William L. Shirer on Adolf Hitler

“But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and – until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself – an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.”

“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 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, should it come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”

“In retrospect, it is easy to see that the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Germany on November 9 and the harsh and brutal measures taken against them afterward were portents of a fatal weakening which in the end would bring the dictator, his regime and his nation down in utter ruin. The evidences of Hitler's megalomania we have seen permeating hundreds of pages of this narrative. But until now he had usually been able to hold it in check at critical stages in his rise and in that of his country. At such moments his genius for acting not only boldly, but usually only after a careful calculation of the consequences, had won him one crashing success after another. But now, as November 9 and its aftermath clearly showed, Hitler was losing his self-control. His megalomania was getting the upper hand. The stenographic record of the Goering meeting on November 12 reveals that it was Hitler who, in the final analysis, was responsible for the holocaust of that November evening; it was he who gave the necessary approval to launch it; he who pressed Goering to go ahead with the elimination of Jews from German life. 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. Hitler's sickness was contagious; the nation was catching it, as if it were a virus.”

“It was 3:30PM on Monday, April 30, 1945, ten days after Adolf Hitler's sixty-fifth birthday and twelve years and three months to a day since he had become Chancellor of Germany and instituted the Third Reich. It would survive him but a week.”