Years after his death, Coe’s William Shirer still expert on Nazi Germany

Among hundreds of items in a special archive at Coe College is a press pass from Adolf Hitler's lavish 50th birthday party, and the news broadcast from that party by Coe grad and journalist William Shirer.

Shirer was the only American broadcast journalist in Vienna in 1938 to witness the German annexation of Austria. A war correspondent based for several years in Berlin, Shirer was known for his reports during the rise of Nazi power before World War II.

Drawing on those experiences, in addition to research after the war, Shirer wrote “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” considered one of the definitive histories of Nazi Germany.

Coe will celebrate its notable alum on the 50th anniversary of the publication of his most famous book with a three-day symposium this month.

The George T. Henry College Archives, secure and climate-controlled in the basement of Coe's Stewart Memorial Library, is home to Shirer's papers, diaries and broadcasts recordings.

Shirer chronicled the 20th century as few people did, Coe President Jim Phifer said, and Shirer's papers are of increasing interest to scholars and students.

“Being able to shelter those documents is very important to us,” Phifer said. “He is one of our proudest graduates and for the right reasons.”

Shirer was born in Chicago, where his father was a lawyer, but moved to Cedar Rapids, his mother's hometown, with his mother and siblings after his father died.

He worked on the campus newspaper and studied journalism before graduating from Coe in 1925. He moved to Paris shortly after and counted artists like Picasso and Hemingway among his friends there.

Shirer bounced around journalism jobs in Europe, India and the Middle East for outlets including the Chicago Tribune and Universal News Service. During time in India, he wrote about Gandhi and spent time in his inner circle.

In 1937, he was hired by CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow as the network's European correspondent.

His reports came under increasing censorship and threats from the Nazi regime. He fled Berlin in December 1940, when one of his informants told him he was about to be arrested for spying. He managed to smuggle out his diaries and notes.

“The man saved everything, which is really wonderful,” Coe Library archivist Jill Jack said. “How he got some of it out of Germany, I'll never know.”

Shirer decided before his death in 1993 he wanted Coe to have his papers and journals. The Shirer archives at Coe draws writers, researchers, historians and academics from around the world, Jack said. It's just in recent years that Coe had funding and time to begin cataloging the hundreds of items, she said, and that effort has drawn more interest to the archives as knowledge of it spreads online. The archive is 150 feet of materials stored in archival boxes.

Jack gets two or three calls a week about the collection and typically a few visitors each semester, not counting Coe students.

The collection offers insight into Nazi history, but also early 20th-century journalism and the McCarthy blacklist era, Jack said.

After Shirer fled Berlin and returned to America, he continued reporting on the war and eventually on the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Shirer came under increasing pressure for his outspoken view that Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklisting was similar to attitudes he'd seen in Nazi Germany. CBS' advertisers didn't care for his liberal views, and he and Murrow had a falling out. Whether Shirer was fired from CBS or whether he quit is disputed, but he was left unemployed.

In the 1950s, he couldn't get a job in journalism, Jack said, so Shirer turned to writing books. He started work on “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” which took him about a decade.

“Even his publisher said, ‘No one's going to read it; you're gonna sell 15 copies,' ” Jack said.

It won the National Book Award in 1961 and sold millions of copies.

“For a long time it was THE book on Germany,” Jack said. “It really revived him and validated him.”