End of a Berlin Diary

The Berlin Diary Series, Book 2

By: William L. Shirer

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

A radio broadcaster and journalist for Edward R. Murrow at CBS, William L. Shirer was new to the world of broadcast journalism when he began keeping a diary while on assignment in Europe during the 1930s. It was in 1940, when he was still virtually unknown, that Shirer wondered whether his eyewitness account of the collapse of the world around Nazi Germany could be of any interest or value as a book.

Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is considered the first full record of what was happening in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, appeared in 1941. The book was an instant success - and would not be the last of his expert observations on Europe.

Shirer returned to the European front in 1944 to cover the end of the war. As the smoke cleared, Shirer - who watched the birth of a monster that threatened to engulf the world - now stood witness to the death of the Third Reich.

End of a Berlin Diary chronicles this year-long study of Germany after Hitler. Through a combination of Shirer’s lucid, honest reporting, along with passages on the Nuremberg trials, copies of captured Nazi documents, and an eyewitness account of Hitler’s last days, Shirer provides insight into the unrest, the weariness, and the tentative steps world leaders took towards peace.

©2016 William L. Shirer (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Great book and author

Loved the whole thing. He lived the history of that whole nightmare and got out while he could.

beginning of the end the end of the beginnin

I feel the original Berlin diary was far more concise and had more meat to it but that could be because I have a feeling this was not exactly an intended follow up and I'm comparing it to a work completed much later. it is an adequate coda is Berlin diary. you can sense the initial forms of the rise and fall of the Third Reich and its pages but it's tantalizing ly sparse on those details.

Diaries of the powerful

Good second part to Shirer’s WW2 story…gives some Nazi mindsets while finalizing the facts while they were defeated.

Not in the same league as his other writings, but not bad

I’ve read Shirer’s other books and thought they were great - but this one is not one of his best. But it’s still interesting to read. With that said Shirer comes off as a typical leftist media snob, so of course he loves Russia and pushes socialism, which is annoying - but his pure hatred of Germany and the German people helps offset that since it’s so entertaining to hear him spew his unfiltered feelings about them. On the downside he also goes as far as to downplay and even dismiss the mass rapes that Russia committed against German, doubting it happened and if it did, well, every army does it (no, they don’t). But that is why this book has value, it reads like someone’s unfiltered thoughts from the time, and seeing things first hand, and not having some woke or PC filter at work.

The other downside of the book is that he uses a ton of filler to pad out the length - so it’s not 10 hours or whatever of his writings - it’s probably like 4-5 hours with some speeches and reports to fill out the length. It’s not boring or uninteresting - but I’d have much rather listened to him talk about his return to Germany and get more detail and opinion from that.

The reader does a great job - fits the book perfectly.

Fantastic book.

I would highly recommend this book to anybody that has a deep interest in World War II history; particularly the war in Europe.