William L. Shirer

Shirer broadcast from Berlin for American radio from 1934 until the censors made it pointless in December 1940, reporting live as Austria was annexed and Poland invaded, and he was standing in the clearing at Compiègne when France surrendered in the same railway carriage used in 1918. Berlin Diary is that period. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich came in 1960, built from captured German documents and the Nuremberg record, ran past a thousand pages and sold in the millions. Academic historians have long objected to its central thesis, that the German regime descends in a straight line from Luther and Bismarck, while conceding the documentary value of the rest. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy years and lost his broadcasting career for it.