heavily engaged in the Ukraine, and add Reinhardt’s tank corps from the Leningrad front. But it was not until the beginning of October that the armored forces could be brought back, refitted and made ready. On October 2 the great offensive was finally launched. “Typhoon” was the code name. A mighty wind, a cyclone, was to hit the Russians, destroy their last fighting forces before Moscow and bring the Soviet Union tumbling down. But here again the Nazi dictator became a victim of his megalomania. Taking the Russian capital before winter came was not enough. He gave orders that Field Marshal von Leeb in the north was at the same time to capture Leningrad, make contact with the Finns beyond the city and drive on and cut the Murmansk railway. Also, at the same time, Rundstedt was to clear the Black Sea coast, take Rostov, seize the Maikop oil fields and push forward to Stalingrad on the Volga, thus severing Stalin’s last link with the Caucasus. When Rundstedt tried to explain to Hitler that this meant an advance of more than four hundred miles beyond the Dnieper, with his left flank dangerously exposed, the Supreme Commander told him that the Russians in the south were now incapable of offering serious resistance. Rundstedt, who says that he “laughed aloud” at such ridiculous orders, was soon to find the contrary. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 860 | Loc. 21708-11  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:45 AM

The fall rains, however, had commenced. Rasputitza, the period of mud, set in. The great army, moving on wheels, was slowed down and often forced to halt. Tanks had to be withdrawn from battle to pull guns and ammunition trucks out of the mire. Chains and couplings for this job were lacking and bundles of rope had to be dropped by Luftwaffe transport planes which were badly needed for lifting other military supplies. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 860 | Loc. 21714-16  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:46 AM

The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in the slime. Even tractors can only move with great difficulty. A large portion of our heavy artillery was soon stuck fast… The strain that all this caused our already exhausted troops can perhaps be imagined. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 860 | Loc. 21722-24  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:46 AM

“Winter,” he says, “was about to begin, but there was no sign of winter clothing… Far behind the front the first partisan units were beginning to make their presence felt in the vast forests and swamps. Supply columns were frequently ambushed…” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 860 | Loc. 21725-26  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:47 AM

The German generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 861 | Loc. 21744-46  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:48 AM

Heavy snows and subzero temperatures came early that winter in Russia. Guderian noted the first snow on the night of October 6–7, just as the drive on Moscow was being resumed. It reminded him to ask headquarters again for winter clothing, especially for heavy boots and heavy wool socks. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 862 | Loc. 21767-70  | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015, 10:49 AM

Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery and felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow every object in its path; who drove for hour after hour through that no-man’s land only at last to find too thin shelter with insufficiently clothed, half-starved men; and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting… can truly judge the events which now occurred. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 865 | Loc. 21835-37  | Added on Saturday, February 14, 2015, 03:15 PM

December 6, 1941, then, is another turning point in the short history of the Third Reich and one of the most fateful ones. Hitler’s power had reached its zenith; from now on it was to decline, sapped by the growing counterblows of the nations against which he had chosen to make aggressive war. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 866 | Loc. 21854-56  | Added on Saturday, February 14, 2015, 03:17 PM

The strain of leading an army which could not always win under a Supreme Commander who insisted that it always do had brought about renewed heart attacks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, and by the time Zhukov’s counteroffensive began he was determined to step down as Commander in Chief. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 868 | Loc. 21898-906  | Added on Saturday, February 14, 2015, 03:20 PM

And yet some of the generals later reluctantly admitted that Hitler’s iron will in insisting that the armies stand and fight was his greatest accomplishment of the war in that it probably did save his armies from completely disintegrating in the snow. This view is best summed up by General Blumentritt. Hitler’s fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position and in the most impossible circumstances was undoubtedly correct. Hitler realized instinctively that any retreat across the snow and ice must, within a few days, lead to the dissolution of the front and that if this happened the Wehrmacht would suffer the same fate that had befallen the Grande Armée… The withdrawal could only be carried out across the open country since the roads and tracks were blocked with snow. After a few nights this would prove too much for the troops, who would simply lie down and die wherever they found themselves. There were no prepared positions in the rear into which they could be withdrawn, nor any sort of line to which they could hold on. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 870 | Loc. 21959-63  | Added on Saturday, February 14, 2015, 03:24 PM

The next day, Sunday, December 7, 1941, an event occurred on the other side of the round earth that transformed the European war, which he had so lightly provoked, into a world war, which, though he could not know it, would seal his fate and that of the Third Reich. Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day † Hitler hurried back by train to Berlin from his headquarters at Wolfsschanze. He had made a solemn secret promise to Japan and the time had come to keep it—or break it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 871 | Loc. 22011-14  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 10:53 AM

The American Republic, he saw, would have to be dealt with eventually and, as he said, “severely.” But one nation at a time. That had been the secret of his successful strategy thus far. The turn of America would come, but only after Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been struck down. Then, with the aid of Japan and Italy, he would deal with the upstart Americans, who, isolated and alone, would easily succumb to the power of the victorious Axis. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 871 | Loc. 22015  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 10:53 AM

Japan was the key to Hitler’s efforts to keep America out of the war until Germany was ready to take her on. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 872 | Loc. 22039-41  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 10:55 AM

If Germany should ever weaken, Japan would find itself confronted by a world coalition within a short time. We were all in the same boat. The fate of both countries was being determined now for centuries to come… A defeat of Germany would also mean the end of the Japanese imperialist idea. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 874 | Loc. 22078-83  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 10:57 AM

There was no doubt [Ribbentrop said] that the British would long since have abandoned the war if Roosevelt had not always given Churchill new hope… The Three-Power Pact had above all had the goal of frightening America… and of keeping it out of the war… America had to be prevented by all possible means from taking an active part in the war and from making its aid to England too effective… The capture of Singapore would perhaps be most likely to keep America out of the war because the United States could scarcely risk sending its fleet into Japanese waters… Roosevelt would be in a very difficult position… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 875 | Loc. 22096-103  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 10:59 AM

America was confronted by three possibilities: she could arm herself, she could assist England, or she could wage war on another front. If she helped England she could not arm herself. If she abandoned England the latter would be destroyed and America would then find herself fighting the powers of the Three-Power Pact alone. In no case, however, could America wage war on another front. Therefore, the Fuehrer concluded, “never in the human imagination” could there be a better opportunity for the Japanese to strike in the Pacific than now. “Such a moment,” he said, laying it on as thickly as he could, “would never return. It was unique in history.” Matsuoka agreed, but reminded Hitler that unfortunately he “did not control Japan. At the moment he could make no pledge on behalf of the Japanese Empire that it would take action.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 876 | Loc. 22113-26  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 11:01 AM

This boast led him to make the fateful pledge. Schmidt recorded it in his minutes: If Japan got into a conflict with the United States, Germany on her part would take the necessary steps at once. From Schmidt’s notes it is evident that Matsuoka did not quite grasp the significance of what the Fuehrer was promising, so Hitler said it again. Germany, as he had said, would promptly take part in case of a conflict between Japan and America. * Hitler paid dearly not only for this assurance, so casually given, but for his deceit in not telling the Japanese about his intention to attack Russia as soon as the Balkans were occupied. Somewhat coyly Matsuoka had asked Ribbentrop during a talk on March 28 whether on his return trip he “should remain in Moscow in order to negotiate with the Russians on the Nonaggression Pact or the Treaty of Neutrality.” The dull-witted Nazi Foreign Minister had replied smugly that Matsuoka “if possible should not bring up the question in Moscow since it probably would not altogether fit into the framework of the present situation.” He did not quite grasp the significance of what was up. But by the next day it had penetrated his wooden mind and he began the conversations that day by referring to it. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 876 | Loc. 22131-35  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 11:02 AM

But as soon as the Nipponese Foreign Minister was back in Moscow on his trip home, he signed a treaty of neutrality with Stalin which, as Ambassador von der Schulenburg, who foresaw its consequences, wired Berlin, provided for each country to remain neutral in case the other got involved in the war. This was one treaty—it was signed on April 13—which Japan honored to the very last despite subsequent German exhortations that she disregard it. For before the summer of 1941 was out the Nazis would be begging the Japanese to attack not Singapore or Manila but Vladivostok! 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 877 | Loc. 22144-46  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 11:03 AM

Six days after the Nazi armies were flung into Russia, on June 28, 1941, Ribbentrop was cabling the German ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, to do everything he could to get the Japanese to promptly attack Soviet Russia in the rear. Ott was advised to appeal to the Japanese appetite for spoils and also to argue that this was the best way of keeping America neutral. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 877 | Loc. 22151-53  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:12 PM

Matsuoka was in favor of immediately turning on Russia, but his views were not accepted by the government in Tokyo, whose attitude seemed to be that if the Germans were rapidly defeating the Russians, as they claimed, they needed no help from the Japanese. However, Tokyo was not so sure about a lightning Nazi victory and this was the real reason for its stand. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 883 | Loc. 22282-84  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:28 PM

On October 31, the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk while on convoy duty, with the loss of 100 men of 145 in its crew, including all its seven officers. Thus, long before the final formalities of declaring war, a shooting war had begun. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 885 | Loc. 22336-38  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:32 PM

The Fuehrer and, of course, his doltish Foreign Minister had never understood that the failure of the Nomura-Hull negotiations in Washington, which they so greatly desired, would bring the very result they had been trying to avoid until the time was ripe: America’s entry into the world conflict. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 886 | Loc. 22348-55  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:33 PM

Now Berlin awoke to what was up. The day before the “Winds” message, on November 18, Ribbentrop was somewhat surprised to receive a request from Tokyo asking Germany to sign a treaty in which the two nations would agree not to conclude a separate peace with common enemies. Just which enemies the Japanese meant was not clear, but the Nazi Foreign Minister obviously hoped that Russia was the first of them. He agreed “in principle” to the proposal, apparently in the comforting belief that Japan at last was about to honor its vague promises to hit the Soviet Union in Siberia. This was most welcome and timely, for the resistance of the Red Army on the broad front was becoming formidable and the Russian winter was setting in—much earlier than had been anticipated. A Japanese attack on Vladivostok and the Pacific maritime provinces might provide that extra ounce of pressure which would bring a Soviet collapse. Ribbentrop was swiftly disillusioned. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 887 | Loc. 22372-75  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:35 PM

November 25, 1941, is a crucial date. On that day the Japanese carrier task force sailed for Pearl Harbor. In Washington Hull went to the White House to warn the War Council of the danger confronting the country from Japan and to stress to the U.S. Army and Navy chiefs the possibility of Japanese surprise attacks. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 891 | Loc. 22465-67  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:42 PM

German armies reeled back in the snow and bitter cold. There was all the more reason for Hitler to demand his quid pro quo. On this question there was great uneasiness in the Foreign Office in Tokyo. The naval task force was now within flying distance of Pearl Harbor for its carrier planes. So far—miraculously—it had not been discovered by American ships or aircraft. But it might be any moment. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 891 | Loc. 22471-76  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:42 PM

But they were more worried than ever that Hitler would refrain from giving his guarantee unless Japan agreed to take on not only the United States and Great Britain but the Soviet Union as well. In this predicament Togo got off a long message to Ambassador Oshima in Berlin urging him to somehow stall the Germans on the Russian matter and not to give in unless it became absolutely necessary. Deluded though they were about their ability to deal with the Americans and the British, the Japanese generals and admirals retained enough sense to realize that they could not fight the Russians at the same time—even with German help. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 892 | Loc. 22491-94  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:43 PM

The Japanese need not have worried so much. For reasons unknown to the Tokyo militarists, or to anyone else, and which defy logic and understanding, Hitler did not insist on Japan’s taking on Russia along with the United States and Britain, though if he had the course of the war conceivably might have been different. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 892 | Loc. 22494-502  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:44 PM

At any rate, the Japanese on this Saturday evening of December 6, 1941, were determined to strike a telling blow against the United States in the Pacific, though no one in Washington or Berlin knew just where or even exactly when. That morning the British Admiralty had tipped off the American government that a large Japanese invasion fleet had been observed heading across the Gulf of Siam for the Isthmus of Kra, which indicated that the Nipponese were striking first at Thailand and perhaps Malaya. At 9 P.M. President Roosevelt got off a personal message to the Emperor of Japan imploring him to join him in finding “ways of dispelling the dark clouds” and at the same time warning him that a thrust of the Japanese military forces into Southeast Asia would create a situation that was “unthinkable.” At the Navy Department, intelligence officers drew up their latest report on the location of the major warships of the Japanese Navy. It listed most of them as being in home ports, including all the carriers and other warships of the task force which at that very moment had steamed to within three hundred miles of Pearl Harbor and was tuning up its bombers to take off at dawn. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 892 | Loc. 22509-14  | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 03:45 PM

The Japanese onslaught on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at 7:30 A.M. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941, caught Berlin as completely by surprise as it did Washington. Though Hitler had made an oral promise to Matsuoka that Germany would join Japan in a war against the United States and Ribbentrop had made another to Ambassador Oshima, the assurance had not yet been signed and the Japanese had not breathed a word to the Germans about Pearl Harbor. * Besides, at this moment, Hitler was fully occupied trying to rally his faltering generals and retreating troops in Russia. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 897 | Loc. 22609-17  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 09:52 AM

Hitler’s address on December 11 to the robots of the Reichstag in defense of his declaration of war on the United States was devoted mainly to hurling personal insults at Franklin D. Roosevelt, to charging that the President had provoked war in order to cover up the failures of the New Deal and to thundering that “this man alone,” backed by the millionaires and the Jews, was “responsible for the Second World War.” All the accumulated, pent-up resentment at a man who had stood from the first in his way toward world dominion, who had continually taunted him, who had provided massive aid to Britain at a moment when it seemed that battered island nation would fall, and whose Navy was frustrating him in the Atlantic burst forth in violent wrath. Permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representative in that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 900 | Loc. 22684-91  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 09:54 AM

The final act in the day’s drama was the signing of a tripartite agreement by Germany, Italy and Japan declaring “their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the joint war against the United States and England reaches a successful conclusion” and not to conclude a separate peace. Adolf Hitler, who a bare six months before had faced only a beleaguered Britain in a war which seemed to him as good as won, now, by deliberate choice, had arrayed against him the three greatest industrial powers in the world in a struggle in which military might depended largely, in the long run, on economic strength. Those three enemy countries together also had a great preponderance of manpower over the three Axis nations. Neither Hitler nor his generals nor his admirals seem to have weighed those sobering facts on that eventful December day as the year 1941 drew toward a close. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 903 | Loc. 22836-39  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 09:57 AM

But now the proud and hitherto invincible soldiers were falling back in the snow and bitter cold before an enemy which had proved their match; casualties in six months had passed the million mark; and a host of the most renowned generals were being summarily dismissed, some of them, such as Hoepner and Sponeck, publicly disgraced, and most of the others humiliated and made scapegoats of by the ruthless dictator. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 904 | Loc. 22842-43  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 09:58 AM

The plotters had long been convinced, as we have seen, that only the generals, in command of troops, had the physical power to overthrow the Nazi tyrant. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 908 | Loc. 22944-47  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:03 AM

“The principal difficulty with Beck,” Hassell wrote in his diary shortly before Christmas, 1941, “is that he is very theoretical. As Popitz says, a man of tactics but little will power.” This judgment, as it turned out, was not an ungrounded one and this quirk in the General’s temperament and character, this surprising lack of a will to act, was to prove tragic and disastrous in the end. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 909 | Loc. 22973-80  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:06 AM

This summer he would concentrate the bulk of his forces in the south, conquer the Caucasus oil fields, the Donets industrial basin and the wheat fields of the Kuban and take Stalingrad on the Volga. This would accomplish several prime objectives. It would deprive the Soviets of the oil and much of the food and industry they desperately needed to carry on the war, while giving the Germans the oil and the food resources they were almost as badly in need of. “If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,” Hitler told General Paulus, the commander of the ill-fated Sixth Army, just before the summer offensive began, “then I must end this war.” 10 Stalin could have said almost the same thing. He too had to have the oil of the Caucasus to stay in the war. That was where the significance of Stalingrad came in. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 910 | Loc. 22986-92  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:07 AM

Goering arrived in Rome at the end of January 1942 to line up Italian reinforcements for Russia, assuring Mussolini that the Soviet Union would be defeated in 1942 and that Great Britain would lay down her arms in 1943. Ciano found the fat, bemedaled Reich Marshal insufferable. “As usual he is bloated and overbearing,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted in his diary on February 2. Two days later: Goering leaves Rome. We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and during the dinner Goering talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, he had some beautiful rings on his fingers… On the way to the station he wore a great sable coat, something between what automobile drivers wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 911 | Loc. 23012-17  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:07 AM

Hitler talks, talks, talks [Ciano wrote in his diary]. Mussolini suffers—he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet. On the second day, after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty minutes. He omitted absolutely no argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history. Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist watch… The Germans—poor people—have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a word or a pause, which they don’t know by heart. General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the divan. Keitel was reeling, but he succeeded in keeping his head up. He was too close to Hitler to let himself go… 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 911 | Loc. 23021-25  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:08 AM

Of the 41 fresh divisions which were to reinforce the southern part of the front, where the main German blow would fall, one half—or 21 divisions—were Hungarian (10), Italian (6) and Rumanian (5). Halder and most of the other generals did not like to stake so much on so many “foreign” divisions whose fighting qualities, in their opinion, were, to put it mildly, questionable. But because of their own shortage of manpower they reluctantly accepted this aid, and this decision was shortly to contribute to the disaster which ensued. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 911 | Loc. 23027-31  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:09 AM

On May 27,1942, General Rommel had resumed his offensive in the desert. * Striking swiftly with his famed Afrika Korps (two armored divisions and a motorized infantry division) and eight Italian divisions, of which one was armored, he soon had the British desert army reeling back toward the Egyptian frontier. On June 21 he captured Tobruk, the key to the British defenses, which in 1941 had held out for nine months until relieved, and two days later he entered Egypt. By the end of June he was at El Alamein, sixty-five miles from Alexandria and the delta of the Nile. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 911 | Loc. 23031-36  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:10 AM

It seemed to many a startled Allied statesman, poring over a map, that nothing could now prevent Rommel from delivering a fatal blow to the British by conquering Egypt and then, if he were reinforced, sweeping on northeast to capture the great oil fields of the Middle East and then to the Caucasus to meet the German armies in Russia, which already were beginning their advance toward that region from the north. It was one of the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen, had never understood global warfare. He did not know how to exploit Rommel’s surprising African success. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 912 | Loc. 23044-47  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:11 AM

Since September 19 we had given up trying to get convoys through to Libya; every attempt had been paid for at a high price… Tonight we tried it again. A convoy of seven ships left, accompanied by two ten-thousand-ton cruisers and ten destroyers… All—I mean all—our ships were sunk… The British returned to their ports [at Malta] after having slaughtered us. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 913 | Loc. 23061-66  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:12 AM

Spitfires were flown to the island from the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp and soon drove the attacking Luftwaffe bombers from the skies. Rommel felt the effect. Three quarters of his supply ships thereafter were sunk. He had reached El Alamein with just thirteen operational tanks. * “Our strength,” he wrote in his diary on July 3, “has faded away.” And at a moment when the Pyramids were almost in sight, and beyond—the great prize of Egypt and Suez! 
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- Highlight on Page 915 | Loc. 23101-4  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:14 AM

And yet, as General Kurt Zeitzler later recalled, appearances even then, rosy as they were, were deceptive. Almost all the generals in the field, as well as those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. They could be summed up: the Germans simply didn’t have the resources—the men or the guns or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation—to reach the objectives Hitler had insisted on setting. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 916 | Loc. 23129-34  | Added on Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 10:16 AM

The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was one result of the fatal decision which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which became famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arms, making certain that he could never win the war and that the days of the thousand-year Third Reich were numbered. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 922 | Loc. 23271-76  | Added on Thursday, February 19, 2015, 02:20 PM

There is something weird and batty about such goings on that take the Supreme warlord, who by now was insisting on directing the war on far-flung fronts down to the divisional or regimental or even battalion level, thousands of miles from the battlefields on an unimportant political errand at a moment when the house is beginning to fall in. A change in the man, a corrosion, a deterioration has set in, as it already had with Goering who, though his once all-powerful Luftwaffe had been steadily declining, was becoming more and more attached to his jewels and his toy trains, with little time to spare for the ugly realities of a prolonged and increasingly bitter war. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 926 | Loc. 23342-46  | Added on Saturday, February 21, 2015, 05:20 PM

Zeitzler later contended that as soon as he saw what was happening he urged Hitler to permit the Sixth Army to withdraw from Stalingrad to the Don bend, where the broken front could be restored. The mere suggestion threw the Fuehrer into a tantrum. “I won’t leave the Volga! I won’t go back from the Volga!” he shouted, and that was that. This decision, taken in such a fit of frenzy, led promptly to disaster. The Fuehrer personally ordered the Sixth Army to stand fast around Stalingrad. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 927 | Loc. 23375-83  | Added on Saturday, February 21, 2015, 05:22 PM

Hitler would not give way. In vain I described to him conditions inside the so-called fortress: the despair of the starving soldiers, their loss of confidence in the Supreme Command, the wounded expiring for lack of proper attention while thousands froze to death. He remained as impervious to arguments of this sort as to those others which I had advanced. In the face of increasing Russian resistance in front of him and on his flanks General Hoth lacked the strength to negotiate that last thirty miles to Stalingrad. He believed that if the Sixth Army broke out he could still make a junction with it and then both forces could withdraw to Kotelnikovski. This at least would save a couple of hundred thousand German lives. * Probably for a day or two —between December 21 and 23—this could have been done, but by the latter date it had become impossible. For unknown to Hoth the Red Army had struck farther north and was now endangering the left flank of Manstein’s whole Army Group Don. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 929 | Loc. 23424-42  | Added on Saturday, February 21, 2015, 05:26 PM

They were honorable terms. All prisoners would be given “normal rations.” The wounded, sick and frostbitten would receive medical treatment. All prisoners could retain their badges of rank, decorations and personal belongings. Paulus was given twenty-four hours to reply. He immediately radioed the text of the ultimatum to Hitler and asked for freedom of action. His request was curtly dismissed by the Supreme warlord. Twenty-four hours after the expiration of the time limit on the demand for surrender, on the morning of January 10, the Russians opened the last phase of the Battle of Stalingrad with an artillery bombardment from five thousand guns. The fighting was bitter and bloody. Both sides fought with incredible bravery and recklessness over the frozen wasteland of the city’s rubble—but not for long. Within six days the German pocket had been reduced by half, to an area fifteen miles long and nine miles deep at its widest. By January 24 it had been split in two and the last small emergency airstrip lost. The planes which had brought in some supplies, especially medicines for the sick and wounded, and which had flown out 29,000 hospital cases, could no longer land. Once more the Russians gave their courageous enemy a chance to surrender. Soviet emissaries arrived at the German lines on January 24 with a new offer. Again Paulus, torn between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler. Troops without ammunition [he radioed on the twenty-fourth] or food… Effective command no longer possible… 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs… Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops. Hitler’s answer has been preserved. Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 931 | Loc. 23466-76  | Added on Saturday, February 21, 2015, 05:28 PM

The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulus got off his final message to headquarters. The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the end. At 7:45 P.M. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a last message on his own: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment.” He added the letters “CL”—the international wireless code signifying “This station will no longer transmit.” There was no last-minute fighting at headquarters. Paulus and his staff did not hold out to the last man. A squad of Russians led by a junior officer peered into the commander in chief’s darkened hole in the cellar. The Russians demanded surrender and the Sixth Army’s chief of staff, General Schmidt, accepted. Paulus sat dejected on his camp bed. When Schmidt addressed him—“May I ask the Field Marshal if there is anything more to be said?”—Paulus was too weary to answer. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 933 | Loc. 23528-31  | Added on Saturday, February 21, 2015, 05:32 PM

The initiative had passed from Hitler’s hands, never to return. It was his enemies who seized it now, and held it. And not only on land but in the air. Already on the night of May 30, 1942, the British had carried out their first one-thousand-plane bombing of Cologne, and more followed on other cities during the eventful summer. For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which their armed forces had inflicted on others up to now. 
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Getting Started Guide: Analyzing Big Data with AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Highlight Loc. 174-81  | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 10:53 AM

In the terminal window, run the following command: $ cd sentiment To collect tweets, run the following command, where term1 is your search term. Note that the collector script is not case sensitive. To use a multi-word term, enclose it in quotation marks. $ python collector.py term1 Examples: $ python collector.py kindle $ python collector.py "kindle fire" Press Enter to run the collector script. Your terminal window displays the following message: Collecting tweets. Please wait. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 351-53  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:01 AM

It doesn’t get any faster than pinging localhost. The latency in an Ethernet interface is around 0.3 milliseconds (ms). DSLand cable are around 20 ms. T1/T3 have a latency of about 4 ms. Satellite is the highest, as much as two seconds. That much latency breaks IP. Satellite providers play a lot of fancy proxying tricks to get latency down to a workable level. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 372-76  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:02 AM

When do you need an elite, hideously expensive, top-of-the-line Cisco or Juniper router? To quote networking guru Ed Sawicki: “You don’t need more performance than what you need.” Unless you’re an ISP handling multimegabyte routing tables, need the fastest possible performance, highest throughput, good vendor support, and highest reliability, you don’t need these superpowered beasts. The highest-end routers use specialized hardware. They are designed to move the maximum number of packets per second. They have more and fatter data buses, multiple CPUs, and TCAM memory. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 377-79  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:02 AM

TCAM is Ternary Content Addressable Memory. This is very different from ordinary system RAM. TCAM is several times faster than the fastest system RAM, and many times more expensive. You won’t find TCAM in lower-cost devices, nor will you find software that can shovel packets as fast as TCAM. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 395-98  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:03 AM

Management port Because switches forward traffic directly to the intended hosts, instead of promiscuously spewing them to anyone who cares to capture them, you can’t sniff a switched network from anywhere on a subnet like you could in the olden hub days. So, you need a switch that supports port mirroring, or, as Cisco calls it, SPAN. (An alternative is to use the arpspoof utility — use it carefully!) 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 414-16  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:04 AM

VLANs This is a feature that will have you wondering why you didn’t use it sooner. Virtual LANs (VLANs) are logical subnets. They make it easy and flexible to organize your LAN logically, instead of having to rearrange hardware. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 417-19  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:04 AM

QoS Quality of Service, or traffic prioritization, allows you to give high priority to traffic that requires low latency and high throughput (e.g., voice traffic), and low priority to web-surfin’ slackers. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 476-78  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:07 AM

This chapter will show you how to install and configure Pyramid Linux ( http://metrix.net/ ) on a Soekris 4521 board. There are many small distributions designed to power routers and firewalls; see Chapter 3 for more information on these, and to learn how to build an Internet-connection sharing firewall. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 481-90  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:07 AM

You might look at the specs of our little 4521 and turn your nose up in scorn: 133 MHz AMD ElanSC520 CPU 64 MB SDRAM, soldered on board 1 Mb BIOS/BOOT Flash Two 10/100 Ethernet ports CompactFLASH Type I/II socket, 8 MB Flash to 4 GB Microdrive 1 DB9 Serial port Power, Activity, Error LEDs Mini-PCI type III socket 2 PC-Card/Cardbus slots 8 bit general purpose I/O 14-pins header Board size 9.2” x 5.7” Option for 5V supply using internal connector Power over Ethernet Operating temperature 0–60°C You’ll find more raw horsepower in a low-end video card. But don’t let the numbers fool you. Combined with a specialized Linux, BSD, or any embedded operating system, these little devices are tough, efficient workhorses that beat the pants off comparable (and usually overpriced and inflexible) commercial routers. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 491-92  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:07 AM

These little boards can handle fairly hostile environments, and with the right kind of enclosures can go outside. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 509-10  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:09 AM

Pyramid Linux fits nicely. The stock image occupies a 60 MB partition, and uses about 49 MB. It uses stock Ubuntu packages, so even though it does not come with any package management tools, you can still add or remove programs. 
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Linux Networking Cookbook (Carla Schroder)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 567-70  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:11 AM

You don’t have to use a Linux machine as the serial terminal; using Hyperterminal from a Windows machine works fine, too. Other Unix serial communication programs are cu, tip, and Kermit. Kermit is fun if you want a versatile program that does everything except cook dinner. Mac OS X users might try Minicom, which is in Dar-win Ports, or ZTerm. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 189-93  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:42 PM

Spark Core contains the basic functionality of Spark, including components for task scheduling, memory management, fault recovery, interacting with storage systems, and more. Spark Core is also home to the API that defines resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), which are Spark’s main programming abstraction. RDDs represent a collection of items distributed across many compute nodes that can be manipulated in parallel. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 245-50  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:50 PM

Spark supports the different tasks of data science with a number of components. The Spark shell makes it easy to do interactive data analysis using Python or Scala. Spark SQL also has a separate SQL shell that can be used to do data exploration using SQL, or Spark SQL can be used as part of a regular Spark program or in the Spark shell. Machine learning and data analysis is supported through the MLLib libraries. In addition, there is support for calling out to external programs in Matlab or R. Spark enables data scientists to tackle problems with larger data sizes than they could before with tools like R or Pandas. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 256-61  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:51 PM

The other main use case of Spark can be described in the context of the engineer persona. For our purposes here, we think of engineers as a large class of software developers who use Spark to build production data processing applications. These developers usually have an understanding of the principles of software engineering, such as encapsulation, interface design, and object-oriented programming. They frequently have a degree in computer science. They use their engineering skills to design and build software systems that implement a business use case. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 292-97  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:53 PM

Spark can create distributed datasets from any file stored in the Hadoop distributed filesystem (HDFS) or other storage systems supported by the Hadoop APIs (including your local filesystem, Amazon S3, Cassandra, Hive, HBase, etc.). It’s important to remember that Spark does not require Hadoop; it simply has support for storage systems implementing the Hadoop APIs. Spark supports text files, SequenceFiles, Avro, Parquet, and any other Hadoop InputFormat. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 353-58  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:55 PM

Unlike most other shells, however, which let you manipulate data using the disk and memory on a single machine, Spark’s shells allow you to interact with data that is distributed on disk or in memory across many machines, and Spark takes care of automatically distributing this processing. Because Spark can load data into memory on the worker nodes, many distributed computations, even ones that process terabytes of data across dozens of machines, can run in a few seconds. This makes the sort of iterative, ad hoc, and exploratory analysis commonly done in shells a good fit for Spark. Spark provides both Python and Scala shells that have been augmented to support connecting to a cluster. 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 468-73  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 01:58 PM

Finally, a lot of Spark’s API revolves around passing functions to its operators to run them on the cluster. For example, we could extend our README example by filtering the lines in the file that contain a word, such as Python, as shown in Example 2-4 (for Python) and Example 2-5 (for Scala). 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Note Loc. 1435  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 06:23 PM

acc is the pair zero zero. first element is the counter divisor and is incremented by one in the first lambda function. second element is the running sum numerator.

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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Note Loc. 1435  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 06:24 PM

acc is the pair zero zero. first element is the counter divisor and is incremented by one in the first lambda function. second element is the running sum numerator.
second lambda defines what to do with results frm each node... in this case adds all divisors and then adds all numerators.
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 1768-78  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 06:36 PM

The way to build key-value RDDs differs by language. In Python, for the functions on keyed data to work we need to return an RDD composed of tuples (see Example 4-1 ). Example 4-1. Creating a pair RDD using the first word as the key in Python pairs = lines.map(lambda x: (x.split(" ")[0], x)) In 
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Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia)
- Highlight Loc. 1998-2012  | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2015, 06:42 PM

Example 4-9. Word count in Python rdd = sc.textFile("s3://...") words = rdd.flatMap(lambda x: x.split(" ")) result = words.map(lambda x: (x, 1)).reduceByKey(lambda x, y: x + y) 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight Loc. 84-89  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 09:12 PM

Leo Breiman, the statistician who wrote the influential “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures” paper in 2001. 2 In Breiman’s view, most statisticians of that time belonged to the data modeling culture, which starts with the assumption that there is some underlying stochastic model that is generating the data, and the analyst’s job is to measure the fit of a model to the data. Interpretability of the model is a primary concern. A minority of statisticians in 2001 and a majority of data scientists today belong to a culture of algorithmic modeling—one that recognizes that the data may derive from a complicated combination of unknown factors, and thus one that will resist characterization by a simple model. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight Loc. 94-97  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 09:12 PM

Another statistician who was eager to grasp new opportunities was George Box, who wrote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” 3 His career as a statistician deeply integrated with engineers led him to understand that “your model is wrong” is not a criticism, but rather an acceptance of the inherent complexity of the real world. Models are judged by their empirical utility, not by some elusive Platonic rationalist ideal. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 286-90  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 09:49 PM

Wiggins: There are very few typical days right now, though I look forward to having one in the future. I try to make my days at The New York Times typical because this is a company. What I mean by that is that it is a place of interdependent people, and so people rely on you. So I try throughout the day to make sure I meet with everyone in my group in the morning, meet with everyone in my group in the afternoon, and meet with stakeholders who have either data issues or who I think have data issues but don’t know it yet. Really, at this point, I would say that at none of my three jobs is there such a thing as a “typical day.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 406-8  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:01 PM

The people I find the most inspiring are the people who think about things in this order: people—in terms of how you build a strong community; ideas—which is how you unite people in that community; and things that you use to build the community that embodies those ideas. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 433-35  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:03 PM

There’s a quote from the famous physicist Niels Bohr, who posits that the way you become an expert in a field is to make every mistake possible in that field. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 534-39  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:11 PM

So I think there was a strong tradition of people understanding how powerful and how different it was to understand the world through data. The “primacy of the data” was a phrase that one of the mathematical statisticians at Berkeley used a long time back for Tukey’s emphasis. 15 This strong tradition carried on through this sort of heretical strain of thought from John Tukey through Leo Breiman to Bill Cleveland in 2001. All of them saw themselves asorthodox statisticians, though they were people who were sufficiently heretical. It’s just that as statistics kept doubling down on mathematics every five years because of their origin from math that made statistics a bona fide field, you found this strain of heretics who were saying, “No, you should really try to get with data.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 651-57  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:17 PM

Gutierrez: How would you describe your work to a data scientist? Smallwood: I would say we’re a team that does all kinds of statistical modeling. We really focus and output three things as a team. We work on predictive models using all of the techniques that people in this field would be familiar with—regression techniques, clustering techniques, matrix factorization, support vector machines, et cetera, both supervised and unsupervised techniques. A second thing is algorithms, which I would say are obviously closely related to models, except that they’re embedded in some sort of ongoing process, like our product. And then the third thing is experimentation and all the scientific methodology behind that, which we leverage, as well as all the analytics that go with each experiment that we run. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 667-70  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:18 PM

I feel like I just kind of lucked into this career that happened to coincide with the Internet. Suddenly it was like, hey, there’s all this data that wasn’t available before, whole new opportunities of types of things you could build models for, and whole new problems that need to be solved. Things you used to have to “model” did not need models anymore, because there was so much data. All you needed to do was figure out the median of some particular dimension value. So that changed the whole world of opportunities. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 887-90  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:36 PM

We use Teradata for a large part of our data warehousing. If we wanted to move from Teradata to some other data-center–oriented warehousing system, we would have so much to move that it would be a year’s worth of work for the entire data organization. Perhaps not quite that much, but it would be a lot of work. So the farther upstream you are in your stack, the harder it is, I think, to change technologies. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 894-97  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:37 PM

We do still have a formidable amount of data in Teradata, but we’ve switched our philosophy. We have aggregate data we use for ongoing reporting in Teradata. We have granular data we use more for the modeling in the cloud, and all sorts of analytics go in both places. But we have more data in the cloud, as it’s closer to the point of capture. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 900-905  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:38 PM

Smallwood: It’s a lighter thing when thinking about technology selection for the team rather than for the data infrastructure. We want to do analysis and then have some visualization on top of that analysis. For this work, we experiment with all different types of tools, and the technology choice essentially comes down to whatever the passion is of the person who’s working on it. We use all sorts of tools at that layer of the stack. For analytics, we heavily use R. Any open source software for the most part is preferable to licensed software, so we are heavily open source–oriented. We use a ton of R, Python, and things that are easy for people to pick up, learn, and then do all sorts of visualization things with as well. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 928-33  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:40 PM

Whether the model is right or wrong about somebody—predicting that somebody is a risk has caused me to have conversations with my own team that I might not have otherwise had. It’s probably those conversations that mattered the most. It really helps to make sure you check in with people and ask, “Are you happy and engaged? If you’re not, let’s talk about it, because I can’t promise you we can change it, but we can certainly talk about it and try.” So I think it’s very easy in a fast-paced business to lose track that a whole year has gone by and you don’t know if people are happy or not. That’s a dangerous thing to let happen if you want to make sure your team’s engaged. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 945-48  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:41 PM

Smallwood: I would say the top things are hunger and insatiable curiosity. You imagine a data set and you salivate at just thinking about that data set. Those are the top qualities, because people who always want to dig more, mine the data, and learn new things from the data are the people who are happiest in this kind of job. Obviously, the technical skills are important. But that’s always the easiest thing to interview for because it’s straightforward to ask those technical questions. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 949-52  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:41 PM

You can’t ask someone, “How curious are you?” But you can tell by how many questions they ask. And if you describe to them a data set and ask, “What would you do with that data set?”, people either can’t stop talking about idea after idea, or they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I would look at the average minutes”—or something inconsequential like that. So I obviously look for the technical skills and the curiosity. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 962-65  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:42 PM

Smallwood: I would say hands down it’s A/B testing. When I was first exposed to it many years ago as “web analytics”, I didn’t have much of a level of respect for it. It seemed very straightforward and trite to me. I didn’t really get the power of it until I came to Netflix. What’s interesting to me is that people’s intuition is wrong so often, even when you’re an expert in an area. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 1000-1003  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:44 PM

I think this is true in particular for companies that are trying to start a data science team where they didn’t have one before. I think it’s a bit of a danger zone for them. It will be very easy to hire someone who’s built one regression model and uses fancy terms in their interviews like “support vector machine,” and the executives will go, “Wow! Come in and build our data science team.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 1003-6  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:44 PM

For these companies, there’s no way to gauge whether the person they hire knows what they’re doing, because a great model versus a bad model is still a model. They both spit out the same type of result and you have some measure of whether that’s a good result or not, but it’s impossible to really know whether it’s a good model or not. In my mind, it’s all about the quality of the people building those models, and I think it will be hard for inexperienced companies to discern that. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 1007-12  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:45 PM

Smallwood: I think it’s important to look for experience—especially if you’re starting a new team. You can’t take someone without experience, even if they were valedictorian of their PhD program at MIT. I still wouldn’t take that person as my only or first data scientist, because they haven’t worked enough. I think the education is great—don’t get me wrong, education is fantastic. But in today’s world, where people are working on more practical problems, the actual experience of wrestling through one model after another matters for the only or first data scientist hire. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 1012-14  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:45 PM

Especially if the experience happened under very different data circumstances, different distributions of the underlying data, and different data characteristics. You also want to see experience with missing data, duplicate data, and all the challenges that you actually face with raw collected data. And that’s just on the data side. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 1014-16  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:45 PM

On the modeling side, you also want to see experience in thinking about whether you’re solving the right thing, and then learning from the business perspective that it’s completely impractical and you solved the wrong thing. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 1047-48  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:47 PM

Smallwood: I think it’s huge to embrace your curiosity. You should never quite feel satisfied with an answer and you should always essentially have more questions than answers. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 1068-73  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:48 PM

Gutierrez: What should someone starting out try to understand deeply? Smallwood: I’m a big believer in understanding probability distributions. Understanding all the different types of distributions and what those characteristics look like in your data really goes a long way toward understanding how to build different types of models. If you only know the normal distribution, you’re not going to be nearly as effective as if you know Poisson distributions and all the other different kinds of distributions. Knowing and understanding the distributions really help guide how you think about modeling things. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 1073-75  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:48 PM

Also important is studying a variety of techniques: clustering techniques, regression techniques, tree-based techniques, and others. Try to get experience with a gamut of different kinds of techniques, because then over time you realize there are subtle similarities across them. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1080-81  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:50 PM

I also think there’s also a lot to be said for working in a collaborative environment where you can show your approach to someone else and hear their feedback on questions like: Why was that a good idea? Why was that not a good idea? 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1082-83  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:50 PM

It’s hard to know if you’re working in isolation on a model. You would have a hard time knowing whether you built the right kind of model or not, because the model will output something regardless if you modeled it correctly or not. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1088-91  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:50 PM

Smallwood: I would say to always bite the bullet with regard to understanding the basics of the data first before you do anything else, even though it’s not sexy and not as fun. In other words, put effort into understanding how the data is captured, understand exactly how each data field is defined, and understand when data is missing. If the data is missing, does that mean something in and of itself? Is it missing only in certain situations? These little, teeny nuanced data gotchas will really get you. They really will. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 1095-98  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 10:51 PM

Another thing I’ve learned over time is that a mix of algorithms is almost always better than one single algorithm in the context of a system, because different techniques exploit different aspects of the patterns in the data, especially in complex large data sets. So while you can take one particular algorithm and iterate and iterate to make it better, I have almost always seen that a combination of algorithms tends to do better than just one algorithm. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 1233-34  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:01 PM

The availability of data sets so large that you don’t even have time to look at any piece of data more than once because you have streaming data coming at you is a very recent phenomenon. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 1234-38  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:02 PM

A lot of the methods that I am interested in happen to scale very well in those situations, because I have always been a believer in things like stochastic gradient descent and similar techniques. These are things people use now after a hiatus of 10 years. People used other methods that didn’t scale very well because they weren’t confronted with this flow of data, and now that they have data of this size, they’re now coming back to these techniques. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 1241-44  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:02 PM

is really the general problem of extracting knowledge from data, whether that is done automatically or semiautomatically, and whether we’re talking about the methods or the tools or the infrastructure, and whether the data has to do with things like business or science or social science in particular. Those are two of my slightly different interests. In both cases, I believe things like deep learning will probably have a big impact on the practice of data science in the near future. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 1254-61  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:03 PM

LeCun: I think it goes in cycles. We have a new set of techniques that comes up, and for a while the technique is under the radar and then it kind of blows up, and everybody explores how you can milk this technique for a while until you hit a wall. Progress slows and becomes more boring. Then some new set of techniques comes up and the whole process starts over again. In my area, back in 1986 and 1987, neural nets had been under the radar and sort of blew up in 1986. So a lot of interesting stuff happened, a lot of crazy things happened—and a lot of hype happened, as well—until the early 1990s, when, in my own lab at Bell Labs, the next wave came up. The next wave was support vector machines or kernel methods, which are very popular and work very well. That replaced, to some extent, a lot of the work on neural nets. So neural nets migrated at that time to other conferences, like NIPS. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 1278-80  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:05 PM

LeCun: Natural language is what’s next. At Facebook, we have quite a lot of effort going on with deep learning for natural language. That’s kind of obvious though, right? Google also has pretty big efforts in that direction. After natural language, there’s video, and then after that there is the combination of all of the above. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 1349-56  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:10 PM

Gutierrez: How do you get ideas for things to study or analyze? LeCun: That’s actually a very important question that determines how a research lab should be organized. There are several kinds of research scientists. As a first step, you need people with vision. These are research scientists who have a long-term vision. They may or may not be that good at actually implementing it. They might associate with other people who do the implementation. Then there are people who are good at keeping their eyes on a long-term goal that will have a long-term impact and are good at ignoring fashions. Then there are people who are excellent problem solvers, who may not necessarily have the long-term vision, but they do have an ability to solve complex problems that other people just can’t. And finally, you have people who can actually implement things and get them to work. In a research lab, you need all of those people. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 1356-62  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:11 PM

Yes, you need all those people, but it is very essential that the people in the management of the research have vision, which means that they have to be respected in their field. The idea that somehow you can put a bunch of research scientists together and then put some random manager who’s not a scientist directing them doesn’t work. I’ve never ever seen it work. You need to have someone that has vision, who also has some standing in the community, directing a research lab or directing a group within a research lab. Management skills are a little overrated in the sense that managing research scientists is like herding cats. You basically have to make sure the litter is clean every morning so that people can do what they’re best at and then you get out of the way. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 1376-80  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:12 PM

A few years ago, we switched to another similar environment called Torch 7. The philosophy of it is very similar. It’s a flexible, dynamic language that’s compiled. Torch 7 is built on top of LuaJIT, so it’s the compiled version of the Lua programming language. Lua is a simple language that is very popular in the video game and computer game industry. It’s a scripting language and so it’s a very easy to extend language. Torch 7 is basically a numerical and machine learning extension to Lua. Torch has been really flexible for us. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 1380-84  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:12 PM

We use Torch 7 at NYU in our research and we also use it at Facebook AI Research. We’ve actually released some of our Facebook source code related to Torch as open source. Google is also using Torch 7. They recently acquired a London company called Deep Mind. All of Deep Mind’s code is essentially built around Torch. Ronan Collobert who is one of the originators and main developers of Torch, has joined Facebook. The other two main developers are both former students of mine. Koray Kavukcuoglu is at Deep Mind. Clément Farabet is at Twitter here in New York. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1410-13  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:15 PM

What’s been very surprising to me is the amount to which there is now a sense in the industry that AI is going to revolutionize everything. AI all of a sudden or machine learning, particularly deep learning, went from some sort of obscure academic field of investigation to front and center at major successful companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex, and others. It’s been a very recent, quick, and surprising phenomenon to me. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1488-91  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:20 PM

At the same time, my friend Vladimir Vapnik came up with the theoretical argument that you should never try to solve a more complex problem than you have to. In this case, unsupervised learning, to some extent, is a more complex problem than, say, classification in the sense that it’s like learning a density in a high-dimensional space. That’s like the hardest thing you can imagine. So I was against unsupervised learning in some ways. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 1578-86  | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 11:26 PM

What I look for is a track record in research, which means a strong publication record, not necessarily lots of papers, but papers with a particularly large impact that we know contain really interesting ideas. A large number of people that we hire tend to have been on our radar screen for a few years. Occasionally, someone shows up that wasn’t on our radar, so we are constantly looking for great people as well. There is another category of people that we recruit, but frankly, it tends to be more internal recruiting than external. We look for people with extraordinary programming skills combined with a good knowledge of things like machine learning or at least the ability to learn it really quickly. We’re very fortunate at Facebook AI Research that some of the people in the group are essentially the most respected and top engineers at Facebook, which is amazing. These people are just astonishingly good. They’re making things possible that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do and we couldn’t have even approached. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1604-8  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 10:04 AM

Shellman’s data science career began with an internship at the National Institutes of Health in the Division of Computational Biosciences. It was here that she initially learned and applied machine learning to uncover patterns in genomic evolution. Following her internship, she completed a Master of Science degree in biostatistics and a doctoral degree in bioinformatics both from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While at the University of Michigan, Shellman collaborated frequently and analyzed many types of heterogeneous biological data including gene expression microarrays, metabolomics, network graphs, and clinical time-series. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1639-44  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 10:09 AM

In a nutshell, the scorer receives messages about customer actions like product page views or add-to-bag events. It then re-orders recommendations in real-time based on the customer behavior right now in the session. I initially wrote the scorer using the Python library pandas because we’d been using it for our nightly batch recommendations. Well, I learned that the conveniences of the pandas data frame that we were enjoying for batch jobs had subpar performance in real-time applications. Each time the scorer runs, a message needs to be parsed, scores need to be computed and updated, and the process requires multiple reads and writes to our Dynamo tables on AWS. In this situation the set-up costs of the data frame objects were too high, and I ended up having to re-write the whole thing without pandas. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1723-25  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:15 PM

This has been super helpful and has been a really great way to get people excited about what we’re working on. Building and maintaining those relationships are just like anything else—you always have to be working on them. Nurturing those relationships are part of the job, and if you leave them unattended, they might not be there later. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1785-90  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:19 PM

Shellman: We are all responsible for our own progress, and don’t do sprint planning. We write specific tasks on the Post-it notes, like “add more tests to scorer” and work on those tasks until they’re done. We don’t necessarily have things to hit every week, and just try to work as fast as we can on the task-based projects we own. In terms of measuring success, on Thursdays, the Nordstrom Innovation Lab hosts show-and-tell, which entails 5 five-minute lightning talks. The purpose is to show what you’ve been working on and get early feedback. It doesn’t have to be remotely complete. It could even be something that’s broken that you’re stuck on and need advice. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1791-93  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:19 PM

For us, Thursday is an unwritten deadline because we all want to make sure we have something for show-and-tell. There’s only 5 slots so it might be the case that you don’t get to show your work, but the goal is to have something, even if it’s a couple of figures. Transparency into one another’s work—the progress and the obstacles—is really helpful. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1814-18  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:21 PM

Shellman: I’m writing a lot of Python these days, it’s what all our recommendation algorithms are written in. The Recommendo API is written in node and hosted on AWS. We use a lot of open source libraries in Python, like scikit-learn and pandas. As someone who used to work almost exclusively in R, pandas is great because it’s cheating in a way. It makes Python a lot like R, so you get to code in Python but get a lot of the conveniences that we’ve all come to expect from R. Of course, you’ll also make yourself insane trying to remember whether it’s “len” or “length,” and 0 or 1 indexed. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1828-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:35 PM

The issue is that if I didn’t account for that SKU ancestry in my analysis I’d miss a lot of replenishment purchases. I used record linkage to solve the problem. Record linkage is a technique used to find duplicates in things like census data and medical records. In survey data it’s typical to have typos and variations in name spellings and you want to link those separate records into a single entry. I was doing the same thing—only instead of names and addresses, I had brands, categories, and product descriptions. I forced matching on things like product type and brand, and then used fuzzy string matching to measure the similarity between product descriptions. My output was a probability that two items were the same “record” for each candidate product. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1844-45  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:36 PM

We prioritize based mostly on the web teams’ launch dates, so as long as we can hit those we have no problems adding new features. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1856-60  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:37 PM

Plotting data in scatterplot matrices with R is really helpful because you can quickly start discovering relationships in your data without much work on your end. Heat maps are great for that, too. I use plyr and dplyr a ton to bust data up and look at aggregates. It’s not a linear process. I just mess around with it and ask a lot of questions. Usually when I’m looking at new data a lot of thoughts, assumptions, and conclusions come to mind immediately about what things are and how they are related. Once I have those ideas, I’ll then try to disprove them. It’s a fun way to learn about the structure of data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1862-64  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:38 PM

We’re obsessed with Confluence from Atlassian, and the Data Lab has a very active Confluence space. Recommendo is fully documented on Confluence, so anyone in the company could learn how it’s built, where to find it, and how to use it. We also share exploratory analyses and reports on Confluence so that we can still exchange knowledge even if the work didn’t make it into a larger project. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1881-85  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:39 PM

Presentation. What can I say? I’m shallow. I don’t just mean visual presentation (though it’s important), but the ability to convey results both technically and non-technically. The work needs to communicate the point clearly and coherently. I look for whether they did something fancy but without rigor. Sloppy complexity is rampant because so many methods, particularly in machine learning, have been commoditized with external libraries. Presentation is the ability to craft a story, from the reason that you did the research, why I should be interested, what you did, and justifications for your methods. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1889-92  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:39 PM

I hear a lot of marketing about “freeing data scientists from having to program” or “freeing data scientists from the technical overhead so that they can get back to the data.” I think these products are a response to a lack of supply of people with data science skills. In small companies, who are lucky enough to have one data scientist, these tools promise to make them more efficient. It’s not an easy job though, so I’m pretty skeptical of these products and their longevity. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1894-96  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:40 PM

I expect we’ll see a lot of retraining of software engineers and migration into the data science role. You can see some of that already happening with Coursera and Udacity offering data science courses and certifications. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1900-1902  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:40 PM

The cycle of learning by modeling, testing model predictions with experiments, and updating the model with the results is so obvious to me, but academia as a whole is extremely risk averse and hasn’t effectively made use of these models as a tool for experimental design. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1908-16  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:42 PM

For the person who’s trying to transition like I did, I would say, for one, it’s hard. Be aware that it’s difficult to change industries and you are going to have to work hard at it. That’s not unique to data science—that’s life. Not having any connections in the field is tough but you can work on it through meet-ups and coffee dates with generous people. My number-one rule in life is “follow up.” If you talk to somebody who has something you want, follow up. I heard a story from a director of a data lab similar to ours, about a potential hire that didn’t have the skills and experience required to join the team. He suggested the candidate take a machine learning class on Coursera and figure out if data science was more than a fleeting interest. The candidate took the course and every week emailed the director notes on progress and asked follow-up questions. I think this is a really great example of putting in the extra effort and proving to potential employers and to yourself that you can do what it takes to succeed as a data scientist. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1921-23  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:42 PM

Ultimately, what companies want is a person who can rigorously define problems and design paths to a solution. They also want people who are good at learning. I think those are the core skills. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1950-56  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:44 PM

When I finished my dissertation at the end of 1998, I had some soul-searching to do. I realized that I wasn’t cut out for a career in academia, but that I really didn’t know what industry had to offer. I worked a few months at a consulting firm, getting my first taste of a nonacademic, nonresearch job. My lucky break was being discovered by the co-founders of Endeca in 1999 and enlisted as chief scientist. My ten years there were an extraordinary adventure. Our initial ambition was to build a better way to find stuff on eBay. Like most startups, we pivoted, and we ultimately developed technology that revolutionized the search experience for online retail, as well as expanding into other domains like manufacturing, business intelligence, and government. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 2011-18  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:50 PM

Tunkelang: LinkedIn built our early search engines on Lucene, a popular open-source framework. As we grew, we evolved the search stack by adding layers on top of this framework. Our approach to scaling the system was reactive, often narrowly focused, and led to stacking new components to our architecture, each to solve a particular problem without thinking holistically about the overall system needs. This incremental evolution eventually hit a wall requiring us to spend a lot of time keeping systems running, and performing scalability hacks to stretch the limits of the system. So we decided to completely redesign our platform. The result was Galene, a new search architecture that is now powering a variety of our search products, including the "instant" to find people as you type. Galene has also helped us improve our development culture and processes. For example, the ability to build new indices every week with changes in offline algorithms supports a more agile testing and release process. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 2019-21  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:50 PM

Tunkelang: When we started the team, we were pretty conservative with respect to the search experience. Filtering queries by removing irrelevant results was a pretty radical idea, when conventional wisdom was that you should return everything and rely on ranking. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 2022-23  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:50 PM

Our ultimate goal is a “things-not-strings” experience, where all queries are composed of standardized entities. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 2053-55  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 02:01 PM

Search is the problem at the heart of the information economy. The information is out there, if only we can find it. What’s also great about search is that it’s an area full of open problems, many of them pretty fundamental. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 2072-76  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 02:03 PM

When I arrived at Google, there was already a system in place to map businesses to home pages. It was a machine learning system—specifically, it used logistic regression to assign scores to candidate home pages for businesses. I can’t disclose numbers, but there was lots of room to improve its precision and coverage. Moreover, the model was unstable and difficult to interpret, making it difficult to use for work on incremental improvements to it. So we decided to explore other approaches that would not only improve our system’s accuracy, but also facilitate ongoing work to improve it. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 2077-79  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 02:03 PM

we significantly improved accuracy through a series of changes that included switching from a logistic regression model to a decision tree approach. That was surprising, since decision trees are hardly cutting-edge machine learning models. However, they are very interpretable and that interpretability made it much easier for us to gain insight and iterate. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Bookmark on Page 90 | Loc. 2080  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 02:03 PM


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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 2081-84  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 06:40 PM

Tunkelang: I’m not saying that non–cutting-edge models work better—indeed, I’d like to think that progress in machine learning ensures the opposite! Rather, it pays to keep things simple when you’re trying to understand your data and iteratively develop models for it. In those cases, it’s better to optimize for interpretability than accuracy. Once you’ve learned as much as you can, you can go back to more complex models. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Bookmark on Page 91 | Loc. 2099  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 06:41 PM


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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2098-2103  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 06:41 PM

Gutierrez: How was the model for improving local business search built? Tunkelang: Fortunately, we had a framework in place to compare the performance of different machine learning approaches. We tried a bunch of them, evaluating their accuracy against a golden set, as well as their efficiency, stability, and interpretability. Ultimately, we opted to use decision trees. We’d expected that switching from regression to decision trees would trade off accuracy for interpretability and stability. But, to our pleasant surprise, we were able to improve all three. And it was a lot easier to work on new model features once we had a decision tree model in place. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2106-9  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 06:42 PM

decision process is clear: we ship it. The more interesting case is where some metrics go up and others go down. In theory, we use a single utility measure to assess overall impact. In practice, we negotiate whether the tradeoff is net positive to the business. The decisions usually happen at the level of the teams that own the various metrics, but in exceptional cases the tradeoffs get escalated to someone who can arbitrate between competing business goals. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 2110-13  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 06:42 PM

I’ve always valued interpretability, but this project showed me how crucial it could be in the context of machine learning. I also learned a lot about the challenges of working with unrepresentative training data. While we had large volumes of training data, we also had systematic biases that could trick our machine learning models to overfit for those biases. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 2133-36  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:26 PM

Tunkelang: One of the problems I worked on at IBM was visualizing semantic networks obtained by applying natural language processing algorithms to large document collections. Even though my focus was on the network visualization algorithms, I couldn’t help noticing that the natural language processing algorithms had their good moments and bad moments. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 2153-57  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:27 PM

The second was using entropy calculations on language models to automatically detect events in a news archive. We started by performing entity extraction on the archive to detect named entities and key phrases. Then, when we performed a search, for example “iraq”, we could compute the language model for the search results and track it over the time span of the collection. What we found is that sudden changes in the language model corresponded to events. I only had the opportunity to build prototypes with this system, but I did have the chance to demo them to people at three-letter agencies. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 2165-67  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:33 PM

Gutierrez: What are the main types of problems being tackled in search in social networking? Tunkelang: Though there are a lot of problems, you could summarize them with three Rs—relevance, recommendations, and reputation. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 2184-86  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:36 PM

Tunkelang: All kinds—text, numbers, clicks, relationship graphs, geography, time series, and similar data. Part of the challenge of working in data science is that you tend of have lots of different kinds of data, and it’s your job to stitch them together. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 2186-88  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:37 PM

Gutierrez: Are there data that data scientists are not yet looking at? Tunkelang: Probably not. But I think there’s a lot of work to do on improving how wearable devices collect data in order to truly deliver better living through data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 2193-95  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:46 PM

I also keep a foot in the big data world through conferences like O’Reilly Strata. I don’t read particular blogs anymore. Rather, I mostly rely on LinkedIn and Twitter to surface relevant content to me. I tend to use books mostly as references. Fortunately, some of the most valuable information is timeless. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 2201-3  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:47 PM

spend the rest of my time on hiring and outreach. Most of my time is spent providing guidance to my very accomplished team—adding value where I can, and staying out of their way where I can’t. I also spend a lot of time on hiring and outreach. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 2221-22  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:48 PM

The basic principle is fast failure and an exponential increase in effort as we mitigate risk. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 2229-31  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 07:49 PM

It’s easy to be lazy and look at aggregates—for example, favoring one machine-learned model over another because it performs better on average. Drilling down into the differences and looking at specific examples is often what gives us a real understanding of what’s going on. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 2250-52  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:05 PM

we’ve built a variety of open source tools to support our logging needs. I highly recommend a piece that Jay Kreps of LinkedIn wrote on the subject, entitled “The Log: What Every Software Engineer Should Know About Real-Time Data’s Unifying Abstraction.” He published it as a blog post, but it’s more like the definitive book on the subject. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2295-99  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:09 PM

Most of us recognize and laugh at the parable of a drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight because that’s where the light is. But we do it all the time. We, as an industry, work with the data we have on hand and optimize what we can measure. That’s not an entirely bad thing. It’s much better than trying to work without data or trying to improve things we can’t measure. Still, a little bit of humility goes a long way. If our data tells us something that seems incredible, the correct response is skepticism . 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2301-5  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:10 PM

Tunkelang: Technology is obviously important and choosing a technology stack is one of the biggest decisions that you make as a software engineer or data scientist. The wrong technology selection can be a major impediment, as it often leads to kludgey workarounds. Technology selection by itself is unlikely to solve any problems. Technology is like exercise equipment in that buying the fanciest equipment won’t get you in shape unless you take advantage of it. So always put talent before technology. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2311-16  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:11 PM

Tunkelang: By “product sense,” I mean the ability to see real-world problems from the perspectives of users and other stakeholders. For example, a computer scientist might come up with a system that improves through positive and negative feedback. But someone with product sense would think about what would motivate the users to provide the system with such feedback. On the business side, someone with product sense will use that sense to inform key business metrics—for example, determining when a recommendation system makes suggestions so bad that they incur a cost beyond the user simply not clicking on them. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2316-18  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:11 PM

Product sense is a critical skill for a data scientist. Without product sense, you can be a great software engineer and a great statistician, but it’s unlikely you’ve identified the right problems to solve or picked the right metrics for evaluating your solutions. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 2319-20  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:11 PM

Some people seem to have it naturally, so perhaps it’s a form of applied empathy. You can certainly improve it by studying a blend of disciplines, particularly the social sciences, and by working on lots of different real-world problems. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 2328-29  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:12 PM

Hiring is an intensively competitive process, especially here in Silicon Valley, but it’s a very exciting one. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 101 | Loc. 2329  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:12 PM

yeah. maybe for this guy.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2344-45  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:13 PM

Jeff Hammerbacher once said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” I wholeheartedly agree, and so that’s why I suggest that people should focus their best talent on worthy problems. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2352-55  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:14 PM

Tunkelang: Failure is a great teacher. One of my best learning experiences in college was implementing an algorithm from a paper, only to have it not perform as claimed. I contacted the authors, who told me how they’d tuned their systems for each example in the paper. After overcoming my initial reaction of indignation—after all I’d worked for months on my own competing approach—I realized that I’d learned an important lesson to not believe everything I read in a peer-reviewed publication. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 2372-75  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:15 PM

Tunkelang: Read “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”—a classic essay by Google researchers Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira. 3 The essay is usually summarized as “more data beats better algorithms.” It is worth reading the whole essay, as it gives a survey of recent successes in using web-scale data to improve speech recognition and machine translation. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 2375-76  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:15 PM

Then for good measure, listen to what Monica Rogati has to say about how better data beats more data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 2385-86  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:16 PM

As Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult—especially about the future.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 2415-16  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 02:18 PM

When I was a student, I idealized theoretical work. My aspiration was to be a professor contributing to theoretical mathematics and computer science. Perhaps part of my reason was that the problems were so difficult, and I equated difficulty with value. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 2480-83  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 04:47 PM

Not only is the depth of this data powerful, but MailChimp is so large, that its breadth and network effects become an asset. 60% of our business is international. We send to three billion unique email addresses, making the network of recipients of MailChimp’s email about 10 times larger than Twitter’s user base. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2505-9  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 04:49 PM

a boutique consulting firm called Revenue Analytics, which builds large-scale pricing models for Fortune 500 companies. These consulting engagements offered fascinating opportunities for data scientists. The problems were complex, affected top line revenue, and had excellent data sets. You can make the argument that companies like Intercontinental Hotels were doing big data before there was big data. But given the customer on the receiving end of these models, and given their already ugly, difficult-to-use set of enterprise BI tools—I won’t name names!—what I provided was rigorous but often less-than-beautiful. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2549-52  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 04:51 PM

Basically, you can think of it using the concept of neighborhoods—that is, which emails are neighbors to each other. So a user with a list of people, who have already subscribed to their content, can pull different segments based on the globally connected graph. They can then create and name these specific segments of their list. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2558-59  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 04:52 PM

Foreman: For those who aren’t familiar with the math, I talk about how I serve three roles. First is that I build data products, second is that I am a translator between customers and our data science team, and third is that I am an ambassador for MailChimp. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2670-73  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:26 PM

When you look at operations research problems or optimization problems, the data’s important, but what’s really important is the formulation. You have a really small amount of input data—and really complex decisions need to be made from that data. When I went and started doing price optimization models, that’s where the power of the data really hit me and opened my eyes. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2675-76  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:26 PM

What’s amazing about these pricing models—I think they’re some of the coolest data science models around—is that their decisions directly affect revenue. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 2820-24  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:38 PM

I frequently encounter people running Hadoop and they are excited to tell me that they now have all of their data in HDFS. I ask them how much data they have and if it is structured. I’m always amazed when they tell me that it’s a few gigs of structured data. That size and type of data could fit into a tiny free SQLite database. This tells me that they encountered a very good salesperson and they haven’t actually thought through the problem they are solving. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2825-29  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:38 PM

It’s January 1st, and I go get a gym membership and buy a bunch of workout gear and new clothes. What have I done? Nothing. I’m just as fat as I’ve always been, but I feel like I’m making progress because I’ve spent money and bought things. That’s how I see the businesses that go out and procure tools. They say to themselves, “We’ve got to do big data and we’ve got to do data science, so let’s go get tools and get consultants, and then we’ll be ready to go.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2829-33  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:38 PM

And before they know it, all they have to show for it is a bunch of money spent, a bunch of tooling, and maybe an infographic, because they never took the time to do the one thing that’s very hard to show progress on, which is thinking. They never sat down and thought through: What problems should we be attacking? What data do we have, and how should we attack these problems given the data that we have? Instead, they went out and spent their budget, because that’s a great way to show you’re doing something. You’re spending money. Something must be happening. Everyone’s waiting for someone else to make something happen while they spend the money. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2839-45  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:43 PM

a lot of the queries we needed to run for the training sets were queries that were best accomplished via SQL window functions, as we were looking at a lot of lagged time-series data. So once we hit that point, we realized that it would fit fine in a sharded PostgreSQL database, as the data was probably smaller than 30 terabytes. Having realized this, we asked ourselves why would we need something else? This is a tool that’s very robust and stable. It’s a tool that the devs know how to work with really well. They can spin it up fast. Our compliance team needs our models yesterday. Why would I choose to go after tools that are a little bit less stable but sexier and that our devs and our ops people don’t quite understand yet? Why would I risk it when I can use this other stuff that we already understand? So I’m very conservative with the tools that are selected. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 2851-56  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:45 PM

We want to understand that though maybe you haven’t used exactly what we’re going to use in the future and maybe you’ve used something else, that you can still learn these things. That’s a tough thing to grapple with and understand about a person, so you have to ask for examples. You’ve got to hear them articulate problems they’ve encountered in the past. And if they can’t articulate situations in which they’ve encountered problems, and how they used various approaches and showed resourcefulness by saying something along the lines of, “I didn’t know how to use it, but I grabbed it and we used it this way,” if they can’t articulate something like that, then that could be a red flag. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 125 | Loc. 2855  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:46 PM

not internally consistent. first he calls it cheating. then he says he wants cadidates to be able to explain that hey... um... cheat
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2880-82  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:51 PM

But even still, coming out of those degree programs, for MailChimp we would look at how you articulate and communicate to us how you’ve used the data science chops across many disciplines that this particular program taught you. That’s something that’s going to weed out so many people. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 126 | Loc. 2888  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:53 PM

this guy really sunds like a moron.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2920-24  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 02:58 PM

I feel like the way a lot of people talk about this stuff is just so mystical. They don’t really want to tell you what they’re doing because their job security is wrapped up around being some sort of shaman-like persona. But that’s not what your job security should really be based on—it should be based on solving problems. If you’re solving problems appropriately and you can explain yourself well, you’re not going to lose your job. You don’t have to hide behind the fact that no one else knows what this model does. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2986-90  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:44 PM

I felt like the quantitative traders were much more in their own heads, because they’re largely focused on building models to leverage data and generate returns, which is a somewhat abstract concept. A technical startup founder is generally focused on producing a thing—not just a model, but a model that does something that touches and affects people. The DNA of wanting to build something for many people, as opposed to building something for oneself to make money, reads very, very differently. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2996-99  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:47 PM

The people I’ve worked with, whether the quant traders or the technical startup founders, have myriad things they could be doing. They are all incredibly capable, very creative, deeply interested, and unquestionably interesting. However, they need to feel deeply about what they’re doing or they’re not going to be the best at it. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2999-3002  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:48 PM

The other thing, notwithstanding their technical brilliance, is that ultimately what’s going to make them successful at scale is people skills. Hence they shouldn’t simply fall back on the things that make them feel comfortable—namely, coding and product development. They should instead push themselves to learn how to manage, how to lead, and how to recruit. Learning these skills is an essential element to becoming a fully formed professional—not to mention an evolved human being. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 3009-13  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:49 PM

So the first thing I thought about was that, even though I’m technical, I’m not a PhD. And a lot of the things that I was interested in considering for investment required a higher level of scientific knowledge to do the fundamental due diligence on the technology itself. That’s what led me to develop a profile for the so-called “unicorn.” This person would be someone who both is high in technical skills and has a strong scientific base but at the same time has built stuff—building not just models but teams and maybe even businesses. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 3018-19  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:50 PM

We also have Drew Conway as a scientist-in-residence who is a globally-known data hacker and data visualization expert. Again, he is someone who has incredible horizontal skills. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 3028-30  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:52 PM

In the deal meetings, because we’re investing so early, it’s much more about the technical due diligence and our assessment of the market opportunity. That’s where Brad, Jesse, and I really excel, and that’s what our job entails. Then, as the companies execute their plans and achieve scale, rich data assets are developed. That’s when Drew can come in and provide a valuable lens on data assets. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 3037-40  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:53 PM

the biggest lesson is to have a very clear set of customers that you’re going to serve, notwithstanding the fact you may be building something that can ultimately help many different types of customers. That laser focus early on is very important to demonstrate the power of the technology and to prove product/market fit. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 3054-56  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:57 PM

we work with the companies to try and build in a measurement culture. We have a bias toward founders that intuitively embrace data collection and analysis. We work with these teams to identify the right data to track given their particular business and how this data can be used to improve the product and/or marketing strategies. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 3058-60  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 10:59 PM

There are two principal approaches to opportunity identification. One is curating our significant inbound deal flow that either comes to us “warm” through trusted connections or “cold” through direct outreach from someone not in our network. The other results from hypotheses we have about a particular market opportunity or emerging space. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 3062-65  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:00 PM

We invest in a team that is building a business. We do not invest in a team building a data set. The data set is exhaust that emerges from interacting with customers in many cases. Once a company is interacting with customers, we can then think about the exhaust and how the company can improve the product or customer experience by gaining insights from the data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 3071-74  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:03 PM

The last five years of my career entailed living in the world of high-speed data and feeds. This gave me an understanding that while the infrastructure that existed in the late ’90s and early 2000s was good, there was a huge gap relative to what I saw as the inexorable increase in the velocity and volume of data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 3076-79  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:03 PM

What was interesting was that most of the conventional quantitative approaches were already reasonably well-known. The literature was out there for everybody to see, so there was going to need to be innovation either in the kind of data that was being parsed to generate insight or in the technologies to parse existing data to generate better, faster insights. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 3086-89  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:06 PM

After my failure as a company founder I decided there was a way I could continue to be a builder—by becoming a full-time investor. This is what prompted me to start a venture firm and to better leverage my core competencies. So far it has gone pretty well, but venture investing and company building is a very long time-scale business. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 3096-3101  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:07 PM

There are some technical founders that absolutely, positively want to be the CEO, yet they know they’ve got knowledge and experience gaps relative to those who have successfully scaled big businesses. What many of these technical founders do is to actively seek out mentoring. They’re open-minded and eager about expanding their skill sets. However, sometimes a founder thinks that they want to be CEO, but then when they’re tasked with recruiting and finance and general oversight, they realize (a) they suck at it and (b) they hate it. And that’s fine. Part of our job is not only putting our founders in the position to succeed but also helping them to be honest about their strengths, weaknesses, and personal objectives. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 3107-13  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:09 PM

Through my reflections I came to appreciate the fact that the human element—psychology—was as important as—if not more important than—the quantitative and technical assessment of a team. This is why—and I’ve written about this many times—venture investing is an artisanal business. It doesn’t matter how bright somebody is—I’ve known phenomenally brilliant people who are abysmal failures when it comes to starting companies because they just don’t have the empathy, they don’t have the people skills, and they don’t have the perspective. So it’s not just about building in a vacuum. It’s about colliding with the market and with other human beings. I think that’s a lesson that deeply resonated with me. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 3134-40  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:12 PM

Now, they had this initial idea for how they were going to do this, but to me that almost didn’t matter. One of the most important things I’ve learned, which I still carry to this day, is that as a seed stage investor you can get a lot wrong, but you need to get a couple of things right. The most important is the right people. Another is that there needs to be enough “white space”—opportunities in the market to reach customers and be successful. It doesn’t mean there are no competitors. In fact, competition is validating. If people validate a space before you arrive, you can do a better job and if there’s enough white space, then it’s fantastic. What Mike did was identify an area that had so much white space, and he himself was so great, that he could have lots of false starts. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 3143-47  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:14 PM

You could put in an A+++ team, but if they’re operating in a space that’s now insanely competitive, super crowded, and the ability to differentiate is actually quite small, it’s almost a waste of time. Conversely, let’s say you have the Buddy situation again, but you don’t have Mike and Kass. You have a B team that identifies the big idea correctly, but as executors, they’re B-players, they’ll fail. So it’s that intersection of an A team with enough white space in the market that makes for a compelling investment opportunity. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 3157-59  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:15 PM

My day is generally comprised of three elements. There is information ingestion and sharing. There is sitting on boards and helping portfolio companies. And finally, there is looking at new deal flow. For the information ingestion and sharing, I do all my reading relatively early in the day. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 3170-77  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:20 PM

Gutierrez: How does the time you spend with your companies evolve as you go through the investment life cycle? Ehrenberg: It changes dramatically as a company goes through the investment lifecycle. This is something that I’m experiencing now as several of our Fund I companies have recently raised Series C rounds that have taken in 30 or 40 million dollars, where, honestly, the kinds of things that I can do and the value I bring is much less than it was earlier in a company’s life. At these companies, we have brought on new board members—both independents with tremendous amounts of domain experience and later-stage growth investors that understand how to help companies go from 20 million to 200 million to 2 billion in revenue. I’ve never done that, so it’s great for me to have a seat at the table and soak up the learning. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 3177-78  | Added on Friday, April 03, 2015, 11:20 PM

While I still help with recruiting and financing strategy, the more detailed discussions around business model and achieving product/market fit fall away when the emphasis shifts from “figuring it out” to rapid scaling. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 3221-23  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 03:55 PM

There’s no way to short-circuit the process of getting to know someone. That’s why I constantly refer to my friend Mark Suster’s post on “Lines, not Dots,” 1 and why it’s so important to build relationships over time to really get to know founders—and vice versa, for them to get to know us. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3244-47  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 04:07 PM

It’s comes right back to the people issue. You could say, “Well, we’ve got this super-great technology. We’re better, faster. We’ve got this algorithm.” Honestly, no one cares. What you’re selling is an experience, whether you’re selling to a customer or you’re selling to a potential employee. You have to sell the experience. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 3304-6  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 04:15 PM

We back a company called Data Robot that essentially places the power of a data scientist in the hands of a non–data scientist. So I think we’re going to see many more tools and technologies to democratize the power of the data scientist. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 3349-52  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 09:57 PM

if you’re spending time on the computer and you like to check the news or you want to shop, if you are willing to let people follow you and follow your clicks, then you will read better and more relevant stuff, you’ll get offers that you care about, and the whole experience will benefit you.” That said, I do know people who are sensitive about these issues and opt-out, but they represent a very small segment of the population. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 3971-76  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 10:07 PM

Lenaghan’s precursory career before venturing into data science spanned theoretical physics research, editing prestigious science journals, and being a quant researcher for algorithmic quantitative equity trading on Wall Street. After taking his PhD in physics from Yale, he conducted research on the statistical properties of strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Niels Bohr Institute, and the University of Virginia. He served as an editor of two journals of the American Physical Society: Physical Review C (nuclear physics) and Physical Review D (particle physics and cosmology). 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 4037-40  | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2015, 10:15 PM

Lenaghan: When I was an undergraduate, I majored in physics. I knew that I wanted to become a physicist—more precisely, a professor of physics. I really looked up to all of the professors I had as an undergraduate, and I was very excited about graduate school. You might suppose from my future career trajectory that I must have been immersed in experimental data when I was working in physics, but I was actually working more on the formal theoretical side of particle physics. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 4087-94  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:26 PM

The very first big data set that I worked with was anonymized location histories from an ambient background location app. We selected this very large data set as a test set to see how well we could actually contextualize movement. We wanted to understand at a very high level where people were living and what types of behaviors we could correlate with in-home demographics of social data. Gutierrez: Was there an aha! moment that “This is powerful”? Lenaghan: Our “this-is-powerful” moment came when we saw the predictability of human behavior. Location histories tend to cluster very tightly, so it was fascinating how, with a small amount of data, you could build interesting profiles of devices. Most people are at home or at work most of the time. So in that sense, it is not terribly difficult to infer high-level demographic information and associate it with a device, even when you know nothing else about that device. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 4147-50  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:31 PM

What I have found—not only from working in industry, but academics as well—is that when you start from the beginning and everything is blue sky, there are hundreds of ideas to chase as well as thousands of ideas to try and, since everything is possible, nothing ever gets done. It can and has happened that things eventually get done, but running a company by serendipity is begging to fail. So I always focus on looking towards the end result. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 4151-52  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:31 PM

Of course, many times throughout the course of solving the problem, you end up at a different place. Sometimes it is better; other times you just have to scrap the project. Keeping your eyes on the final deliverable is essential to solving the right problems. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 4156-61  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:31 PM

this initial prototype is usually a mixture of Java and/or Python and/or R. Again, we always try to keep our eye on what the final piece is going to be. If we know that performance is going to be a problem, we may start in Java from the very beginning. If we do build a prototype, we usually make it as lightweight as possible. Gutierrez: Why as lightweight as possible? Lenaghan: I do not like writing a lot of code or doing a lot of work for something I do not know is going to succeed. So we build the prototype and start working on it with small data sets first. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 4169-74  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:32 PM

Gutierrez: How do you do the scaling test? Lenaghan: We slowly step up the scale of data we run through the prototype in two dimensions. We have the geospatial dimension, which is large, but not extremely large. There we are talking about hundreds of millions of entities, let’s say, in the United States. We also have the second dimension, which we think of as the movement side. This is the data coming from the ad-request side. This data is on the order of tens of billions of data points per month. We want to understand how well the prototype scales up in the two dimensions—the spatial dimension and the movement dimension. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 4176-80  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:32 PM

We set the initial geographic scale starting with the metro, and then on the movement side, we will start with a day’s worth of data. Then we scale the data to a week’s worth of data. Then we scale up the data to a month’s worth. At each step we are testing to see how the prototype is performing. Depending on the project or the product, varying lengths of history are required for further testing. Interestingly, it is definitely the case that more data is not always better. It depends on the product. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 4184-87  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:33 PM

It turns out that a lot of the biases in the data appear from the fact that all of the movement data comes from smartphones. This means you are completely biased toward people who own smartphones. This is a large population, as there are about 110 million smartphones in the USA right now. Although this represents a large swath of the US population, it is still a biased sample. So we have to deal with that bias in the data. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 4188-91  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:33 PM

The movement histories that we see also have a large bias, as these phones don’t drop 5-minute breadcrumbs all the time. They are only engaged when someone is using an ad-supported app, for example—so you also have a bias there, which means you end up biasing toward people who use ad-supported apps. In fact, biases pop up for different ad-supported apps people use all the time, such as texting apps, Words with Friends, or other apps. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 4193-97  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:33 PM

Let’s dig a little deeper into the biases. Did you and your colleagues figure them out, or are these biases industry-known demographic, sociographic, and/or psychographic heuristics? Lenaghan: That it is something we have figured out internally. Something we’re always very cognizant of is that we don’t want to be an undifferentiated black-box machine learning platform. So a very large component of the bias-correcting work we do is based on social anthropology. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 4208-12  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:35 PM

Gutierrez: There is an idea of the data exhaust. In the operation of ingesting and analyzing your data, you are also generating data that could be useful for other people. How do you think about this secondary data? Do you think about monetizing, giving it back to the community, or a combination? Lenaghan: That is a very good question. Right now, we are not doing that. We are laser-focused on consumer insights and especially on mobile advertising. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 4215-19  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:35 PM

Gutierrez: Speaking of communities, you mentioned earlier that you are using R, Python, and Java, which are tools built by open source software communities. What tools do you use and how has that changed in your career? Lenaghan: When I was working in trading, I worked mainly in C++ and Perl. It makes me feel very old when I say that. Now we hire young engineers, and they have never used C++ or Perl, and that sounds crazy to me. Then moving into this world, I do most of my work in Python. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 4223-26  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:35 PM

Lenaghan: On the prototype building side, we use Python and scikit-learn, the Python machine learning library, a great deal. A lot of the other guys on the team use R, especially those that come from more of a statistics background, as they are very proficient in R. Then we also have the guys who came from more of the finance side, so they still write a lot of Java. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 4227-29  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:36 PM

When it comes to munging, it is definitely true, even for me, that 80 percent of the work I do is munging data. When I worked in finance, I learned to do that very quickly and efficiently in Perl. Since I started at PlaceIQ I have not used Perl. Now I do all of the data munging in Python. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 4243-47  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:37 PM

For temporal data, we divide the week up into 26 time periods that are culturally relevant, so that allows us to not have to worry about the clock time. For instance, your Tuesday A.M. commute is contextually the same as your Thursday A.M. commute, and Sunday lunch is always Sunday lunch. We also have a very sophisticated ontology/taxonomy that we use internally. All of our data and all of our categories of this data get mapped to this ontology. So this framework that was built out is very sophisticated. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 4262-65  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:39 PM

We solved it by tilizing our polygons. You still capture and map data to these tiles. It’s just that—especially for larger polygons, like Walmart and airports and similar giant structure—the error that you have is small once you tilize it. Once you work at the tile level, everything becomes kind of abstract again. You have all these keys, and you are doing large key-value joints. I wrote the first framework to do that work. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 4270-74  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:39 PM

It does sound really easy. You look at the map and search for a house. Once you see a house, you know the tile is residential, so you are able to get demographic results. However, doing this across the one billion tiles in the United States means that you have to do that programmatically somehow. The power of the classifier comes from being able to designate a tile as residential or nonresidential. So this was an important step to figure out. Unfortunately, there is not a good data set that says, “This particular tile is residential.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 4280-85  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:40 PM

The classifier we came up with had about sixteen features that indicated whether or not the tile was residential. We then had to finish building out this very high-quality residential classifier. Once we had that, we could figure out from all these location histories what demographic attributes to give the Air Traveler audience. Now we have these in-home and out-of-home components of the audience, which give us a base data layer for building any sort of movement profile that we would want. So we can now combine “a device that tends to be in households with this particular demographic” with “a device tends to dwell in coffee shops and has been observed on an auto lot for a particular brand.” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 4286-88  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:41 PM

Now that we have the data and the classifier, we then have to build up the query language to help us create the types of audiences we wanted. This means the query language has to be able to write these rules and has to be able to hook into the geospatial base data layer to pull out these audiences. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 4310-12  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:44 PM

Right now, our entire infrastructure is hosted on Amazon’s S3 service. Within a month, we will have moved to a colocation data center facility. The colo will help in storing location data that is very sensitive. Technically, all of the data will be stored in Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System [HDFS]. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 4314-20  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:45 PM

When we are looking for people, we are looking for very passionate people who are quantitatively minded. Even though we use Hadoop a lot here, being an expert in Hadoop is not a job requirement. We want people who can think logically, scientifically, and quantitatively about problems. We want them to be able to accurately identify what works and does not work. We also want them to know why things do not work, even though they thought they were going to work. Being self-critical is important. Our interview process consists more of probing to understand how they think rather than, “How would you do this particular graph algorithm in a map-reduce framework?” We are interested more in raw skills than in particular skills for our data science team. Whether we are hiring a junior hire or a senior hire, we are looking for that quantitative piece. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 4327-31  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:45 PM

We run many processes hundreds of billions of times a month. When you are running algorithms on ad-request logs, even something as simple as converting from a latitude and longitude to a tile makes a big difference in compute times and costs. Making these types of very small changes is important in our work, so we are always looking for more performant numerical techniques. Julia looks very promising in this area, so that is why we have a person working on figuring out how to include it in our workflow. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 4336-37  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:47 PM

I am very excited about real-time processing and real-time computation systems like Storm, even though Storm is not exactly nascent. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 4347-49  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:47 PM

Along similar lines, people and startups are starting to try to democratize data science and analytics. I am all in favor of this move, as well. While it will make our life easier having these better tools, it will never obviate the need for somebody to make and use these tools. You 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 4388-90  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:52 PM

Having an engineering mindset is essential to moving with high velocity in the data science world. Reading Code Complete 1 and The Pragmatic Programmer 2 is going to get you much further than reading machine learning books—although you do, of course, have to read the machine learning books, too. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 4391-97  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:53 PM

So knowing machine learning is the pass to get inside of the door and then, once inside the door, knowing the engineering practices is what sets you apart? Lenaghan: Yes, in terms of the importance of everyday practice, you cannot underestimate engineering. And a lot of people do. A lot of the people we interview, even very senior people, just run some cleansed data sets that they run some R packages on. To really succeed, having an engineering mindset is important. I would say that having an analytical mindset is the most important, then having good hygienic engineering practices, and then having the tools. Where things get messed up is when you have the skillsets inverted—that is, when you just have tools that you rely on and you basically apply them blindly without good dev ops or engineering practices and without any critical thinking. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4404-6  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:59 PM

Anna Smith is an analytics engineer at Rent the Runway, an online and offline fashion company that rents designer dresses and accessories. The company partners with famous designers to ensure every woman can have her Cinderella moment. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 199 | Loc. 4406  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 06:59 PM

why do the women nterviewed in this book all have steretypical barbie jobs. wtf.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4410-11  | Added on Monday, April 06, 2015, 07:00 PM

Smith previously worked as a data scientist at Bitly, where she provided data insights to consumers and brands. Bitly lured her from the University of Oregon physics doctorate program, where her field was quantum computing. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 4492-95  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:20 PM

Then we got a data artist involved and all of a sudden we could really take the data I was making and make it pretty and understandable. Through this process, we were able to solidify what we were trying to accomplish, because before that I was making graphs somewhat haphazardly to show different outcomes. Once we had a more polished project and could see how it was changing and what made it special, we were really able to focus. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 4522-23  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:23 PM

Like, how do I tell my mom what I’m doing? Well, my mom’s a bad choice since she loves computers. Okay, how about—how would I tell my sister? 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4547-50  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:27 PM

Then we have another semi-team who focus on the operations side. So we have one data scientist there who built the predictor for when a dress is going to be late. Then we have another guy who builds out our Tableau reports, and we’re making a big effort to try to get that off of him, as he ends up getting inundated with questions all day long. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4553-54  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:28 PM

The data, the people in the company, my interest in fashion, and being involved in a web company that has a physical aspect to it. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 205 | Loc. 4554  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:28 PM

wwwwwwwwwwowwww
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 4559-60  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:29 PM

Another reason is that I’ve always been interested in fashion. I actually rented semi-frequently from Rent the Runway before I worked here, so it made the transition from Bitly easy. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 206 | Loc. 4560  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:30 PM

data scientists building apps for other data scientists. technophils just breathing in their own exhaust.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 4571-73  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:31 PM

So my boss and our team have really been trying to make it more of a collaborative effort, as opposed to just handing things off. Gutierrez: So, much more of a consulting-type team role. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 4573-75  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:33 PM

to support a business, you need a lot of data going out, and a lot of that is just, “Here are the numbers. Here is how they’re changing week over week.” So we constantly have to figure out automated ways to provide these reports, so that we can do the more interesting and fun problems. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 4591-92  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:35 PM

It’s been great being the first woman on the analytics team, as I have some inside knowledge of how I would go about finding a dress and what the effort entails. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 207 | Loc. 4592  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:35 PM

sure. bc thats all women can offer. what the dress renting experience is like.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 4622-24  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:39 PM

Here we don’t have Hadoop. Here we use databases, like HP’s Vertica. We store in them the data we just talked about and also the pixel logs. The pixel logs tell us what’s going on on the website—like what people are clicking on, their navigation paths, and other website-related things. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 4628-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:40 PM

Here nobody else really writes in Python except for a few people on the data team. Otherwise, people use whatever they want to on our team, so most of it is SQL, just to get access to the data. And then most people outside of our group crunch the data using Excel. Our recommendation engines are built on R. The whole web site is in Java, so I’ve been learning a bit of that again since undergrad. Then for special projects, we use more specialized tools such as D3.js. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 4637-38  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:40 PM

Validating it isn’t always so much fun, because I’m like, “What? It’s data. It’s right. It’s correct”—whether 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 4666  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:42 PM

If we are able to represent someone’s taste, just think of how cool it would be to understand. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 210 | Loc. 4666  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:43 PM

yea. soundslike a quantum chemist. ooh. it would be coooool to understand this. but why why why
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 4676-78  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:43 PM

On a personal note, I’m really excited by the idea of finding more women like me—almost like my body and taste doppelgängers. My new idea is that we should be able to provide that because, once we can do that, it’s nice to know that there are other women out there who face the same issues with finding the right dress. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 211 | Loc. 4679  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:44 PM

yea. first fucking world fucking problems.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 4680-81  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:44 PM

Things like “the dress fit me oddly because I have implants” are helpful to the set of customers that face the same issues. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 211 | Loc. 4681  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:44 PM

jesus. hyram. goddamn. fucking. christ.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4699-4700  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:45 PM

And I like the idea that it’s very empowering to women. It’s all about democratizing fashion and making it more accessible. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 212 | Loc. 4700  | Added on Tuesday, April 07, 2015, 12:46 PM

yea. wome empowerment means power to pick your own dress andpower to have your cinderella momet.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4708-10  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 12:36 PM

So I think that’s a lot of what data science is about. We need to have the freedom to explore on our own. I don’t know if it’s 80 percent free time, but maybe 40 percent, definitely. We need to have monkey time to get involved in something, get really excited about it, and then still make sure you get your other work done and deliver on time. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4717-18  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 12:37 PM

Those are more of the metrics that we look at here, which is very different from the ways I’m used to thinking about it, where I’m like, “Look! It’s awesome!” 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 4720-21  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 12:37 PM

So this is where I need change how I use my thinking time because I feel like I do more latent math in my coding. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 4749-50  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 12:42 PM

You can go to a conference and get excited by what everyone’s doing 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 214 | Loc. 4750  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 12:42 PM

get excited. all she ever says.
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 4766  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 01:03 PM

It comes from experience and having a high bullshit radar. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Note on Page 215 | Loc. 4766  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 01:03 PM

huh?
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 4820-24  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 01:08 PM

How do you deal with the dichotomy of data being very proprietary and controlled, while data science techniques are being, for the most part, very widely shared? Smith: That’s something I’ve been working on regularly, because at Bitly I was given a lot of free rein to give talks, and here, nobody’s really done that, at least not about data. So there’s a lot of guarding of the data. There are written and unwritten rules about what you can and can’t say about any of the numbers. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 4850-55  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 01:10 PM

I’d like to see data science become less of an ego-driven field. I’m really excited for this to happen. I feel like we’re past the rising spike of excitement around it and I’m really excited about it evolving into becoming more practical and approachable. It’s not just a hype thing anymore. It’s like when quants first came to Wall Street. All the physics people wanted to be quants, whereas now it’s kind of de rigueur to find physicists on Wall Street. I like the idea of every company having a data team that’s interested in doing research on and for their business, rather than just pushing out key business metric reports. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 4892  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 01:13 PM

we’re a company focused on the dynamic environment and the data the environment generates. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 4907-15  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:10 PM

My focus in the company is the engineering, data, and technology side of it. In the first year we focused on making sure that we were doing the right thing before we built the product. We started by aggregating public data sets and building a community around the product. Today we have about 7,400 members in our community, and to date we have aggregated data for 33 organizations, including NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration]. In building the community and collecting data for organizations, we learned how professionals—oceanographers, ocean experts, GIS [Geographic Information System] experts, analysts, and so on—need the data to be served to them, how they want to connect their models, how they want to connect their devices, in which way it’s best to integrate with them, and how best to visualize the data. By working on public data sets, we were able to quickly iterate our platform, add APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], add visualizations, and compose different data distribution functions. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 4931-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:12 PM

The main interest for people who have joined the team so far is the possibility to do something meaningful instead of working on advertising or yet another web or mobile app. They can truly impact how humanity interacts with the environment and the oceans. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 4963-67  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:16 PM

Some say that intuition is actually a better thing to use to be able to develop something revolutionary or disruptive when trying to come up with something new, rather than looking into the past, into a mirror, or into the data. Quite often, you don’t come up with something new when you look to the past. You just do incremental improvements, optimizations, and make something more robust. So this is a big challenge and question for me: how much to look into the data and prior knowledge versus just creating something on my own. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 4987-88  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:17 PM

The world’s oceans directly or indirectly affect about $10 trillion of yearly global economic activity, so oceans have a significant impact on our lives. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 5008-9  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:19 PM

An offshoot of this area of problem-solving is that this data also helps yachting competitions. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 5009-12  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:19 PM

Overall, these are largely the most important two cases: long-term investment decisions and daily operational decisions. For the most part, oceanographers usually have a background in physics, so they use their numerical models to create simulations of the dynamic ocean environment with this data. This involves a lot of statistical analysis of past events in order to predict future events. They use highly advanced technology and methods these days, so there are many, many use cases you can think about. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 5014-20  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:20 PM

The first thing we did was go to the top conferences and reach out to the top organizations. We visited NOAA, we interacted with NASA, and we went to different universities, such as Cornell and Rutgers, who are now partners with Planet OS. We looked into what they were doing and quite often engaged in dialog with their experts. We’ve done a similar thing with customers: we’ve interacted, over the course of two years, with close to 100 different organizations. We make sure to talk with people at executive and board levels, as well as those people who are actually on the sea. We’ve worked really hard to understand how their decisions depend on the data they collect or the data they have, what their decision flows are, and what their workflows are so that we can make sure our product and platform will be much more efficient than the way they do it today. 
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Data Scientists at Work (Sebastian Gutierrez)
- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 5035-36  | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2015, 06:21 PM

He is also the author of Pydap, the Python implementation of the OPeNDAP data exchange protocol, so that helped as well. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 280  | Added on Sunday, May 03, 2015, 04:32 PM

“Exergasia 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 674-76  | Added on Sunday, May 03, 2015, 06:45 PM

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1093-95  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:37 PM

There had been assaults in blackliners; people had done unspeakable things, or so one heard. In fact it was hard to believe anyone would care enough to impinge so drastically on anyone else. Why care that much? What would it do? 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1109-11  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:39 PM

on for as long as she was in here. No face to cling to with one’s gaze, nothing at all to see—her memory and imagination would run riot, her starved senses left to spin hungrily, making things up—nothing but her unhappiness for company. Pure being, unadulterated thought, revealing what the phenomenal world could hide but not change: the blank at the heart of things. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1114-20  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:40 PM

“You are perhaps experiencing an episode of hypotyposis,” Pauline said aloud. “The visionary imagination of things not present before the eyes.” “Shut up, Pauline.” Then, after a while, she said, “No, I’m sorry. Go on, please.” “An aporia in some rhetorics is a pretended dubitation before coming back to the attack, as in Gilbert on Joyce. But Aristotle has it as an insoluble problem in an inquiry, arising from equally plausible but inconsistent premises. He writes that Socrates liked to reduce people to aporia to show them they didn’t really know what they thought they knew. The plural that Aristotle uses in his book on metaphysics is ‘aporiai.’ 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1120-22  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:40 PM

The word aporia was later adapted by Derrida to mean something like the blank spots in our understanding that we don’t even know are there, with the idea we should try to see these. It is not quite the same idea, but joins a constellation of meanings for the word. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1124-26  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:41 PM

The Greek comes from a, ‘not,’ and poros, ‘passage.’ But in the Platonic myth, Penia, the child of poverty, chooses to become impregnated by Poros, the personification of plenty. Their child is Eros, who combines the attributes of its parents. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1167-70  | Added on Tuesday, May 05, 2015, 12:44 PM

people compromise, they cut corners. They want to do things, they indulge their desires, their love of adventure to have to return to Earth, so dirty and old, so oppressive, such a failure. So much the sad planet they swore they would live by accident, but they were young at the time 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 1982-84  | Added on Thursday, May 07, 2015, 12:29 PM

“Solvitur ambulando,” Pauline said. “Latin for ‘It is solved by walking.’ Diogenes of Sinope.” “Thus you prove motion is real,” Wahram supposed. “Yes.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2060-71  | Added on Thursday, May 07, 2015, 12:36 PM

After a time of silence she would sometimes snap. “All right tell me something! Tell me about yourself! What’s your first memory?” “I don’t know,” Wahram said, trying to locate it. “My first memory,” she said, “comes from a time that my parents tell me I was three. My parents were part of a house that decided to move to the other side of the city. I think we were trading places north to south, in order to look at the other half of the countryside as we passed by it. Or maybe they just told me that. So a bunch of carts were there, and both houses were moving stuff back and forth. Everything my family owned could fit on the back of one battery cart and two handcarts. My mother took me back inside when the place was emptied, and it scared me. I think that’s why I remember it. My room looked much smaller when it was empty, and that seemed backward and scared me, like the world had shrunk. We fill rooms to make them bigger. Then we went back outside, and the other image that sticks with me, along with the empty room, was all the stuff in the bed of the cart, and everyone standing by it at the curb, under a set of trees. Above some trees I could see the Dawn Wall.” She hiked on for a time in silence, and Wahram felt the empty grumble in his stomach that marked another mealtime’s approach. “By now that’s all burned down,” she said. But now her voice was unusually calm. She was no longer grieving in the same way, it seemed. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 2365-69  | Added on Thursday, May 07, 2015, 05:47 PM

There I studied terraforming governance, and the diplomatic arts, such as they are—” “The honest man sent by his country to lie for it?” “Oh, I would hope that is not an accurate description of a diplomat. It’s not mine, and I hope not yours.” “I don’t think we get to choose what words mean.” “No? I think we do.” “Only within very tight limits,” she said. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 2373-75  | Added on Thursday, May 07, 2015, 05:48 PM

Memory is a haunting. You remember times you liked, and you want something like them. But you can only get new things. So I try to want what I get. It isn’t obvious how to do it. You get into your second century and it gets hard, I think.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2469-73  | Added on Friday, May 08, 2015, 11:45 AM

He thought about that for a while. The lights passed them overhead, he pushed her on the cart. Was that right? Was it how you felt about what you did that made it good or bad, rather than what you did, or what others saw? Well, you were stuck in your thoughts. The current medical definition of the term “neurotic” was simply “a tendency to have bad thoughts.” If you had that tendency, he thought, looking down at Swan’s bare scaly head, if you were neurotic, then the material to work with would be nearly infinite. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2509-13  | Added on Friday, May 08, 2015, 11:48 AM

Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One’s thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective. He wondered if he could ask her about this without offending her. Possibly not. She was irritable already, and seemed miserable. 
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