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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January 19, 2015

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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January 20, 2015

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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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January 21-23, 2015

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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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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January 25-26, 2015

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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 10610  | Added on Monday, January 26, 2015, 10:23 AM

turgid page in Mein Kampf 
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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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January 27-28, 2015

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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- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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- 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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January 29, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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January 30, 2015

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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

February 1-3, 2015

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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- 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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February 4-6, 2015

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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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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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February 7-9, 2015

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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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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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 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 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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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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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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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 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)
- Highlight on Page 781 | Loc. 19654-56  | Added on Saturday, February 07, 2015, 06:25 PM

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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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 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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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
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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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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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- 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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- 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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- 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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February 10-13, 2015

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 842 | Loc. 21155-63  | Added on Tuesday, February 10, 2015, 02:27 PM

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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- Highlight on Page 852 | Loc. 21370-77  | Added on Tuesday, February 10, 2015, 02:41 PM

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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- 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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February 14-17, 2015

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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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February 18-21, 2015

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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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March

March 15-20, 2015

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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March 21-31, 2015

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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April

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)
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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)
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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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May

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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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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July

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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 618-21  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:04 AM

Using common names such as HP Jetdirect as a means to blend into the network could be beneficial in a black-box testing environment. Overclocking Overclocking the 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 663-64  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:05 AM

Once you connect your Wi-Fi adapter, you should first verify that the system shows it is functioning properly. You can do this by issuing the iwconfig command in a terminal window as shown in the following screenshot: 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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You should see a wlan0 interface representing your new wireless interface. The next step is to enable the interface. We do this by issuing the ifconfig wlan0 command followed by the up keyword 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 680-85  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:15 AM

You can use 3G USB modem cards with Kali Linux and connect to your Raspberry Pi over cellular for stealthy remote access. Each card is manufactured a little differently, and therefore the setup may vary based on the type of 3G card and service provider. Our recommendation is using a MiFi (short for Mobile Wi-Fi) hotspot and connecting Kali Linux through a Wi-Fi adapter; however, if you want to use a 3G USB modem, make sure you verify it works with Debian. In our next example, we use the Huawei 3G USB modem connect card. This is a 3G GSM card that works with most frequencies around the globe. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 703-5  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:16 AM

You should first verify whether the SSH service is installed. Type in the service --status-all command to check whether the SSH service is running. If you see + as shown in the following screenshot, you are good to go. If you see a - sign, then you will need to install the OpenSSH server. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 736-41  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:17 AM

Since Kali Linux is a fully featured Linux operating system, you can control the entire environment through SSH; however, your incoming SSH connections may be blocked by firewalls or other security solutions. Many organizations have security measures in place to block incoming connections with the goal of preventing backdoors into their network. In a white-box assessment, you may be explicitly able to open up a firewall to permit SSH to your Raspberry Pi as shown in the following image. The bad news is even if this is possible from a policy standpoint, it may be difficult to achieve when dealing with multiple sites under multiple administrative controls. Reverse SSH is a good alternative to manage a Raspberry Pi running Kali Linux. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 765-71  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:27 AM

To try again with a different port on your Raspberry Pi, use the following command: ssh -fN -R 443:localhost:22 root@192.168.162.133 On your C&C central server, open up a command-line terminal and enter the following command: ssh root@localhost -p 443 You will be prompted for the root password of your Kali Linux Raspberry Pi. You can see from the last command-line example that the command prompt has changed. We are now on our remote server and have full control of our Raspberry Pi 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 785-90  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:29 AM

You will need to create a file called stunnel.conf inside the /etc/stunnel/ directory. You can use your favorite text editor such as nano or vi to create the file. The following will be configured and entered into the stunnel.conf file. Note that you can change the ports to something that better suits you: client = no [squid] accept = 8888 connect = 127.0.0.1:3128 cert = /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 915-19  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:43 AM

WPA and WPA2 can be cracked with Aircrack. Kali Linux includes the Aircrack suite, which is one of the most popular applications to break wireless security. Aircrack works by gathering packets seen on a wireless connection to either mathematically analyze the data to crack weaker protocols such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), or use brute force on the captured data with a wordlist. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 922-24  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:44 AM

Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi lacks the processing power and the hard drive space to accommodate large wordlist files. So, you might have to crack the password off-box with a tool such as John the Ripper. We recommend this route for most WPA2 hacking attempts. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 931-34  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:45 AM

It is recommended that you hide your Mac address while cracking a foreign wireless network. Kali Linux ARM does not come with the program macchanger. So, you should download it by using the sudo apt-get install macchanger command in a terminal window. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 935-36  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:45 AM

Next, we need to stop the interface used for the attack so that we can change our Mac address. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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change the Mac address of this interface to hide our true identity. Use macchanger to change your Mac to a random value and specify your interface. There are options to switch to another type of device; however, for this example, we will just leave it as a random Mac address using the following command: macchanger -r wlan0 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 945-48  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:46 AM

We need to locate available wireless networks so that we can pick our target to attack. Use the following command to do this: airodump-ng wlan0 You should now see networks within range of your Raspberry Pi that can be targeted for this attack. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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The next step is running airodump against the Mac address that you just copied. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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You may not get the full handshake when you run this command. If that happens, you will have to wait for a live user to authenticate you to the access point prior to launching the attack. The output on using Aircrack may show you something like Opening [file].cap a few times followed by No valid WPA handshakes found, if you didn't create a full handshake and somebody hasn't authenticated you by that time. Do not proceed to the next step until you capture a full handshake. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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The last step is to run Aircrack against the captured data to crack the WPA key. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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It is a good idea to perform this last step on a remote machine. You can set up a FTP server and push your .cap files to that FTP server or use steps similar to those covered under the Scripting tcpdump for future access section found later in this chapter. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 60 | Loc. 995-99  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:49 AM

There are many sources and tools that can be used to develop a wordlist for your attack. One popular tool called Custom Wordlist Generator (CeWL), allows you to create your own custom dictionary file. This can be extremely useful if you are targeting individuals and want to scrape their blogs, LinkedIn, or other websites for commonly used words. CeWL doesn't come preinstalled on the Kali Linux ARM image, so you will have to download it using apt-get install cewl. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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Here is a dictionary that one of the coauthors of this book put together: http://www.drchaos.com/public_files/chaos-dictionary.lst.txt 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 60 | Loc. 1012-14  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:50 AM

typically the next step, once a foothold is established, is to start looking at the data. To do this, you will need a method to capture and view network packets. This means turning your Raspberry Pi into a remotely accessible network tap. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1017-18  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:51 AM

Tcpdump is a command-line-based packet analyzer. You can use tcpdump to intercept and display TCP/IP and other packets that are transmitted and seen attached by the system 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1023-25  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:51 AM

As the previous screenshot shows, there really isn't much to see if you don't have the proper traffic flowing through the Raspberry Pi. Basically, we're seeing our own traffic while being plugged into an 802.1X-enabled switch, which isn't interesting. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1034-35  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:52 AM

Let's look at a few versions of man-in-the-middle attacks used to get data into your Raspberry Pi. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1037-39  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:53 AM

One method is placing the Raspberry Pi in line between two systems using two Ethernet ports. This requires a USB to Ethernet adapter and the ability to physically connect the Raspberry Pi in this fashion. In the following example, we are connecting a windows laptop to one end of our Raspberry Pi and the network switch to the other. One of the Ethernet ports is a USB adapter. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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For live penetration testing, you can customize the Raspberry Pi's protective case, as shown in the following image, to mimic anything from a power plug to a network hub to hide your attack system. We found that the average person won't mess with a small box attached to a network device if it looks like it belongs there. Once, we also placed a Raspberry Pi in office stationery, such as a hollow alarm clock, to conceal it during an authorized penetration test. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1044-47  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:53 AM

The Raspberry Pi needs to be configured to bridge the target system's Ethernet port to the network-facing port and vice versa in order to see traffic. Without doing this, traffic will die once it hits the Pi. Before doing this, you will need to install the bridge utility that will be used to bridge the two ports together. To install this, use the apt-get install bridge-utils command. Once installed, here is the procedure to turn your Raspberry Pi into a network bridge for network taping purposes. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1050-51  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:55 AM

You will need to configure both Ethernet ports as open IP addresses, which is also known as setting them to 0.0.0.0. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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Next, we will bridge the interfaces to a bridge0 interface using the brctl command and add both the Ethernet interfaces: 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1061-62  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:55 AM

The last step is turning on the new bridge containing both the Ethernet interfaces using the following command: Ifconfig bridge0 up 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 1068-72  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:56 AM

Another approach to get data through the Raspberry Pi is to redirect traffic from a system on the same network subnet using a man-in-the-middle approach so that you don't have to mess with the physical connection of that target. Let's look at how this works. Note Many network switches made by vendors such as Cisco and Juniper offer techniques to avoid Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) poisoning. For this reason, we recommend the network tap approach for real penetration testing environments. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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Enable IP forwarding to enable ARP spoofing to pass packets to and fro between the target to the Raspberry Pi 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1087-89  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:58 AM

Now, you need to find the default gateway and subnet mask of the network to which your Raspberry Pi is connected. You can find this using the following command: netstat –nr 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1102-5  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 09:59 AM

The command is as follows: arpspoof –i eth0 –t 10.0.2.63 –r 10.0.2.1 Note In this use case, we are using the physical Ethernet adapter on the Raspberry Pi for this attack. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1106-7  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:00 AM

You should start to see traffic from the ARP cache poisoning running in the window as shown in the following screenshot. Leave this open and run a tool such as Wireshark to view the traffic for a data capture. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1162-64  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:04 AM

The Raspberry Pi should now be placed in the middle between the target system and the default gateway, and let you to view the traffic with a sniffing software such as Wireshark. Ettercap has a sniffing option but it is not as good as other tools such as Wireshark, which we will cover later in this chapter. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1176-78  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:05 AM

You can verify whether this Ettercap is working with any network monitoring software such as the urlsnarf part of the dsniff package. To do this, use the urlsnarf –i [the network interface] command, as shown in the following screenshot: 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1182-88  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:07 AM

One utility that is used to see images captured during a man-in-the-middle attack is a program called Driftnet. There are better ways to find more interesting data; however, driftnet can be useful if you are focusing on viewing images. Driftnet does not come preinstalled on Kali Linux ARM. You can download it by using the apt-get install driftnet command. Once installed, use the driftnet –i eth0 command to run it. This will open up a new terminal window that will be blank. Any images seen by a victim during the man-in-the-middle attack will start populating in this window. The following screenshot shows a host accessing www.cisco.com while driftnet is capturing images: 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1190-91  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:07 AM

During real penetration testing exercises, we found that running raw tcpdump captures or using tools such as Wireshark consume a lot of processing power and sometimes crash the Raspberry Pi or render it useless. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1197-1203  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:08 AM

in the following manner: tcpdump host www.drchaos.com Or, we can do it using the IP address in the following manner: tcpdump host 8.8.8.8 You can also specify the source IP address, destination IP address, or both the source and the destination. In the following example, we have defined both the source and the destination: Tcpdump src 1.1.1.1 dst 2.2.2.2 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1204-7  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:08 AM

You may have a need to look at all the traffic belonging to a particular network's subnet. To do this, use the net command in tcpdump. You should, however, keep in mind a few things before doing this. On a busy network, your Raspberry Pi will most likely not be able to keep up with this traffic capture. It is not only limited by the processing power, but also by the 100 MB network interface. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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The following commands are used to look at all the traffic belonging to a particular network's subnet: tcpdump net 10.0.1.0/24 tcpdump icmp You can search for specific protocols as shown in the following example: tcpdump port 80,21 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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You may want to export network captures to avoid running out of space on the local Raspberry Pi. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1239-46  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:11 AM

Let's look at how to develop a simple FTP script to extract data from a remote Raspberry Pi in the following manner. First, open up a text editor and save the file with a .py extension. We saved our file as ftp.py. import ftplib #importing ftp module in python session = ftplib.FTP('server.IP.address.com','USERNAME','PASSWORD') file = open('*.cap','rb') # file to send session.storbinary('STOR *.cap', file) # send the file file.close() # close file and FTP session.quit() # Quit the ftp session 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1258-60  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:12 AM

Wireshark is one of the most popular open source packet analyzer programs available today. It can be used to troubleshoot network problems, analyzing communication between systems, and in the case of a penetration test, to capture data once you breach a network. Think of Wireshark as tcpdump with a pretty graphical interface and nifty data sorting features. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1315-16  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:15 AM

TShark is the command-line version of Wireshark. If you have to run Wireshark from a Raspberry pi, TShark is the best option. Consider TShark as an alternative to using tcpdump for capturing packets. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1334-36  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:16 AM

Thanks to a security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, this layer of defense can be bypassed using SSLstrip. SSLstrip works by proxying HTTPS requests from the victim and sending them using HTTP. The HTTP traffic is not encrypted, making it vulnerable to eavesdropping. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1336-37  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 10:17 AM

Once SSLstrip forces the HTTP connection, an attacker can use tcpdump to view the unencrypted login credentials of people accessing accounts such as Facebook. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1384-90  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 02:38 PM

In this chapter, we started using the Raspberry Pi with Kali Linux for penetration testing purposes. We first covered how to use nmap to assess a network for devices, ports, and other data points for possible exploitation. Next, we looked at how to crack wireless networks so that we could access the network and run nmap or other scanning tool sets. Once we covered basic network reconnaissance for LAN and wireless, we looked at a few attack techniques that could be launched while on the network. The first attack that we covered was performing a man-in-the-middle attack with the purpose of getting data through the Raspberry Pi. Later, we covered how to break SSL encryption while monitoring traffic between a trusted source and a victim. We also included how to tune packet captures and export data to avoid crashing the Raspberry Pi. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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Exploiting a system means taking advantage of a bug, glitch, or vulnerability in the system and causing unintended behavior of the system. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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The key to Metasploit's popularity is that it has weaponized complex attacks in a scripted format so that the average user can launch sophisticated attacks in minutes. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1488-92  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 02:48 PM

Most security solutions such as anti-virus or IPS are designed to detect payloads. However, Metasploit includes encoders to bypass these traditional defenses. Encoding means to add random data to the file so that it looks different than what it really is. Most traditional security defenses leverage lists of known threats that are also known as signatures, which means that if a threat is not on that list, it is not detected. Encoding provides a way to make a payload look unique enough to not trigger a known signature and beat traditional defenses. Some people call this a "day zero" threat, meaning none of the commercial vendors have a signature for the threat to detect it. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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You can learn more about the authors' research on executing a penetration test using social media by searching for "Emily Williams Social Engineering" on Google or at http://www.thesecurityblogger.com/?p=1903 and http://www.pcworld.com/article/2059940/fake-social-media-id-duped-securityaware-it-guys.html . 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1698-1703  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 03:04 PM

Easy-creds is a bash script that leverages Ettercap and other tools to obtain credentials. Ettercap was covered in Chapter 3 , Penetration Testing. However, easy-creds takes the man-in-the-middle attack further by providing you with all the tools you need to develop a monitoring honeypot. Easy-creds is menu-driven and offers ARP spoofing, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) spoofing, one-way ARP spoofing, and creating a fake Access Point (AP). 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1756-59  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 03:10 PM

This chapter focused on running active attacks from the Raspberry Pi once you have breached a network. Topics included compromising systems with various forms of payloads, social engineering techniques, exploiting browsers, and developing rogue access honeypots with the purpose of gaining access through vulnerabilities or by stealing user credentials. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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For people providing penetration testing as a service, you must show evidence to justify your findings or you won't demonstrate enough value for future business. This means documenting everything and not leaving behind possible problems caused by your services. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1776-81  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 03:12 PM

This and other types of behaviors could tip off those watching out for your presence, which might push them to adjust their security measures. This will make it much tougher to accomplish your original task, and will also not provide a true penetration testing simulation as real attackers might not be sloppy and get identified. Administrators might also fix any identified vulnerabilities before they are reported, thereby deflating the value of your final report. This is why everything you attempt on a target should be stealthy unless the service engagement is completely in the clear, meaning all the parties know that you are providing the service against specific systems. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
- Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 1842-43  | Added on Friday, July 17, 2015, 03:18 PM

A more aggressive and quicker way to remove your history file on a Linux system is to shred it with the shred –zu /root/.bash_history command. This command overwrites the history file with zeros and then deletes the log files. 
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Another option to hide your source IP address is using proxychains. Proxychains allows you to tunnel Kali commands through a proxy server. You will need to install proxy chains using the sudo apt-get install proxychains command since it is not preinstalled in the Kali Linux ARM image. Once installed, you will need to add a proxy IP address in the etc/proxychains.conf 
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HideMyAss Internet security offers a list of free proxy servers that you can use for this purpose. You can find their website at http://proxylist.hidemyass.com . Remember, these are not very reliable and can possibly use your data without your permission since the proxy administrators see all the traffic. 
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Penetration Testing with Raspberry Pi ( Joseph Muniz and  Aamir Lakhani)
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The syntax for proxychains is proxychains < command you want tunneled and proxied> <optional arguments>. In the following example, we will use the nmap command to scan the 192.168.1.0/24 network through proxychains to hide from where the scan is being done. Note that we had to edit the .conf file with a proxy prior to executing this command. proxychains nmap 192.168.1.0/24 
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To capture the entire Raspberry Pi screen while introducing a delay, type the sleep 10; import –window root screenshot.png command. This is useful for including things that require interaction, such as opening a menu while performing a screen capture. The number after sleep will give you the delay time before the screenshot will be taken. The import –window root command tells ImageMagick to take a screenshot of the entire screen. The last part of the command is the name of your screenshot. 
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Split To further reduce a file, you can split it into multiple parts before sending it over the wire. One simple utility to accomplish this is split. To split a file, type split "size of each file" "file to be split" "name of split files". 
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To reassemble our three files, we can use the cat "fileaa fileab fileac" > "final file name". 
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The President, furthermore, could not “crack down” on the military, “because of what they knew and what they had taken”—a dark hint, never really pursued by the committee. It was not Colson’s last attempt to till revisionist soil. 
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St. Clair stressed that transcribing the tapes had become “quite an art.” He also gave the impression that the White House had been overly severe in its rendition, as he noted that the committee’s transcripts “are more favorable to the President than our own.” But the committee found significant discrepancies in the Administration’s transcripts; the White House versions had not in fact been less favorable. For example, the committee found a clear indication in the March 13, 1973 tape that Nixon had rejected the “hang-out road”—that is, a full revelation of the truth—in a conversation with Dean. Again, in his March 22, 1973 talk with Mitchell, the President repudiated Eisenhower’s scrupulous standards for the conduct of subordinates; more important, in this exchange, he told Mitchell to “st <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
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October

2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 313 | Loc. 4372-75  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:11 PM

“So who were they?” “I don’t know. Possibly some part of the Chinese government. They play rough sometimes. Although this seems a bit egregious. Maybe it’s a warning signal, but of what I’m not sure. So in that sense it wasn’t a very good warning. Maybe it was just a fishing expedition. Or a notice that we aren’t to fool around on Earth.” “As if we didn’t know that.” 
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- Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 4387-95  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:12 PM

People looked at her strangely. She was a stranger in a strange land. On the screens in the noodle shops she heard several fiery speeches denouncing various political crimes of the Hague, Brussels, the UN, Mars—spacers in general. Some speakers became so infuriated that she had to revise her opinion of Chinese detachment; they were as intense as anyone else, politically speaking, no matter their inward look on the street. Like any group, they had been shaped by their zeitgeist, and had had targets suggested to them such that their discontents were aimed away from Beijing. So, possibly space could be pulled into people’s red zone and attacked as an enemy. She listened to the screen speeches intently, ignoring the men in the shop watching her watch, and it became clear to her at last that there was a widespread view in China that spacers were living in outrageous decadence and luxury, like the colonialist powers of old, only more so. And she could see perfectly well also that in Hangzhou people lived like rats in a maze, jostling shoulder to shoulder every moment of the day. The potential for extreme thoughts was obvious. Throw a rock at the rich kid’s house—why not? Who wouldn’t do it? 
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- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 4395-99  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:12 PM

On the flights to get to Zasha she looked at the news on her screen. Earth Earth Earth. They didn’t give a damn about space, most of them. Some lived by religious beliefs that had been backward-looking in the twelfth century. The pastoralists below her in central Asia ran flocks and herds like the expert ecologists they had to be to produce as much as was demanded of them; each pasture was dairy, stockyard, and soil factory, and their owners were stuffed with anger at the droughts brought on by rich people elsewhere. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 4404-8  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:13 PM

That was life on Earth. Split, fractionated, divided into castes or classes. The wealthiest lived as if they were spacers on sabbatical, mobile and curious, actualizing themselves in all the ways possible, augmenting themselves—genderizing—speciating—dodging death, extending life. Whole countries seemed like that, in fact, but they were small countries—Norway, Finland, Chile, Australia, Scotland, California, Switzerland; on it went for a few score more. Then there were struggling countries; then the patchwork post-nations, the cobbled-together struggles against failure, or the completely failed. 
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If it melted off (and it was a remnant of the previous ice age’s giant ice cap, located very far south for current conditions), it would mean another seven meters’ rise. That would ruin the adjusted new coastline civilization, so painfully fought for. As with all ice sheets, it did not just melt; it slid in glaciers down into the sea, speeded by the lubrication of meltwater running under the ice, lifting the glaciers off their rock beds. It was the same in Antarctica, but while Antarctica’s ice slid down into the sea all the way round its circumference, so that there was nothing they could do about stopping it, Greenland was different. Its ice was mostly trapped within a high tub of encircling mountain ranges, and it could only slide down into the Atlantic through a few narrow gaps in the rock, like breaks in the edge of a bathtub. 
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Outside the helo it was stunningly cold. It made Swan gasp, and a bolt of fear shocked her: if one felt this kind of cold in space, it would mean a breakdown and imminent death. But here people were greeting her and laughing at her expression. 
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- Highlight on Page 324 | Loc. 4536-40  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:22 PM

People in space talked longingly about moving back to Earth, people went back for their sabbatical happily, crowing at the prospect—but after the thrill of the open air wore off, the g remained, and slowly but surely it dragged one down, until when the sabbatical year was over and one had had one’s Gaian replenishment, whatever it was, one rose back out of the atmosphere into the brilliant clarity of space and resumed life out there with relief and a feeling of ebullient lightness. Because Earth was just too damned heavy, and in every possible sense. It was as if a black filter had been dropped between her and the world. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 325 | Loc. 4543-48  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:23 PM

So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.” She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feeling balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of Satyagraha—ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 325 | Loc. 4551-53  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:24 PM

As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 328 | Loc. 4585-97  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:29 PM

We say “four light-years” and those words “four” and “years” fool us; we have little grasp of how far light travels in a year. Step back and think about 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second—whichever you think you can grasp better. Think of that speed as traversing 671 million miles in every hour. Think about it traversing 173 astronomical units a day; an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, thus 93 million miles—crossed 173 times in a day. Then think about four years of days like that. That gets light to the nearest star. But we can propel ourselves to only a few percent of the speed of light; so at 2 percent of the speed of light (ten million miles an hour!) it will take about two hundred years to go those four light-years. And the first stars with Earthlike planets are more like twenty light-years away. It takes a hundred thousand years for light to cross the Milky Way. At 2 percent of that speed—our speed, let us say—five million years. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy took 2.5 million years to cross the gap to our galaxy. And in the universe at large, Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides in the little sphere that is our sector of the cosmos, a neighbor galaxy to ours. So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun—and then—these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 330 | Loc. 4599-4611  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:36 PM

Swan accompanied the inoculants back to Mercury in the first transport available, which was a terrarium only partly finished. At the moment it was impossible to tell what it would become, as it was an empty cylinder of air with rock walls, a sunline, and a spindly jungle gym of framing struts, bolted onto concrete plugs in the raw rock of the interior wall. Swan stared at the people around her in the immense steel frame of the skyscraper, none of them known to her, and realized it had been a mistake to take this flight—not as bad as the blackliner, but bad. On the other hand, considerations of convenience seemed trivial to her now. She walked up flight after flight of metal stairs to get onto the open rooftop of the skyscraper, which was almost touching the sunline. From the low-g roof she could look down—out—up. Everywhere it was a heavily shadowed cylindrical space, crisscrossed with struts, floored by bare rock. The building was like a single lit corner in a castle of sublime immensity; the ground at the foot of the skyscraper was several kilometers below, the ground on the far side of the sunline only a bit farther away. A Gothic ruin, with some poor mice people huddled around the warmth of a final candle. It had not been like this in the early days, when a newly hollowed cylinder was the very shape and image of possibility. That her youth had come to this—that the whole of civilization was really something like this, badly planned, incomplete— Swan hooked her elbows over the rail to get some stability in the low g. She put her chin on her crossed hands and, still regarding the scene, said, “Pauline, tell me about revolution.” “At what length?” “Go on for a short while.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 4633-36  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:38 PM

“ ‘Hegemony’ means one group dominating others without exerting sheer force, something more like a paradigm that creates unnoticed consent to a hierarchy of power. If the paradigm comes to be questioned, especially in situations of material want, loss of hegemony can occur nonlinearly, starting revolutions so rapid there is not time for more than symbolic violence, as in the 1989 velvet, quiet, silk, and singing revolutions.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 332 | Loc. 4637-40  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 02:39 PM

“The Baltic states Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet Union the singing revolutions, referring to the behavior of the demonstrators in the city plazas. That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense. ‘They must dismiss the people and elect another one,’ as Brecht said. That being impossible, they often fall. Or a civil war begins.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 334 | Loc. 4668-75  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:05 PM

“Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.” “Very nice. That’s really very creative of you. Now quantify the recipe, please. I want specifics; I want numbers.” “I refer you to the classic Happiness Quantified, by van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, which contains a mathematical analysis helpful in evaluating the raw ingredients of a social situation. It includes a satisfaction calculus that along with a Maslovian hierarchy of needs could be applied to actually existing conditions in the political units under evaluation, using Gini figures and all relevant data to rate the differential between goal and norm, after which one could see if revolutions happened at predictable shear points or were more nonlinear. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 347 | Loc. 4830-36  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:17 PM

Discovered from Mercury in the late twenty-first century, this almost perfectly circular necklace of burnt but stable beauties had recently been colonized, despite their being one thousand K on their sunward sides. These hemispheres, tidally locked so that they always faced the sun, had burnt away to the extent of several kilometers of rock loss over their lifetimes; they were primordial objects, as old as the oldest asteroids. Now they had been occupied like terraria anywhere else—hollowed out, with the excavated material used in this case to make immense circular light-catching solettas. These solettas processed and redirected sunlight in lased beams that could be aimed at receiver solettas in the outer solar system, now blazing like God’s own streetlights in the skies of Triton and Ganymede. The effect out there was dramatic enough that there were more outer satellite settlements asking for Vulcan streetlights than there were Vulcanoids to provide them. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 348 | Loc. 4838-41  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:18 PM

The sun bulked large in all the representations. It seemed a fiery great dragon, and yet they kept flying toward it—boldly, rashly—they were too close for comfort. It was a transgression sure to be punished. On one screen it looked like a burning red heart, the grainy texture of flowing cell tops like muscle cut against the grain. They must be too close. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 348 | Loc. 4843-45  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:18 PM

At a certain point near the end of their approach, the asteroid and its soletta created a solar eclipse, and the unnerving sight of the red sun became in the end a mere halo of coronal fire, flailing its electric aura; then they were in the dark, in the shelter of the Vulcanoid’s shade. It was a palpable relief. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 349 | Loc. 4845-46  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:18 PM

The people inside the rock were sun worshippers, as might be expected. Some looked like the sunwalkers of Mercury’s outback, carefree and foolish; others seemed like ascetics of a religious order. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 349 | Loc. 4852-57  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:20 PM

She also felt that this new technology in the solettas had altered the devotional nature of these people’s lives, turning them into something more like lighthouse keepers. Their new system was ten million times stronger than Mercury’s older light-transferring technology, which would henceforth be rendered historical, like an oil lamp. Both Mercury’s contribution to the Mondragon Accord and its ability to do above and beyonds were greatly diminished by this development, and one part of the compensation the Mondragon committee had suggested was that Terminator should be the coordinating agent and broker for this new Vulcan ability to transfer light; but it was a matter for the principals to work out. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 5002-4  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:28 PM

actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may never 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 5004-5  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:29 PM

premature declaration of huge longevity gains has been called kyriasis or Dorian Gray syndrome or simply the hope for immortality 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 361 | Loc. 5010-14  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:29 PM

if you recall the old comparison of the human body to a Havana Chevolet, with all moving parts replaced when they broke, then the problem could be compared to metal fatigue in the chassis and axles. In other words, the “seven deadly sins” of senescence are not the only sins. Unrepaired DNA damage, noncancerous mutation, the drift of chromatin states—all these eventually create “aging damage” hard to detect or counteract. None are currently amenable to repair. This probably explains the 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 5118-23  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:37 PM

It was also true that metals and useful chemicals in lunar rock could be mined only by a deep strip-mining and processing of much of the lunar surface, which also made terraforming difficult. So large domed craters and tented areas alternated with cosmologically large mining pits, and each nation with a substantial lunar presence had an influx of raw materials. China’s early investment on Luna led directly to its influence over Venus, because the Venus sunshield was a product of the lunar Chinese industrial bases. At the same time many other Terran nations established lunar bases, and the political unification of Luna became impossible. Some locate the origins of the Balkanization to this development, although most see qubical decoherence and the sheer size of the solar system as the key 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 5145-47  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:46 PM

The nature of this new work was terribly hard on his pseudoiterative mode, which became so much more pseudo than iterative that it tipped over into the flux of sheer exfoliation, every day different and no patterns possible. This was hard for him, and as day followed day, then week week, and month month, he began to wonder, not why he was doing what he was doing, but why Swan was not contacting him to join forces. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 5155-59  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:48 PM

Wahram had thought it generally agreed that the whole development-aid model had been demonstrated to be an example of the Jevons Paradox, in which increases in efficiency trigger more consumption rather than less; increased aid had always somehow increased suffering, in some kind of feedback loop, poorly theorized—or else theorized perfectly well, but in such a way that revealed the entire system to be a case of vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 5160-63  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:48 PM

There were of course very powerful forces on Earth adamantly opposed to tinkering from above in general, and to creating full employment in particular. Full employment, if enacted, would remove “wage pressure”—which phrase had always meant fear struck into the hearts of the poor, also into the hearts of anyone who feared becoming poor, which meant almost everyone on Earth. This fear was a major tool of social control, indeed the prop that held up the current order despite its obvious failures. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5166-67  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:49 PM

So Wahram crisscrossed the Old World like a modern-day Ibn Battuta, 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 375 | Loc. 5180-81  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:50 PM

Over tea they shared the news. Certain space elevators were slapping tariffs on equipment coming down; others were completely denied to spacers, an absurd situation. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 5194-96  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:51 PM

Earth meant people like gods and people like rats: and in a paroxysm of rage they were going to reach out and wreck everything, even the space worlds that kept them from starvation. In the big merry-go-round, Earth spun like a red horse with a bomb in it. And they could not get off the merry-go-round. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 377 | Loc. 5212-15  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:53 PM

Then a selfrep in Uttar Pradesh was blown up; no one knew why. The state government that should have investigated refused to do so, and there were signs that they might even have supported the attack. News of the attack created copycat crimes; it would take only a few more to make the project collapse worldwide. This made Swan furious. “They attacked us when we didn’t help, and now when we do,” she said bitterly. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 377 | Loc. 5216-18  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:53 PM

It was happening all over Earth, Wahram saw on the screens; their restoration projects were getting tangled in dense networks of law and practice and landscape, and the occasional sabotage or accident didn’t help. One couldn’t change anything on Earth without several different kinds of mess resulting, some of them paralyzing. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 5222-25  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:53 PM

No matter what they did, it seemed that the misery of the forgotten ones would keep pulling civilization down, like an anchor they had tied around their own neck. Terran elites would stay on top of an artificial Great Chain of Being until it snapped and everyone fell into the void. A pathetic Götterdämmerung, stupid and banal, and yet still horrible. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 5280-83  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:58 PM

evolution conserves things that work. We have a conserved brain, with different ages for its different parts—in effect lizard at back and bottom, mammal in the middle, human at the front and top. Lizard brain to breathe and sleep, mammal brain to form packs, human brain to think it over over-selecting for a single trait warps evolution, 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 383 | Loc. 5289-92  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:59 PM

reason can’t work without emotion. People cut off from their emotions can’t decide. Thus the decision to manipulate the brain with hormonal therapies has wide-reaching consequences. Bisexual therapies alter brain levels of oxytocin, vasopressin, and their precursor vasotocin. An oxytocin nasal spray causes immediately better eye contact. Endorphins are nature’s version of morphine. The brain releases endorphins when injured, and when someone we love touches us. Thrill seekers calm a hurt 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 383 | Loc. 5293  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 04:59 PM

3 percent of mammals monogamous. Play teaches mammals how to handle surprises 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 384 | Loc. 5306-9  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:00 PM

Human subjects (volunteers) who have ingested the Enceladan community, including the organism Enceladusea irwinii, reported synesthesia and individually heightened senses, sometimes confirmable by test. Heightened sensory impressions are often balanced by a reduced ability to generalize or calculate 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 386 | Loc. 5322-23  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:01 PM

Someone in the office repeated something Zasha had said, “Earth itself is a development sink,” and she shouted in his face. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 386 | Loc. 5326-28  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:01 PM

Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and its sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful g but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 387 | Loc. 5331-36  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:03 PM

Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice—as if they were in a space station—as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night. Walking among them, she saw that it was so. Indeed if they had been people who were interested in the stars they would not have still been here. There overhead stood Orion at his angle, “the most beautiful object any of us will ever know in the world, spread out on the sky like a true god, in whom it would only be necessary to believe a little.” But no one looked. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 388 | Loc. 5350-56  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:05 PM

Swan sat down before the operation console and began to type at speed, while also commanding it verbally to stop. She was first calm, then demanding, then persuasive, then pleading, finally shouting in a fury. The selfrep AI neither responded nor stopped the hangar moving. Something in it must have been jammed; that couldn’t have been easy, a matter of clever industrial sabotage, fighting through some tough security. Swan thought she knew some relevant codes, but nothing she tried was working. “What the hell!” she said. “Why is so much tech support out of reach?” “There are other attacks now ongoing, possibly timed with this one,” Pauline informed her. “So can you give me any help here?” Pauline said, “Type in the sentence ‘Fog is thick in Lisbon.’ ” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 389 | Loc. 5365-70  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:05 PM

It followed as Swan had predicted. The local government demanded that the damaged selfrep be impounded and its operators arrested, prosecuted, and deported or imprisoned. Swan was taken into custody and held in a set of rooms in the government house; it was not a jail, but she could not leave, and it seemed possible that she would be sentenced to time in prison. At that possibility she began to spiral down into a furious despair. “We were invited here,” she kept insisting to her keepers. “We were only trying to help. The sabotage was not our fault!” None of her keepers appeared to be listening to her. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 5415-19  | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2015, 05:09 PM

After a few minutes he stirred and began to say something, but hesitated. Swan saw this and said, “What? Tell me.” “There’s something else,” he said, glancing at her almost as if shyly. “I’ve been thinking that one of the things we’ve been doing here is providing more evidence that reform inside the paradigm of the current system on Earth is never going to be enough. That there is still, in other words, the necessity for revolution.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 5496-99  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 12:18 PM

This leading of animal migrations across agricultural land was the biggest organized act of civil disobedience ever committed by spacers on Earth, but the hope was that after being escorted the first time, the animals would manage on their own, and become popular with the indigenous humans, even the farmers, who were not having that much success anyway. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 400 | Loc. 5521-23  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 04:16 PM

Wild dogs, self-organized: it was always kind of a disturbing thought. That they had turned out so well, so decent and playful, was a bit surprising to Swan, and reminded her that the wolves had come first and were wiser than dogs. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 5572-76  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 04:22 PM

About an hour before dawn she heard their howls ahead. It was their dawn chorus. Wolves howled at the sight of Venus rising, knowing the sun would come soon after. Swan saw what they were howling at, but by its relation to Orion knew it was not Venus, but Sirius. The wolves had been fooled yet again; the Pawnee had even named Sirius He-Who-Fools-the-Wolves for this very mistake. When Venus itself rose, about half an hour later, only one uneasy lupine astronomer spoke up again to howl that something was wrong. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 5636-37  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 04:28 PM

Fields changed, forests changed, suburbs and cities changed. Eradication campaigns were met with fierce resistance and fierce support efforts. Sometimes it came to a kind of war of the animals, but people always led the charge on both sides 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 410 | Loc. 5645-47  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 04:29 PM

Earth was now occupied by the toughest weeds and scavengers. There was talk of a coming world of seagulls and ants, cockroaches and crows, coyotes and rabbits—a star thistle world, depopulate and impoverished—a big broken factory farm. Reintroducing lost species was therefore welcome to many Terrans. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 5918-20  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:07 PM

gatherings composed entirely of gender-indeterminate people are a new social space that some find intensely uncomfortable, eliciting comments such as “like a nakedness I hadn’t thought could happen” or “you’re only yourself, it’s terrifying,” and so on. Clearly, a new kind of psychic exposure 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 5929-32  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:08 PM

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both. And now, in space, openly both. Very small or very tall—human at last 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 5937-38  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:08 PM

Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 5938-40  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:09 PM

A common opinion expressed is that to keep relationships lasting a long time one shouldn’t see too much of a person, or create too intense of a relationship, or it will burn out. Paced for the long haul, one spreads oneself out among a network of acquaintances and new friends, and moves on when 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 437 | Loc. 6013-16  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:16 PM

It occurred to her that this must be how Virginia Woolf had felt when she played with her husband Leonard, an expert lawn bowler from his years administering Ceylon. Virginia too had lost almost every time. The youth seemed not to care one way or the other. Leonard had probably been much the same. Well, but quite a few people played sports mostly against themselves, their opponents no more than random shifters of the problems they faced in their own performance. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 448 | Loc. 6168-70  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:33 PM

The Saturn League then declared their system off-limits to Martians, also to Terrans (the Chinese in particular)—to anyone, in fact, except themselves. It was the first post-Martian revolution, against the great revolutionaries themselves, a statement very forcefully made by the threat of bombardment. So everything changed once again, because of a few people on Titan. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 454 | Loc. 6247-49  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:40 PM

Wahram said to the entire group, “The question of programming lies at the heart of today’s meeting. There’s clear evidence to suggest that some qubes are actively self-programming, in particular the ones involved with assembling these humanoids with qubes for brains. We don’t know that any humans asked them to do that, and we don’t know why they’re doing it. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 454 | Loc. 6254-59  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:41 PM

Swan said, “But go back a bit—how could they self-program? I’ve heard that recursive self-programming does nothing but speed up operations they already know.” “Well, but if they were instructed to try to make something, for instance, then it might lead to some odd results. Pushing at ways to make something work could have initiated other ideas in them. It might be much like the way they play a game of chess. They’re given a task, which is to win, and they’re told to figure out ways to do it, and then, in their usual testing of all possible options, they might have had certain unexpected successes at modeling effective courses of action to get what they want. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 456 | Loc. 6278-82  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:43 PM

“So it has seemed,” Wahram said after a silence. “But now it looks like they may be generating goals for themselves. Maybe there are some pseudo-emotions there; we don’t know. Probably they still aren’t very wise—more like crickets than dogs. But, you know—we don’t know how our own minds work, in terms of creating the higher levels of consciousness. Since we can’t get inside the qubes to see what’s happening in them, we’re even less sure of them than we are of us. So… it’s a problem.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 6293-96  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:44 PM

“Is it bad?” Swan asked, thinking it over. “I mean, they can’t band together into some kind of hive mind creature, because of decoherence. And so ultimately they’re just people with qube minds.” “People without emotions.” “There have always been people like that. They get by.” Wahram squinted. “Actually, they don’t. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 6300-6303  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:45 PM

We also find that the organization in Los Angeles that ordered the pebble-launching ship is entirely qubical, with the only humans involved located in a kind of board of directors. We also found qubes involved with the construction of the launch mechanism, which we now suspect was built in an unaffiliated shipyard trailing the Vesta group. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 458 | Loc. 6310-12  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:45 PM

All we can say is we don’t know what kind of intentionality they have now, because their intentions were very limited when they started. Read the input, run it through algorithms, present the output—that was AI intention before this. So now that it appears that they are intending things, we have to be on our guard. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 462 | Loc. 6352-55  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:50 PM

But even decelerating for half of each trip, the average speeds were so high that relatively short transit times were possible all over the solar system, and the longer the trip, the faster the top speeds became, so it was not a linear thing: Earth to Mercury took three and a half days; Saturn to Mercury, eleven days; across the Neptune orbit (“width of solar system”), sixteen days. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 464 | Loc. 6370-73  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:52 PM

On mornings when Wahram joined her in the park, he sloped around looking at birds and flowers. Once she saw him spend half an hour inspecting a single red rose. He was one of the most placid animals she had ever seen; even the sloths above them were scarcely a match for his imperturbability. It was peaceful to be around, but disturbing too. Was it a moral quality, was it lethargy? She could not stand lethargy, and sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 470 | Loc. 6459-63  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 05:58 PM

He shrugged. “You know, this notion of a criticality… you can only avoid those to a certain extent. Even on Earth they have them. Anywhere. We’re stuffed with them.” He gestured at the room, regarded it with his pop eyes. “The whole thing is a giant bundle of criticalities.” “I know. But there’s a difference between you and your world. Your body can break—it will break. But your home, your world—those should be stronger. You should be able to count on them lasting. Someone shouldn’t be able to pop all that, like popping a soap bubble with a pin. One prick kill everyone you know. Do you see the distinction I’m making?” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 471 | Loc. 6482-83  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 06:00 PM

No one ever does something consciously for the last time without feeling a little sad, Dr. Johnson had once remarked to Boswell, and it was certainly true for Swan. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 472 | Loc. 6483-88  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 06:00 PM

She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent. Here they were, eating dinner on the upper balcony of a restaurant that looked down onto the top of a forest, and she was feeling sad because later she would not be here. This world lost, a world that would be unremembered. And here she was with Wahram, they were a couple; but what about when they got off this spaceship and moved on through space and time? What about a year from now, what about through the many decades possibly left to come? 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 493 | Loc. 6812-14  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:22 PM

There are songs in our brains, she thought, whether bird brain cells have been inserted in them or not; they were already there, down in the cerebellum, conserved for millions of years. No death there; maybe death was an illusion, maybe these patterns lived forever, music and emotion stranding through universes one after the next, on the wings of transient birds. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 496 | Loc. 6855-60  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:27 PM

Swan could sometimes pop the third dimension even farther into the black—not only perceive the depth of field variously punctured by stars at different distances, which one could pretend were marked by their brightness, but also see Andromeda as a whole galaxy, far farther away than anything else she could see—thwoop, there it was, deepest space, the extension of the vacuum evident to her eye. Those were awesome moments, and truthfully they didn’t last long, they couldn’t, it was too vast; the human eye and mind were not equipped to see it. Mostly it had to be an imaginative leap, she knew; but when that idea clicked with what she was actually seeing at that very second, it could become very much like something completely real. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 498 | Loc. 6882-85  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:29 PM

After a long while, he turned the music off. The silence was immense. Again she could hear her breath, her heartbeat. It was thumping away in its double thump, a little faster than normal, but no longer racing. Calm down, she thought again. You’re marooned in space, they will rescue you eventually. Meanwhile here you are, and Wahram is with you, and Pauline. No moment is ever fundamentally different from this one. Focus and be calm. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 498 | Loc. 6886-87  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:29 PM

Maybe to say that someone was “like this” or “like that” was just an attempt to stick a memory to a board where you organized memories, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s collection. Not really the generalization it seemed, but just a stab at understanding. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 498 | Loc. 6895-97  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:31 PM

And yet you do care. I love you, you said. And—Swan admitted to herself—she wanted him to feel that way when he was with her. That way—is this what love was, this desire for a feeling that remained unclear even when felt? 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 500 | Loc. 6925-27  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 10:33 PM

It could have been their last hours. She thought of Alex again. Our stories go on a while, some genes and words persist; then we go away. It was a hard thing to remember. And as the lock door closed and they were back inside, she once again forgot it. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 7167-72  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 11:06 PM

If they could make the majority of Venusians believe that the sunshield was in danger of an attack—that they could all be cooked like bugs—then public sentiment would surely back another era of bombardment to give Venus a spin.” “Scaring a civilian populace into making a certain political choice,” Wahram said. “Yes. Which we recognize is one definition of terrorism. But this might not be so apparent to a qube programmed to look for results.” “And so the attack on Terminator was a kind of demonstration?” “Exactly. And it certainly had that effect here on Venus.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 7173-77  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 11:07 PM

“If it had succeeded, it would have killed a lot of people.” “Even that might not register as a negative. Depends on the algorithm, and that means it depends on the programmer. There are lots of people on Earth available to replace anyone killed up here. China alone could easily restock the place. The whole Venusian population could be killed and replaced by Chinese and China not even notice. So who knows what people might be thinking? These programmers may have set their qubes off in new directions, even given them new algorithms, but whatever they did they won’t have made human thinkers of them, even if they did get them to the point of passing a Turing test or whatnot.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 7179-80  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 11:07 PM

I’ve been interested to learn that a great many of them are on Mars, passing for human and involved in government. Mars’s problems with the Mondragon and with Saturn—they look a little suspicious to me now.” 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 7479-83  | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 10:25 AM

No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape—some place for people to live in for ages to come—then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough. But then you wanted to share it. Just so there would be someone to be pleased together with. Alex had been pleased with her. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 7520-23  | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 10:31 AM

Out there now was a little group of sunwalkers, trudging patiently west. Little silver figures reminiscent of Inspector Genette, disappearing over the horizon. They would walk for a spell and then lie down in carts or travois to sleep while being pulled along by the others. Walking together, pulling sleeping people along—how beautiful the sense of trust and care, the playful handing over of your life to strangers—part of being Mercurial. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 7526-27  | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 10:32 AM

To walk in the dawn perpetually, ah, so devoutly to be wished! Who could stand high noon or the wane of day? Leave the dawn behind, run back into the night. Forestall the day—who knew what it would bring? She had no plan, no idea. 
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2312 (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 7590-93  | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 10:37 AM

to form a sentence is to collapse many superposed wave functions to a single thought universe. Multiplying the lost universes word by word, we can say that each sentence extinguishes 10n universes, where n is the number of words in the sentence. Each thought condenses trillions of potential thoughts. Thus we get verbal overshadowing, where the language we use structures the reality we inhabit. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe this is why we need to keep making sentences 
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 1788-89  | Added on Friday, October 09, 2015, 01:37 PM

There was an old dwarf legend about the famous Horn of Furgle, which sounded itself when danger was near and also in the presence, for some reason, of horseradish.
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 1795-97  | Added on Friday, October 09, 2015, 01:38 PM

The old music shop was right up against the University, after all, and magic did leak out despite what the wizards always said about the talking rats and walking trees just being statistical flukes. But this didn’t feel like magic. It felt a lot older than that. It felt like music.
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 2569-70  | Added on Friday, October 09, 2015, 04:08 PM

And they were always talking about splitting the thaum, the smallest unit of magic. The Archchancellor couldn’t see the point. So you had bits all over the place. What good would that do? The universe was bad enough without people poking it.
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 3244-45  | Added on Friday, October 09, 2015, 04:57 PM

“Mr. Stibbons, I know you to be a man who seeks to understand the universe. Here’s an important rule: never give a monkey the key to the banana plantation.
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 4788-91  | Added on Monday, October 12, 2015, 10:38 PM

It went on and on while the boy stood there, head bowed. “But he’s not doing anything,” Clete shouted into Satchelmouth’s ear. “Why’re they all cheering him for not doing anything?” “Can’t say, sir,” said Satchelmouth. He looked around at the glistening, staring, hungry faces, feeling like an atheist who has wandered into Holy Communion.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 997 | Loc. 25222-26  | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 11:25 AM

The Fascist rebels, with the possible exception of Grandi, do not appear to have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a second and wider plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung. Mussolini himself apparently felt that he had weathered the storm— after all, decisions in Italy were not made by a majority vote in the Grand Council but by the Duce—and he was taken completely by surprise when on the evening of July 25 he was summoned to the royal palace by the King, summarily dismissed from office and carted off under arrest in an ambulance to a police station. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 997 | Loc. 25229-31  | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 11:26 AM

As a person he was not unintelligent. He had read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 997 | Loc. 25231-34  | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 11:26 AM

The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. 
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Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)
- Highlight Loc. 5249-50  | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 11:33 AM

I said it was eldritch.” “I thought that meant oblong,” said Asphalt.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1079 | Loc. 27155-60  | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2015, 07:24 PM

The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great. It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Kluge and Rommel, implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of them was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scores of its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapo and judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In this unprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not close ranks. Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the former Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1080 | Loc. 27184-86  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:06 PM

In judging and selecting General Staff officers, superiors should place traits of character and spirit above the mind. A rascal may be ever so cunning but in the hour of need he will nevertheless fail because he is a rascal. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1081 | Loc. 27199-209  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:08 PM

it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility. By now the generals knew the evil of the man before whom they groveled. Guderian later recalled Hitler as he was after July 20. In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him: it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence. 47 Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half mad, rapidly deteriorating in body and mind, who now, as he had done in the snowy winter of 1941 before Moscow, rallied the beaten, retreating armies and put new heart into the battered nation. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1082 | Loc. 27211-16  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:10 PM

The revolt of July 20, 1944, had failed not only because of the inexplicable ineptness of some of the ablest men in the Army and in civilian life, because of the fatal weakness of character of Fromm and Kluge and because misfortune plagued the plotters at every turn. It had flickered out because almost all the men who kept this great country running, generals and civilians, and the mass of the German people, in uniform and out, were not ready for a revolution—in fact, despite their misery and the bleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did not want it. National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country’s savior. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1082 | Loc. 27221-25  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:11 PM

at least “one half of the civil population was shocked that the German generals had taken part in the attempt to overthrow Hitler, and felt bitterly toward them in consequence—and the same feeling was manifested in the Army itself.” 49 By a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people to the last. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1082 | Loc. 27231-34  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:11 PM

Later when Kluge turned against Hitler the Fuehrer told his officers at headquarters, “I personally promoted him twice, gave him the highest decorations, gave him a large estate… and a large supplement to his pay as Field Marshal…” (Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, pp. 101–02, a stenographic account of Hitler’s conference at headquarters on August 31, 1944.) 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1087 | Loc. 27490-501  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:20 PM

Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defend the sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia’s and Germany’s, had been fought on—and had devastated—the soil of other peoples. A shower of exhortations fell upon the hard-pressed troops. SOLDIERS OF THE WESTERN FRONT! …I expect you to defend Germany’s sacred soil… to the very last!… Heil the Fuehrer! VON RUNDSTEDT, Field Marshal SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY GROUP! …None of us gives up a square foot of German soil while still alive… Whoever retreats without giving battle is a traitor to his people… Soldiers! Our homeland, the lives of our wives and children are at stake! Our Fuehrer and our loved ones have confidence in their soldiers! …Long live our Germany and our beloved Fuehrer! MODEL. Field Marshal 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1088 | Loc. 27516-21  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:22 PM

Why it subsided has been a subject of dispute to this day among the Allied commanders from General Eisenhower on down; to the German generals it was incomprehensible. By the second week in September American units had reached the German border before Aachen and on the Moselle. Germany lay open to the Allied armies. Early in September Montgomery had urged Eisenhower to allot all of his supplies and reserves to the British and Canadian armies and the U.S. Ninth and First armies for a bold offensive in the north under his command that would penetrate quickly into the Ruhr, deprive the Germans of their main arsenal, open the road to Berlin and end the war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal. * He wanted to advance toward the Rhine on a “broad front.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1089 | Loc. 27522-24  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:22 PM

But his armies had outrun their supplies. Every ton of gasoline and ammunition had to be brought in over the beaches in Normandy or through the single port of Cherbourg and transported by truck three to four hundred miles to the advancing front. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1091 | Loc. 27585-93  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:37 PM

Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims… Ultracapitalist states on the one hand; ultra-Marxist states on the other. On the one hand a dying Empire, Britain; on the other, a colony bent upon inheritance, the United States… Each of the partners went into this coalition with the hope of realizing his political ambitions… America tries to become England’s heir; Russia tries to gain the Balkans… England tries to hold her possessions… in the Mediterranean… Even now these states are at loggerheads, and he who, like a spider sitting in the middle of his web, can watch developments observes how these antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour. If now we can deliver a few more blows, then at any moment this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder… provided always that there is no weakening on the part of Germany. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1092 | Loc. 27593-95  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:37 PM

It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain… Wars are finally decided by one side or the other recognizing that they cannot be won. We must allow no moment to pass without showing the enemy that, whatever he does, he can never reckon on [our] capitulation. Never! Never! 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1093 | Loc. 27621-23  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:52 PM

On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of the German XLVIIth Armored Corps, sent a written note to General A. C. McAuliffe, commanding the 101st Airborne, demanding surrender of Bastogne. He received a one-word answer which became famous: “NUTS!” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1093 | Loc. 27634-40  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:55 PM

For the Germans it now became a question of extricating their forces from the narrow corridor before they were cut off and annihilated. But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On the evening of December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Instead of heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the German forces in the Bulge in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bastogne to be stormed and the push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, he insisted on a new offensive being started immediately to the south in Alsace, where the American line had been thinned out by the sending of several of Patton’s divisions north to the Ardennes. To the protests of the generals that they lacked sufficient forces either to continue the offensive in the Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1094 | Loc. 27641-45  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:55 PM

Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years, and… I have never heard anybody report that everything was completely ready… You are never entirely ready. That is plain. He talked on and on. * It must have been obvious to the generals long before he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded to reality and had lost himself in the clouds. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1094 | Loc. 27657-61  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 05:56 PM

I hasten to add, gentlemen, that… you are not to conclude that even remotely I envisage the loss of this war… I have never learned to know the word “capitulation”… For me the situation today is nothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mention this only because I want you to understand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. As much as I may be tormented by worries and even physically shaken by them, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fight on till at last the scales tip to our side. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1095 | Loc. 27671-78  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 06:00 PM

On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out. They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers. * But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1097 | Loc. 27708-15  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 06:15 PM

Most catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin. Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power—pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war is lost,” his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the Ruhr, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only two weeks’ supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal and one sixth of the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944. 14 This augured disaster for 1945. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1098 | Loc. 27727-36  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 06:18 PM

A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the scene. HITLER: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments? GOERING: They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer all of Germany… They had not counted on our… holding them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now… JODL: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion. GOERING: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few days. 16 On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last hopes. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1099 | Loc. 27770-80  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 06:22 PM

Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10, replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out so stubbornly and long in Italy. Already in February the Fuehrer, in a fit of rage, had considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in order, he said at a conference on the nineteenth, “to make the enemy realize that we are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our disposal.” He had been urged to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, the bloodthirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all captured airmen be shot summarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the German cities. When some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler retorted angrily: To hell with that! …If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert. 17 This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler, his mission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own people. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1100 | Loc. 27792-97  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:42 PM

In the West the number of deserters, or at least of those who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wake of the British-American advances, became staggering. On February 12 Keitel issued an order “in the name of the Fuehrer” stating that any soldier “who deceitfully obtains leave papers, or who travels with false papers, will… be punished by death.” And on March 5 General Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group H in the West, issued this order: All soldiers… encountered away from their units… and who announce they are stragglers looking for their units will be summarily tried and shot. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1102 | Loc. 27833-38  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:49 PM

He was fast becoming a physical wreck and this helped to poison his view. The strain of conducting the war, the shock of defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air and exercise in the underground headquarters bunkers which he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent temper tantrums and, not the least, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Morell, had undermined his health even before the July 20, 1944, bombing. The explosion on that day had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness. After the bombing his doctors advised an extended vacation, but he refused. “If I leave East Prussia,” he told Keitel, “it will fall. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1103 | Loc. 27863-70  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:53 PM

In four to eight weeks [Speer wrote] the final collapse of the German economy must be expected with certainty… After that collapse the war cannot be continued even militarily… We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a most primitive manner, a basis for the existence of the nation to the last… We have no right at this stage of the war to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people. If our enemies wish to destroy this nation, which has fought with unique bravery, then this historical shame shall rest exclusively upon them. We have the duty of leaving to the nation every possibility of insuring its reconstruction in the distant future… 23 But Hitler, his own personal fate sealed, was not interested in the continued existence of the German people, for whom he had always professed such boundless love. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1104 | Loc. 27870-74  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:53 PM

He told Speer: If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation [Russia]. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1104 | Loc. 27880-87  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:54 PM

These millions of people were to be sent upon their trek on foot. No provisions for their existence had been made, nor could it be carried out in view of the situation. It would have resulted in an unimaginable hunger catastrophe. And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann—there were a number of supplementary directives—been carried out, millions of Germans who had escaped with their lives up to then might well have died. Speer tried to summarize for the Nuremberg court the various “scorched earth” orders. To be destroyed, he said, were all industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works, gas works, food stores and clothing stores; all bridges, all railway and communication installations, all waterways, all ships, all freight cars and all locomotives. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1106 | Loc. 27925-29  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 09:58 PM

On April 16, the day American troops reached Nuremberg, the city of the great Nazi Party rallies, Zhukov’s Russian armies broke loose from their bridgeheads over the Oder, and on the afternoon of April 21 they reached the outskirts of Berlin. Vienna had already fallen on April 13. At 4:40 on the afternoon of April 25, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met forward elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe, some seventy-five miles south of Berlin. North and South Germany were severed. Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The last days of the Third Reich had come. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1109 | Loc. 28052-59  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:07 PM

Fortified by Carlyle and the “amazing” predictions of the stars, Goebbels on April 6 issued a ringing appeal to the retreating troops: The Fuehrer has declared that even in this very year a change of fortune shall come… The true quality of genius is its consciousness and its sure knowledge of coming change. The Fuehrer knows the exact hour of its arrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we, in this time of great external and internal stress, shall testify to the miracle… 6 Scarcely a week later, on the night of April 12, Goebbels convinced himself that “the exact hour” of the miracle had come. It had been a day of further bad news. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1110 | Loc. 28086-89  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:08 PM

In this atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, with cabinet ministers long in power and educated in Europe’s ancient universities, as Krosigk and Goebbels were, grasping at the readings of the stars and rejoicing amidst the flames of the burning capital in the death of the American President as a sure sign that the Almighty would now rescue the Third Reich at the eleventh hour from impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlin was played out to its final curtain. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1111 | Loc. 28090-92  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:08 PM

Eva Braun had arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. Very few Germans knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to Adolf Hitler. For more than twelve years she had been his mistress. Now in April she had come, as Trevor-Roper says, for her wedding and her ceremonial death. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1119 | Loc. 28310-13  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:24 PM

During those three days Hanna Reitsch had ample opportunity to observe the lunatic life in the underground madhouse—indeed, she participated in it. Since she was as emotionally unstable as her distinguished host, the account she has left of it is lurid and melodramatic, and yet it is probably largely true and even fairly accurate, for it has been checked against other eyewitness reports, and is thus of importance for the closing chapter of this history. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1122 | Loc. 28383-89  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:28 PM

Goering at least had asked the Leader’s permission to take over. But the “treue” S.S. chief and Reichsfuehrer had not bothered to ask; he had treasonably contacted the enemy without saying a word. This, Hitler told his followers when he had somewhat recovered, was the worst act of treachery he had ever known. This blow—coupled with the news received a few minutes later that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, but a block away, and would probably storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30, thirty hours hence—was the signal for the end. It forced Hitler to make immediately the last decisions of his life. By dawn he had married Eva Braun, drawn up his last will and testament, dispatched Greim and Hanna Reitsch to rally the Luftwaffe for an all-out bombing of the Russian forces approaching the Chancellery, and ordered them also to arrest Himmler as a traitor. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1122 | Loc. 28395-401  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:29 PM

“Poor, poor Adolf,” she whimpered to Hanna Reitsch, “deserted by everyone, betrayed by all. Better that ten thousand others die than that he be lost to Germany.” He was lost to Germany but in those final hours he was won by Eva Braun. Sometime between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M. on April 29, as a crowning award for her loyalty to the end, he accorded his mistress’s wish and formally married her. He had always said that marriage would interfere with his complete dedication to leading first his party to power and then his nation to the heights. Now that there was no more leading to do and his life was at an end, he could safely enter into a marriage which could last only a few hours. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1123 | Loc. 28418-20  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:31 PM

These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that the man who had ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelve years, and over most of Europe for four, had learned nothing from his experience; not even his reverses and shattering final failure had taught him anything. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1128 | Loc. 28522-28  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:44 PM

Dr. Goebbels, like Eva Braun but unlike Bormann, had no desire to live in a Germany from which his revered Fuehrer had departed. He had hitched his star to Hitler, to whom alone he owed his sensational rise in life. He had been the chief prophet and propagandist of the Nazi movement. It was he who, next to Hitler, had created its myths. To perpetuate those myths not only the Leader but his most loyal follower, the only one of the Old Guard who had not betrayed him, must die a sacrificial death. He too must give an example that would be remembered down the ages and help one day to rekindle the fires of National Socialism. Such seem to have been his thoughts when, after Hitler retired, Goebbels repaired to his little room in the bunker to write his own valedictory to present and future generations. He entitled it “Appendix to the Fuehrer’s Political Testament.” 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1133 | Loc. 28645-49  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:52 PM

While the oil to provide the fire for the Viking funeral was being collected, Hitler, having done with his last meal, fetched Eva Braun for another and final farewell to his most intimate collaborators: Dr. Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, the secretaries and Fräulein Manzialy, the cook. Frau Goebbels did not appear. This formidable and beautiful blond woman had, like Eva Braun, found it easy to make the decision to die with her husband, but the prospect of killing her six young children, who had been playing merrily in the underground shelter these last days without an inkling of what was in store for them, unnerved her. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1136 | Loc. 28722-28  | Added on Friday, October 16, 2015, 10:59 PM

“Schwaegermann,” he told him, “this is the worst treachery of all. The generals have betrayed the Fuehrer. Everything is lost. I shall die, together with my wife and family.” He did not mention, even to his adjutant, that he had just had his children murdered. “You will burn our bodies. Can you do that?” Schwaegermann assured him he could and sent two orderlies to procure the gasoline. A few minutes later, at about 8:30 P.M., just as it was getting dark outside, Dr. and Frau Goebbels walked through the bunker, bade goodbye to those who happened to be in the corridor, and mounted the stairs to the garden. There, at their request, an S.S. orderly dispatched them with two shots in the back of the head. 
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer)
- Highlight on Page 1136 | Loc. 28730-31  | Added on Monday, October 19, 2015, 10:57 PM

The Russians found the charred bodies of the Propaganda Minister and his wife the next day and immediately identified them. 
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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (John Perkins)
- Highlight Loc. 273-78  | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2015, 01:17 AM

Nearly every country we EHMs have brought under the global empire's umbrella has suffered a similar fate.6 Third world debt has grown to more than $2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it—over $375 billion per year as of 2004—is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of third world households accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all private financial wealth and real estate ownership in their country;
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 216-22  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 10:54 AM

A death cart enters a cemetery, halting at a broad pit. A man follows, walking behind the remains of his family. And then, "no sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to him," Defoe wrote, "for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in." Instead, "Sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest; but the matter was not much to them, or the indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind." This was democracy at last, "for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went together; there was no other way of burials, neither was it possible there should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in such a calamity as this."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 315-20  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:09 AM

The core of the idea is there: that a change in the motion of a body is proportional to the amount of force impressed on it. But to turn that conception into the detailed, rich form it would take as Newton's second law of motion would require long, long hours of deep thought. The same would prove to be true for all his efforts over the next twenty years as they evolved into the finished edifice of his great work, Philosophiœ naturalis principia mathematica—The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy—better known as the Principia. For all his raw intelligence, Newton's ultimate achievement turned on his genius for perseverance. His one close college friend, John Wickens, marveled at his ability to forget all else in the rapt observation of the comet of 1664.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 331-36  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:11 AM

Newton labored through the summer. That September, the Great Fire of London came. It lasted five days, finally exhausting itself on September 7. Almost all of the city within the walls was destroyed, and some beyond, 436 acres in all. More than thirteen thousand houses burned, eighty-seven churches, and old St. Paul's Cathedral. The sixty tons of lead in the cathedral roof melted; a river of molten metal flowed into the Thames. Just six people are known to have died, though it seems almost certain that the true number was much greater. But once the fire destroyed the dense and deadly slums that cosseted infection, the plague finally burned itself out. That winter, reports of cases dropped, then vanished, until by spring it became clear that the epidemic was truly done.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 346-52  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:20 AM

Aside from such minimal nods toward the instruction of the young, Newton did as he pleased. He loathed distractions, had little gift for casual talk, and entertained few visitors. He gave virtually all his waking hours to his research. Humphrey Newton again: "I never knew him [to] take any Recreation or Pastime, either in riding out to take air, Walking, bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours lost, that was not spent in his Studyes." He seemed offended by the demands of his body. Humphrey reported that Newton "grudg'd that short Time he spent in eating & sleeping"; that his housekeeper would find "both Dinner & Supper scarcely tasted of"; that "He very seldom sat by the fire in his Chamber, excepting that long frosty winter, which made him creep to it against his will."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 354-57  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:21 AM

But work to what end? Year after year, he published next to nothing, and he had almost no discernible impact on his contemporaries. As Richard Westfall put it: "Had Newton died in 1684 and his papers survived, we would know from them that a genius had lived. Instead of hailing him as a figure who had shaped the modern intellect, however, we would at most...[lament] his failure to reach fulfillment."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 410-13  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:26 AM

"I thought that publication should be put off to another time, so that I might investigate these other things and publish all my results together." He was trying to create a new science, one he called "rational mechanics." This new discipline would be comprehensive, able to gather in the whole of nature. It would be, he wrote, "the science, expressed in exact propositions and demonstrations, of the motions that result from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 430-32  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:30 AM

He analyzed the motion of a pendulum. He inserted some older mathematical work on conic sections, apparently simply because he had it lying around. He attempted an analysis of wave dynamics and the propagation of sound. On and on, through every phenomenon that could be conceived as matter in motion.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 461-64  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:33 AM

But Newton does not choose to end Book Three here, and his decision reveals how much the work as a whole acts to persuade and not merely to demonstrate. To be sure, no one thinks of Newton as a novelist, or of the Principia as a galloping read. But Book Three—and the volume in its entirety—can be experienced as a kind of epic of gravity, and to bring that tale to its heroic close, Newton spins his account outward once again, into the realm of the comets.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 503-7  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:36 AM

Locke had offered to help his friend Newton gain the post of Master of Charterhouse, a boys' school in London. Newton recoiled at the thought. "You seem still to think on Charterhouse," he wrote, but "I believe your notions & mine are very different about the matter." What was wrong with the proposal? Everything. "The competition is hazzardous," he complained, "and I am loathe to sing a new song" in hopes of persuading the mighty to throw him a sop. Still more galling, the pay was meager, beneath him. "Its but 200 pounds per an besides a Coach (wch I reccon not) & lodging"—not enough to live in the style to which Newton aspired nor fit reward for a man of his reputation.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 605-14  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 10:25 PM

Doing so, he became, in effect, a foot soldier in what he and his contemporaries understood to be a radically new approach to knowledge. We now call this transformation the scientific revolution, and it is often imagined as a series of heroic battles, victories in a war against ignorance led by men whose names resound like those of triumphant generals—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the greatest of them all. But in fact, the shift in understanding that such men led was carried forward through the daily actions of hundreds, then thousands of people who for pleasure, profit, or both set out to use reason and experimentation to order their surroundings. Practical rationalists such as Jethro Tull and his disciples tried to bring the methods of the new natural philosophy to bear on the farm. Amateur naturalists catalogued the habits of animals painstakingly observed over days, weeks, months. One of the more famous among them was Erasmus Darwin; born four years after Newton's death, he absorbed the Newtonian credo that material events must have discernible material causes, and he grappled with the question of the origin of species that his grandson Charles would solve a century later.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 615-18  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 10:26 PM

Instrument makers began to establish the crucial idea of standards, common measures that would enable observers anywhere to trust one another's results. Thomas Tompion, the maker of Locke's thermometer, was the first craftsman known to have used serial numbers to identify his finished pieces—bringing science's tools into the nuts and bolts of efforts to systematize the material world.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 706-8  | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 10:34 PM

No later than the early 1680s, William Chaloner abandoned his master and set out on "St. Francis's Mule"—that is, on foot—"with a purpose to visit London." The capital was for him more of a goal than a specific destination. He had no plan, no idea of what to do once he got there.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1226-36  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 10:46 AM

At last, he wrote, he succeeded, forging the legendary "stone of the ancients." With that, Newton allowed his most extravagant language to fall away and simply recorded what happened next. "You may ferment them wth [gold] & [silver] by keeping the stone & metal in fusion together for a day, & then project upon metals." This stage, "the multiplication of the stone in vertue," created a kind of catalyst, the ultimate goal of millennia of alchemical investigation. Then, as Newton wrote, a touch of color returning to his prose, "You may multiply it in quantity by the mercuries of wch you made at first, amalgaming ye stone wt ye [mercury] of 3 or more eagles and adding their weight of ye water, & if you desgine it for mettalls you may melt every time 3 parts of wth one of ye stone ... Thus you may multiply to infinity" (italics added). The philosophers' stone. Power without limit—and knowledge too. It was the alchemist's dream, realized at last. Praxis ends with a discussion of whether his newly formed philosophers' stone was the "quintessential matter or Chaos out of which man and all ye world was made."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1238-39  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 10:46 AM

To paraphrase Albert Einstein, Newton wanted to know what choices God made when He created the world. More deeply, he wanted to understand what comes next—what the divinity is doing now in the physical cosmos of space and time.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1539-45  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:05 PM

Lowndes, the leading public figure arguing for devaluation, welcomed Newton's reasoning and support. He still found it hard to make his case, because at its core was a radically modern thought: the King's imprimatur was a mere fiction and not the working of a kind of magic that determined the absolute worth of a given piece of silver. By Newton's logic, the word "shilling" could be thought of as no more than a convenient way to express what a given amount of silver bullion was worth as a commodity. In that view, units of currency—shillings, half-crowns, guineas—could not be absolute statements of value, extensions of the divine authority of kings. Instead, they were relative claims of the prices of quantities of metal—of anything—and those values could change with every shift in conditions in the real world.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1545-48  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:05 PM

Thus, lurking within the argument for devaluation lay a genuinely unsettling idea. Money need not be seen as merely a thing, a tangible object jangling in one's purse. It could be understood as a term in an equation, an abstraction, a variable to be analyzed mathematically—as in fact skilled traders had been doing more or less explicitly every time they played the markets in Holland against those in London.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1553-60  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:06 PM

The unquestioned leader of the anti-devaluation forces was John Locke. To be sure, Locke recognized the need to recoin; the miserable state of the clipped coinage was as obvious to him as it was to anyone in England. But apart from melting down old silver to mint new coins, all else—the old weight and face values for each denomination—should remain constant. To do otherwise, he argued, would violate the very nature of money. After all, changing the number associated with a coin, calling a crown-weight piece of silver seventy-five pence instead of sixty, for instance, would not make that coin buy more silver bullion than it had previously. "I am afraid no body will think Change of Denomination has such a Power." Locke's argument is correct; it is merely another way of stating the fact of devaluation: a devalued silver shilling contains and buys less silver metal than a higher-silver-content one did yesterday. But that was beside the point. The reason silver escaped to Amsterdam was because each transaction brought more Dutch gold than the same weight of silver stamped into shillings and crowns could buy in England.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1564-67  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:07 PM

they will be of another mind when they consider that silver is a matter of nature different from all other" (italics added). It was, he said, "the thing bargained for as well as the measure of the bargain." To Locke, silver was unique in the material world: alone in nature it was the fixed center around which all else learned its worth.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1567-68  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:07 PM

Newton was right, but Locke grasped what his friend did not. Devaluation was a weapon aimed at the moneyed, and especially the landowning class—those whose rents would fall by the amount of silver shaved from the legal measure of a shilling piece.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1578-80  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:08 PM

Newton could not respond swiftly enough. Trinity's records show that he left Cambridge for London on March 21 to discuss his prospects. Evidently what he found at the Mint's headquarters in the Tower of London satisfied him. The Chancellor had assured him that the Warden "has not too much bus'nesse to require more attendance than you may spare."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1584-87  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:09 PM

More likely, he would have hired a horse, as became a gentleman. He would probably have broken the journey at the inn at Ware, waiting there, just as Chaucer's pilgrims had three hundred years before, for enough of a company to gather to provide mutual protection along the isolated stretch of road that followed, a notorious haunt of highwaymen.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1696-99  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:24 PM

TO MOST PEOPLE in the 1690s, paper money was an oxymoron, as ridiculous and self-contradictory as a wise fool or a cowardly lion. Paper could not be real money. But faced with the cost of the war and the fact of a debased coinage, the demand for something—anything—that could pass between buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, forced the issue.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1713-18  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:25 PM

That's how it began: money, captured on a sheet of paper. It rapidly became something more. By lending the full sum of its deposits (and soon enough, even more) to the government, and by issuing notes against that same capitalization that depositors could spend, the Bank of England performed the essential economic miracle: it created capital out of thin air. This was the birth of what is known as fractional reserve banking, the foundation of the modern financial system. In a fractional reserve bank, working on the assumption that only a small percentage of depositors will demand their share back at any given time, the institution lends more than the sum total of its capital. How much more is the question.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1718-22  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:26 PM

Banks that lend too great a multiple of their deposits risk running out of cash if too many depositors demand payment. If the banking system as a whole lends too little, credit tightens, loans become more costly, and economic life suffers. (Bank regulators can use the reserve requirement—how much cash as a percentage of loans a bank is required to keep on hand—as a tool to tighten or loosen credit, and thus, in theory, keep an economy from becoming either too sullen or too exuberant. The gap between that theory and actual practice is not, perhaps, as small as economists would wish.)
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1735-39  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:28 PM

So, two weeks after the Bank received its charter, the directors formally decided that "the Notes for Running Cash being considered liable to be counterfeited, for preventing thereof it was ordered that they be done on marbled paper Indented." Thus decorated, Bank of England notes—in practical terms, the first bank-issued paper money in the world—entered circulation in June 1695. They were immediately popular. As early as 1697, almost 700,000 pounds circulated as running notes—and this pile of what passed as cash quickly took on a life of its own.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1739-42  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:29 PM

The five pounds that Mr. Smith deposited on Tuesday became ten by Wednesday: the five lent to support the army in Flanders and the five Smith could hold as a running cash note. This simple trick was the first in the sequence of novel gyrations of money that was about to turn London into the financial center of Europe and, within a century or a little more, of the entire world.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1869-74  | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 04:40 PM

Eventually, Newton identified the perfect pace: if the press thumped just slightly slower than the human heart, beating fifty to fifty-five times a minute, men and machines could stamp out coins for hours at a time. That pounding set the rhythm that Newton used to drive the entire Mint. Newton's drumbeat got results, fast. The record of the recoinage as a whole is one of an enormously complicated and expensive undertaking that was completed smoothly, efficiently, and mostly safely. (Only one man died at the rolling mills, an amazingly low number given the intensity of the work.) Under Newton's control, where once the sum of 15,000 pounds per week had been thought unattainable, soon the presses were turning out 50,000 pounds a week.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1877-80  | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015, 11:02 AM

In June 1699, matters had so far returned to normal that the Mint sold off the machines it had added to handle the national crisis. By then, the Mint under Newton's direction had totally remade England's stock of silver money, a total of 6,840,719 pounds. The total cost of the effort was huge—about 2,700,000 pounds, most of which represented the lost metal in clipped coins accepted for recoinage at face value. But for that price England had bought a whole new silver coinage with which to buy, trade, and fight.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1881-86  | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015, 02:34 PM

The swift and ample transfer of silver coins from the Tower into public hands, beginning in the autumn of 1696, quelled the deepest fears of the day. There were no currency riots. The poor of London did not rise up to demand the return of good King James. King William continued to complain about the lack of money, but he was able to keep his army in the field, and by September 1697, after it was clear that the recoinage would be completed satisfactorily, he even achieved a peace with Louis XIV. Nothing directly links the success of the effort with England's domestic calm or its military success abroad. But the fears that had seemed almost overpowering less than two years before disappeared from the record of public concern as the recoinage wended its way to a quiet, competent end.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2093-95  | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015, 03:00 PM

By early 1697, Newton's network of informers, undercover agents, and street muscle had turned him into the most effective criminal investigator London had yet seen.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2521-26  | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015, 11:35 PM

Among the great mass of men and women outside the learned societies, the scientific revolution was making inroads on understanding as the world of money came fully into being. Paper money, exchangeable promises, bonds, and loans are all abstractions. To understand them, to accept them—even to suborn them—took a capacity for the kind of mathematical reasoning that was just beginning to infiltrate all kinds of new ideas, including that demanded by the new physics. Figuring out the present value of a bond, for example, or how to price the risk (likelihood) of government default, demanded and demands a quantitative, mathematical turn of mind—just as calculating the orbit of a comet did and does.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2887-95  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 12:08 AM

Isaac Newton and William Chaloner fought their last battle the next day, March 3. English trials in the late seventeenth century were swift and ruthlessly to the point. There were no lawyers. Prosecutions in most felony cases were handled by the victims of crimes themselves, or by local authorities in cases, such as murder, where victims could not speak on their own behalf. Crimes against the Crown required some agent of the state—the Warden of the Mint or his designated mouthpiece, for example—to stand as the aggrieved party. Chaloner had to speak for himself. There was no presumption of innocence. He had to offer an affirmative defense—either an outright argument of innocence or some demonstration that the prosecution's witnesses and evidence were sufficiently tainted so as to leave the case unproven. It was still an unpopular position that the defendants might benefit from the counsel of someone learned in the law. As the influential early-eighteenth-century legal scholar William Hawkins wrote, it should require "no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2895-99  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 12:08 AM

The trial took place in the Old Bailey, which stood just beyond the western side of the London city wall, about two hundred yards from St. Paul's Cathedral and conveniently close to Newgate. The building, erected in 1673 to replace the courts lost in the Great Fire of 1666, contained a ground-floor courtroom that was open to the sky, the better to reduce the risk that prisoners with typhus would infect judges and juries. (The danger was real. The courtroom was enclosed in 1737, and in the worst of the incidents that followed, sixty people died following a court session in 1750, among them the Lord Mayor of London.)
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2931-38  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 12:12 AM

The impression of an overwhelming presumption of guilt grew as Newton's parade of six prosecution witnesses entered the chamber. With that entrance, Chaloner was able to gauge the direction of the testimony he would have to counter. Before he had an instant to gather his wits, however, the trial began. That prosecution was a probably deliberate muddle. Newton seems to have taken to heart the advice he got a year earlier, that he could simply throw enough dirt around to convince the jury that Chaloner must have done something bad. The prosecution's witnesses essentially ignored the central claim of the indictment. Rather than dwell on proving that Chaloner had actually produced more than one hundred coins, both false gold and false silver, of five different sizes and designs, all in a single day, Newton's witnesses took the jury on an extended tour of the previous eight years of Chaloner's career.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3077-80  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:20 PM

The book also presented Newton's first full declaration of all that he believed to be true, across the range of investigations that had consumed his life. He argued for intellectual humility; in a draft of the introduction he acknowledged, "To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3101-5  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:23 PM

As he had predicted, the recoinage, however successful as an industrial operation, was a failure as monetary policy. The decision to recoin without devaluing had the predicted result: silver continued to flow across the English Channel, buying continental gold at cheaper prices than those offered by the exchange rate between silver shillings and golden guineas. By 1715, most of the new silver specie struck through 1699 had vanished. In response, more or less by accident, the basis of British currency shifted from silver to a new gold standard.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3105-12  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:23 PM

Newton, first of necessity and then with more intention, oversaw this shift. In doing so, he found himself exploring the same kind of global information networks he had used to advance his arguments in the Principia. This time, instead of data on the tides and observations of comets and the motion of pendulums at various spots on the planet, he investigated what he quickly realized was a worldwide trade in gold. By 1717, he was able to sum up in detail what was going on. Gold was much cheaper in China and India than in Europe, Newton told the Treasury. That imbalance sucked silver—much of it mined originally in the New World—not just out of England but out of the entire European continent. This was its own kind of action at a distance: the faraway, almost occult attraction of Asian gold markets putting European silver into a predictable trajectory, one to be explained with the same habits of mind that had brought the revolutionary study of gravity to its completion thirty years earlier. 
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 3115-18  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:24 PM

In a strikingly modern-sounding passage, he wrote, "If interest be not yet low enough for the advantage of trade and designs of setting the poor on work ... the only proper way to lower it is more paper credit till by trading and business we can get more money." And even more radically he wrote, "Tis mere opinion that sets a value upon [metal] money," adding, "We value it because we can purchase all sorts of commodities and the same opinion sets a like value upon paper security."
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 3125-33  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:26 PM

the South Sea Company agreed to take over some of Britain's official debt—that whole bestiary of obligations, bonds, and lotteries issued to pay for the nation's wars. The company recapitalized the debt with a loan of £2.5 million to the government and then converted the older obligations it had received into shares in the new company. The promised trade never materialized, and the company began to act almost exclusively as a kind of bank—and an innovative one at that. In 1719, Parliament passed a bill permitting the South Sea Company to purchase more government obligations, again converting a range of public debts into a single, easily tradable form: stock in a company that could be bought and sold on the nascent market in London's Exchange Alley. The creation of a permanent, easily transferable debt would prove to be a very valuable tool, one that some historians have credited with financing the great leap to global power the British Empire achieved over the next century and a half. But that financial revolution did not occur without the occasional setback—including, notably, the fiasco of the South Sea Bubble.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3174-77  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:29 PM

Before his death, Newton offered his own version of an epitaph. In perhaps his most famous moment of self-reflection, he wrote: I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.
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Newton and the Counterfeiter (Thomas Levenson)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 3178-82  | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2015, 05:29 PM

November

Those who had known him took a different view. In 1730, John Conduitt was considering the design of Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey. He received a letter from a man who had once engaged Newton's thoughts as deeply as anyone ever would. Nicholas Fatio de Duillier remembered when the Principia had appeared like prophecy, a revelation. Thus he proposed the text for the inscription to be carved into the memorial: " Nam hominem eum fuisse, si dubites, hocce testatur marmor." The phrase can be translated, "If you doubt there was such a man, this monument bears witness."
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Bookmark on Page 50 | Loc. 752  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:26 AM


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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 750-54  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:26 AM

With all this going on against a background of the most utter misery, the effect was to promote the most far-reaching cynicism: liberty, fraternity and equality might still be paid lip service, but it was clear that, at best, they had become mere slogans. Nor was any of this lost on Napoleon. To quote a letter he wrote to Joseph, ‘There is only one thing to do in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.’
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 780-85  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:30 AM

At the same time, the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ was formative in another sense. From the very beginning of the Revolution it is clear that Napoleon was contemptuous of the crowd as a political force. In his eyes it was a mere mob, lacking in organization, that could easily be overawed by an opponent possessed of military discipline and firm leadership. Had Louis XVI appeared on horseback to defend the Tuileries in 1792, he told Joseph, the palace would never have fallen. But the principle was political as much as it was military: the mob had to be defeated. Uncivilized and brutal, in Napoleon’s eyes it would inevitably run amok the moment the bounds of order and discipline were relaxed.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 789-94  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:32 AM

On the one hand, the crowd had been crushed: faced by 25,000 insurgents, 8,000 government troops had broken the uprising in little more than twenty-four hours of serious fighting with the loss of perhaps 100 casualties. And, on the other, most of the insurgents had not taken part in the actual fighting but given themselves over to drunkenness and pillage. If they had been called on to the streets at all, meanwhile, it was the result of a political factionalism born solely of what Napoleon saw as selfish ambition. As he had written to his brother Lucien in 1792, ‘Those at the top are poor creatures . . . Everyone wants to succeed at the price of no matter what horror and calumny; intrigue is as base as ever.’
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 889-92  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 03:44 PM

For over a hundred years before 1789 there had hardly been a year when the whole of Europe had been at peace. Why this was so is again a question that need not detain us here for too long. However, in brief, for all the monarchies of Europe the battlefield was at one and the same time a gauge of their power and a theatre for their glorification and, by extension, an important means of legitimizing their power at home where they were frequently challenged by feudal aristocracies and powerful religious hierarchies.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 933-37  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 03:49 PM

In 1789 the standing armies of Europe may have been much bigger than they had been in 1700, but new crops, better transport, improved bureaucracies, more productive fiscal systems, harsher discipline and tighter procedures in the field all ensured that the horrors of the Thirty Years War, in which masses of unpaid men had simply surged from one side of Germany to the other, living off the country and denying the authority of political masters that had lost all ability to pay and supply them, would not be repeated.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 941-47  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 03:50 PM

But in reality Europe was no more getting safer than she was becoming more civilized. Given that every possible territorial solution that could be worked out for the Continent of Europe was bound to upset one or other of the great powers, continual conquest led not to perpetual peace but rather perpetual war, and therefore produced not security, but insecurity. As the Seven Years War had shown, as the stakes grew ever higher, so rulers with their backs against the wall would habitually resort to battle rather than simply accepting the logic of superior numbers or generalship, just as they would be inclined to put fortress governors under great pressure to resist the enemy to the utmost: this was the conflict that gave rise to the phrase ‘pour encourager les autres’.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 949-53  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 03:51 PM

And there was certainly no diminution in the sufferings of the civilian population, nor in the damage which an army’s passage could inflict on a district. On the wilder fringes of warfare - the Balkans, the frontiers of the American colonies - torture and massacre were very much the order of the day while large parts of Germany had been devastated by the Seven Years War. The overall picture is a grim one: war may not have been the monster of the seventeenth century, but it was still a savage beast.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1141-44  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 04:59 PM

there emerged the makings of the strong bond between Napoleon and his soldiers that was to sustain the French army right through to 1815. By the middle of 1797, in fact, the Army of Italy no longer served France but Napoleon, who in consequence felt safe to employ the most ambiguous bombast: ‘Mountains separate us from France, but were it necessary to uphold the constitution, to defend liberty, to protect the government and the Republicans, then you would cross them with the speed of an eagle.’
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1224-28  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:18 PM

Action, in fact, was essential, for, as he remarked, ‘In Paris nothing is remembered for long. If I remain doing nothing . . . I am lost.’57 To suggest that this restless energy and ambition now became the only factor in the determination of French policy would be incorrect, but the fact was that Napoleon had already had a massive impact on France’s relations with the rest of Europe and imparted a direction to the international history of the Continent that would otherwise have been lacking.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1232-37  | Added on Monday, November 02, 2015, 11:19 PM

Austria was almost bankrupt, and even Britain was finding the demands of the war difficult to bear. Individual members of the Directory may have taken a different line, but no general plan of conquest - or, if it is preferred, liberation - was under consideration. And, when conquests were suddenly showered on Paris (from a totally unexpected direction), the plan was still to use them as bargaining counters that could be exchanged for France’s real aims. What changed all this was Napoleon. By embarking on a course of republicanization in Italy, while at the same time cynically partitioning the neutral Republic of Venice with Austria, he set off a chain reaction.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 1624-26  | Added on Tuesday, November 03, 2015, 11:41 AM

Even if the Austrian army did eventually have to appear before the Tuileries, it would not be with the intention of opening the gates to a Bourbon who had, in the old phrase, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, for to do so would simply be to run the risk of a second 1789 and with it a second war.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1851-57  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:17 AM

The First Consul . . . continued a few days longer at Milan to settle the affairs of Italy, and then set out on his return to Paris . . . I shall say but little of the manifestations of joy and admiration with which Bonaparte met throughout his journey . . . On arriving at Lyons we alighted at the Hotel des Celestins, where the acclamations of the people were so great and the multitude so numerous . . . that Bonaparte was obliged to show himself at the balcony . . . We left Lyons in the evening, and continued our journey by Dijon, and there the joy of the inhabitants amounted to frenzy.18 At the same time, if the events of 14 June 1800 did not in themselves bring the First Consul any extra power in France, they did shatter all chance that the various politicians who had found themselves outmanoeuvred in the aftermath of Brumaire might put the Napoleonic jack back in its box.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2014-19  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:31 AM

Thanks to a variety of political circumstances in the United States, including, not least, the manner in which the war was tending to strengthen the position of Adams’s enemies, the Federalists, these moves achieved the desired effect. Diplomatic relations were restored and a peace settlement was elaborated that effectively annulled the treaty of 1778- thereby cementing the principle of American neutrality - in exchange for the rejection of Britain’s claims with regard to neutral shipping and the de facto surrender of United States claims for compensation for the losses inflicted on her shipping since 1793. For the time being, all was quiet, but such were the contradictions between the French and American positions that further trouble was likely. In short, the acquisition of Louisiana remained essential.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2140-46  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:46 AM

Nor was the settlement itself so very bad as a basis for an end to the ‘age of war’ that had characterized the eighteenth century. As Schroeder points out, the settlement reached in the period 1801-2 was in fact remarkably realistic in global terms. Britain, France and Russia were effectively recognized as the three leading powers of Europe, and each of them was accorded dominance in one particular sphere. Britain was allowed to retain her supremacy at sea: even Napoleon did not demand the dismantling of the Royal Navy, and this meant that France’s colonial presence was one that existed on sufferance and could always be closed down. France stood supreme in Western Europe and was bolstered by much enlarged frontiers and an unassailable sphere of influence in Italy and Germany. And Russia was seemingly assured that the Ottoman Empire would be her exclusive preserve, and that she would have a major voice in the reorganization of Germany that now loomed.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2146-51  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:47 AM

As for Austria and Prussia, while clearly less well favoured than Britain, France and Russia, they too might hope for compensation in Germany. And if it was theoretically the case that no one power would be allowed to dominate Germany - one possible bone of contention amongst the powers - a similar situation was reached in the Mediterranean: France had her base at Toulon, Britain hers at Gibraltar, and Russia hers - at least potentially - in the Ionian islands, while Malta was denied to everybody. In short, what we see is a compromise settlement that was no more unstable than earlier general European peace treaties, and we must therefore find other reasons for its failure to produce anything other than a mere truce.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2151-57  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:47 AM

What, though, should we make of the war that had just terminated? Put in a nutshell, what it showed was that France was so strong in the wake of the Revolution and, more particularly, the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte, that there was no way that she could be contained except by a general alliance amongst the powers. For that to be workable, Britain would have to accept a continental commitment, Austria and Prussia set aside their endless rivalry over Germany, and Russia lift her eyes from Poland and the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the powers would have to evolve a new approach to international relations that was based on common interest rather than mutual rivalry and the pursuit of traditional ambitions. In 1802, however, this development was still far away, blocked by obstacles so entrenched that only the most cataclysmic of forces could have swept them aside.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2266-70  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 12:01 PM

In addition there were serious worries about civilian society. Napoleon had come to power ostensibly offering France peace, but he also wished to offer her prosperity, and this too seemed to demand the continuation of a belligerent foreign policy that would give la grande nation resources and markets that she could not otherwise command. And only thus could Napoleon seek to counter the growing chorus of voices accusing him of overthrowing liberty and establishing himself as a despot. By the time of the peace of Amiens this opposition was starting to make itself felt.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2448-54  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 06:26 PM

Equally, if an emasculated legislature continued to meet in Paris, it was in part because it acted as a forum in which Napoleon could justify his policies and extol his successes. And if plebiscites were repeatedly used to legitimize changes in government - in 1800 to approve the consular constitution and in 1802 to make Napoleon First Consul for life and usher in constitutional changes that increased his powers still further - it was to create an image of national unity and pay lip-service to the principle of the sovereignty of the people. In this respect, moreover, every aspect of cultural life was pressed into service as a mouthpiece of the government. With regard to the press, for example, Napoleon on the one hand imposed rigid censorship, and on the other ensured that his message reached the widest possible audience by having papers produced in cheap editions and read aloud in public places.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2486-89  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 06:31 PM

Bonaparte lacked education and good manners: it was as if he had been irrevocably destined to live out all his life either in a tent, where anything goes, or on a throne, when anything is permitted. He did not know how to enter or to leave a room; he did not know how to greet people, how to get up, how to sit down. His gestures were rapid and abrupt, as was his manner of speaking . . .
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2526-29  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 06:35 PM

On his return from the battle of Leipzig he came across Monsieur Laplace. ‘It looks as if you’ve lost weight.’ ‘Sire, I have lost my daughter.’ ‘Well, that’s no reason. You are a geometrician: measure what’s happened with a ruler and you will find that it comes to precisely nothing.’ It is to this insensibility that one must attribute many of the actions of his rule . . .
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2563-66  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 06:38 PM

Taking all this together, it is difficult to see how the Treaty of Amiens could have contained Napoleon. An unquiet soul, he needed military glory on personal and political grounds alike, while as ruler of France he controlled a state that was the richest and most populous in continental Europe and whose internal problems he was in the process of getting under control. Buoying him up, too, was immense confidence in his own abilities, an unblemished record of military success and contempt for the potential opposition.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2566-67  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 06:39 PM

‘Conscription forms armies of citizens,’ he remarked. ‘Voluntary enlistment forms armies of vagabonds and criminals.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2623-29  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:13 PM

But it was in Germany that Napoleonic intervention was at its most dramatic. Thus, within a matter of months the Holy Roman Empire was effectively dismantled. So important was this last development that it must needs be looked at in some detail. Essentially a heterogeneous collection of independent kingdoms, principalities, bishoprics, abbeys, free cities and feudal fiefs united only by the theoretical allegiance of their rulers to the house of Habsburg, the Empire was a major bastion of Austrian influence, and as such had become the object of Napoleon’s ire. Yet it was also threatened with destabilization from within, for many of the rulers of the larger and middling states were increasingly determined to absorb the free cities, the territories of the Church and the host of petty principalities and baronial estates. Such a policy could not but prove disastrous for Austria, whose strongest supporters in the Empire had traditionally been the bishops, abbots and imperial knights,
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2639-46  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:16 PM

Despite apparent difficulties, achieving Napoleon’s goals proved almost ridiculously simple. In the first instance, as France was a guarantor of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire by virtue of the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the First Consul had a legitimate right to intervene in German affairs. At the same time, the French ruler had long since correctly identified gaining the support of Alexander I as the key to the situation, and all the more so as the tsar was for a variety of reasons closely involved in the fate of Germany. Thus, by virtue of the treaty of Teschen of 1779, which had seen Catherine II mediate an Austro-Prussian peace settlement in the wake of the War of the Bavarian Succession, he could claim to be the guarantor of the Holy Roman Empire’s constitution, while he also had numerous connections among the rulers of the states of Germany: his mother was a princess of Hesse, his wife was a princess of Baden, his brother-in-law was Duke of Oldenburg and a cousin the ruler of Württemberg.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2665-68  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:19 PM

Within days there followed the treaty with France that formally put an end to Russia’s participation in the Second Coalition. This agreement being accompanied by a secret codicil that effectively promised Napoleon Russian support for his German plans, the way was open for the First Consul to remake Germany, so long, that is, as he respected the interests of Alexander I.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2871-77  | Added on Wednesday, November 04, 2015, 11:43 PM

Yet of this he did stand accused, and he had borne the accusation in silence . . . because he was conscious it was undeserved and because he felt within his own breast a complete vindication of his conduct . . . The time was now near when this justification would become manifest . . . His maxim, he declared, from the moment he took office was, first, to make peace, and then to preserve it, under certain reservations in his mind, if France chose and as long as France chose, but to resist and bear all clamour and invective at home till such time as France (and he ever saw it must happen) had filled the measure of her folly, and had put herself completely in the wrong, not only by repeated acts of unprovoked insolence and presumption, but till these acts were, from their expressions and inference, declaratory of sundry intentions the most hostile and adverse to our own particular interest, a violation of treaty and dangerous to the interest of Europe . . .
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2961-66  | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2015, 12:03 AM

Hardly able to believe their luck, the Americans snapped it up, and on 30 April the whole territory - an area over four times the size of France, stretching all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian frontier, embracing modern-day Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska - duly passed into the orbit of the Stars and Stripes at a price of $80 million. At a stroke Napoleon had cut his losses in the West while at the same time filling his war chest in Europe and hamstringing Britain. It was beyond doubt a major coup and one that makes it even harder to acquit Napoleon of blame for the events of
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2966  | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2015, 12:03 AM

May 1803.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2975-80  | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2015, 12:04 AM

Far from respecting the very favourable balance that had been secured at Lunéville and Amiens, he continued to expand French influence in the most ruthless fashion. This in turn destabilized the Addington administration, which was then forced to breach the Treaty of Amiens and demand concessions that in the last resort the First Consul’s pride would not allow him to accept. Finally, what it came down to was that Napoleon could not accept the notion that there should be curbs on his freedom of action. At the same time, however, Britain had no means of imposing those curbs except through war. With neither Britain nor France prepared to make fundamental concessions, there could in the end be but one outcome.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2982-90  | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2015, 12:05 AM

In May 1803, the whale went to war with the elephant. Possessed of the most powerful navy in the world, Britain stood supreme at sea, but on land she was a comparative weakling capable of fielding only puny expeditionary forces of a few thousand men, drawn from an army that had in the 1790s been notorious for the poverty of its human and material resources. With France, however, the picture was completely reversed. Though by no means the invincible force of legend, the French army was an impressive military machine with many victories to its credit, whereas the French navy was in a truly pitiable condition and virtually incapable of putting to sea. How the two belligerents were to strike at one another was therefore most unclear. Particularly outside Europe, ways were naturally found of doing so, but in the end the resolution of the struggle would necessarily revolve around one issue and one issue alone. To overcome France, Britain had to put together a continental coalition that could overthrow Napoleon or, at the very least, bring him to the peace table, while to defeat Britain Napoleon had to frustrate these aims and mobilize a substantial part of Europe against London. Even then victory was not guaranteed for either side.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3010-13  | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2015, 12:08 AM

One of the chief difficulties faced by London in 1803 was its distinctly unimpressive war record: on land the British army had hardly a victory to its credit, while at sea its ships had won only four major victories - victories, what is more, that seemed to have more to do with enshrining Britain’s commercial monopoly than they did with defeating the French. As late as the Waterloo campaign of 1815, bitter distrust of Britain continued to be rampant, and this despite all Wellington’s victories in Spain and Portugal.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3173-78  | Added on Friday, November 06, 2015, 12:03 PM

Taking Napoleon and his allies first of all, France had emerged from the Revolution immensely strengthened. With over 29 million inhabitants, she was second only to Russia in terms of population, and by far the most advanced state in continental Europe. Though political paralysis and widespread unrest had done much to nullify these advantages under the Directory, Napoleon had put an end to these disorders and was now in an excellent position to capitalize upon the very considerable financial and demographic resources at his disposal. Making full use of the military advances of the ancien régime and Revolution, he was in the process of building an army that in size and quality had no equals, consisting of 265 infantry battalions, 322 cavalry squadrons and 202 batteries of artillery, the whole amounting to perhaps 300,000 men. At
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3252-57  | Added on Friday, November 06, 2015, 12:12 PM

Command, too, was important. The generals of the ancien régime were for the most part neither superannuated dodderers nor the products of gilded aristocratic youth, but rather tough professionals who often had substantial records of success. Many, indeed, were commanders of talent, and a few men of genius: one thinks here of Wellington, the Archduke Charles and, for all his oddities, Suvorov. But all too often they were operating with one hand tied behind their back thanks to the imposition of a variety of political controls. For example, in the summer of 1799 allied operations in Italy, Switzerland and southern Germany were disrupted disastrously by interference from both London and Vienna.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 230 | Loc. 3518-20  | Added on Friday, November 06, 2015, 05:17 PM

And, in the second, though fearful of France in the long term - as he told the Swedish ambassador, ‘We will be the last to be eaten: that is the limit of Prussia’s advantage’38 - Haugwitz was at the moment more concerned with Vienna than Paris.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 4362-69  | Added on Monday, November 09, 2015, 02:56 PM

it is no coincidence that a few days after Austerlitz, an isolated Bavarian enclave on the right bank of the Rhine, centred on the city of Düsseldorf, was given to Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as the Grand Duchy of Berg, nor that in February Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed King of Naples - that we should see, in other words, the first steps in the creation of the so-called ‘family monarchies’. On one level it is possible to defend all these actions on strategic grounds: Berg, for example, was a useful ‘bridgehead’ in northern Germany. Yet serious questions must be asked of Pressburg and the other treaties with which it is associated. ‘The system that Napoleon then adopted . . . was the first act to be reckoned among the causes of his fall,’ wrote Talleyrand, who rightly went on to point out that there was something ‘impolitic and destructive in this method of overthrowing governments in order to create others which he was not slow to pull down again, and that in all parts of Europe’.34
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 300 | Loc. 4591-92  | Added on Monday, November 09, 2015, 11:55 PM

With the treaty signed, Hardenberg had good reason to expect that he would soon replace Haugwitz once more. Not for the first time, then, ancien-régime foreign policy was influenced by power struggles played out in cabinet and chancellory.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 4763-65  | Added on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 11:56 AM

The struggle that followed is all but unknown to anglophone readers. Yet it is doubtful whether the rest of the Napoleonic Wars can match it in terms of savagery. Emblematic of the style in which it was waged is the fate of the Danubian provinces’ large community of Muslim Tartars.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 4837-42  | Added on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 12:16 PM

In the summer of 1806 Europe was temporarily more or less at peace, or, at least, experiencing a period of ‘phoney war’. Technically speaking, both Britain and Russia remained at war with France, and there was some fighting in both Italy and the Balkans. At sea and in the wider world, too, operations went on unabated: the Royal Navy kept watch on Europe’s coasts; a British expeditionary force seized Buenos Aires; and French commerce raiders based in ports as widely spaced as Brest and Mauritius raided the sea lanes and on occasion achieved considerable success. Serious peace negotiations, however, were in place, and, although these soon broke down, it is difficult to see how anything comparable to the campaign of 1805 could have been revived.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 5699-5703  | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015, 03:32 PM

With Napoleon in control of much of the European coastline, the future was distinctly uncertain. What would occur next was, of course, impossible to say. But such was Britain’s predicament it is entirely possible that she would have been forced to give in. Fortunately for the Portland administration, however, their opponent was not a rational European statesman, but Napoleon. If he had only allowed Russia to believe that she was a French partner rather than a French vassal, the emperor might have won the war, but, exactly as had been the case in 1803, he could not let matters be.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 5704-6  | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015, 03:32 PM

As the British ambassador to Vienna remarked most prophetically to Stadion, ‘these fresh successes [will] lead probably to fresh pretensions on the part of France’, and persuade Napoleon, ‘to whom no project [seems] preposterous or impossible’, to ‘adopt that of carrying his army into the heart of Russia and attempt to dictate the law even at Saint Petersburg’.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 5708-11  | Added on Friday, November 13, 2015, 03:33 PM

There are few historians who would deny the significance of the period immediately after Tilsit in the history of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was at this point that the emperor was drawn to intervene in the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula, and thereby to spark off a chain of events that are traditionally held to have had a major role, if not the major role, in the downfall of the French imperium.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 391 | Loc. 5991-94  | Added on Saturday, November 14, 2015, 04:01 PM

These difficulties were doubly unfortunate for they forced Britain back on methods of war - above all, blockade and colonial aggrandizement - that both antagonized potential partners on the Continent and confirmed suspicions that the British were avoiding the sort of commitment they themselves required of their allies. Nor were the methods of warfare on which they relied particularly cost-effective.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 417 | Loc. 6381-88  | Added on Saturday, November 14, 2015, 04:32 PM

It was a key moment - possibly the key moment. Agreement with St Petersburg offered the only real hope of defeating Britain, so why did Napoleon not give Alexander what he wanted? On one level, the answer was primarily economic and strategic. With Russia in control of the Dardanelles, the tsar would be able to challenge France’s commercial presence in the Orient; restrict or even cut off the supply of Egyptian cotton; build up an unassailable naval and military presence in the Levant; and completely block the overland route to India (not that this was of any real value: the French mission that had been dispatched to Persia had been sending back a stream of reports that suggested that it would at best have been a road paved with bones). But it was not just that. Also important was the issue of psychology. To give the tsar the principal objective sought by all of his predecessors was simply a concession too far for Napoleon, while there was much pleasure simply in denying Alexander the object of his desire.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 418 | Loc. 6397-6402  | Added on Saturday, November 14, 2015, 04:33 PM

Then came another shock. In a long memorandum dated 24 February, Napoleon denounced the anarchy in the royal household, accused Spain of bad faith and announced that he no longer considered himself bound by Fontainebleau. Spain was now promised the whole of Portugal, true, but in exchange she would have to surrender all the territory between the river Ebro and the Pyrenees and sign a permanent and unlimited alliance with France. In acting thus, Napoleon hoped both to justify his conduct hitherto and to provoke the Spaniards into a resistance that would provide the pretext he needed to overthrow the monarchy. If this was his intention, then he was certainly successful: Charles IV agreed with Godoy and his other advisers that he should flee to America by way of Seville.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 428 | Loc. 6551-55  | Added on Monday, November 16, 2015, 05:01 PM

In May 1808 Napoleon Bonaparte was truly at the pinnacle of his power. From September 1805 until June 1807 his forces had fanned out across the Continent driving all before them. But in the early months of 1808 the tempo of French aggression was raised to fresh levels. Two dynasties - the Bourbons of Naples and the Braganças - had already been driven from their thrones and a third had now been physically sequestered and forced to give up its rights. Not for nothing, then, did the Ottomans accord Napoleon the title of padishah - ‘King of kings’.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6569-71  | Added on Monday, November 16, 2015, 05:04 PM

According to traditional British accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, if the French hegemony that had been established at Tilsit was eventually challenged, it was in large part because of the events that the overthrow of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII unleashed in Spain and Portugal.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 472 | Loc. 7234-40  | Added on Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 04:43 PM

However, also at issue was Britain’s ability to sustain her allies. Over and over again expectations were confounded by developments elsewhere: in 1807 Sicily found that troops stationed there were sent to Egypt; in 1808 Sweden found that Britain’s attention was distracted by the outbreak of insurrection in Portugal; in 1809 Spain and Portugal saw large numbers of troops that might otherwise have fought in the Peninsula sent to Walcheren (see below); and from 1810 onwards troops from Sicily fought in Spain. Added to this was a further issue. With British troops very thin on the ground, Moore and Wellington alike were well aware that defeat had to be avoided at all costs and were therefore inclined to adopt a cautious line that again did not sit well with the expectations of their allies. In the absence of supporting forces, however, Spaniards especially died by the thousand and this could not but fan the flames of anglophobia.
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Napoleon's Wars (Charles Esdaile)
- Highlight on Page 475 | Loc. 7269-74  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 04:58 PM

Even by the standards of Napoleonic peace settlements, it was a massive blow. Deprived not just of much of her territory and population, but also unable even to levy tolls on the entire length of such frontiers as remained to her, Prussia was economically ruined. Still worse, she was seemingly forever in Napoleon’s pocket: with her main fortresses in the hands of the French, her army a mere shadow of its former self and Frederick William resolutely opposed to any move that might incur the emperor’s ire, there was no chance of the national uprising of which a few diehard officers dreamed, and, indeed, no guarantee of Prussia’s continued existence other than Napoleon’s will.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 256-62  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:13 PM

This is logistics, in other words the equipment and feeding of the armies. Commissariat officers had little status in any of the rival armies and societies. Their efforts have won little attention from historians. This is unfortunate because their role was often crucial. Napoleon destroyed his army in 1812 in large part because of logistical failures. By contrast, one of the key triumphs of the Russian war effort was its success in feeding and supplying more than half a million troops outside Russia’s borders in 1813–14. How this was done in a European continent which in those days only had two cities with populations of more than 500,000 is a key part of the present book. The contrast with the Seven Years War (1756–63), when logistics helped to cripple the Russian military effort, is very much to the point.14
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 267-70  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:14 PM

In 1812 Napoleon lost not just almost all the men but virtually all the horses with which he had invaded Russia. In 1813 he could and did replace the men but finding new horses proved a far more difficult and in the end disastrous problem. Above all it was lack of cavalry which stopped Napoleon winning decisively in the spring 1813 campaign and persuaded him to agree to the fatal two-month summer armistice, which contributed so much to his ultimate defeat.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 272-74  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:15 PM

the Russian light cavalry had been superior from the start and totally dominant after September 1812. But this dominance was not an act of God or nature. The historian needs to study the Russian horse industry and how it was mobilized by the government in 1812–14.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 289-94  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:16 PM

There were, however, important differences between Wellington and the Russian leaders. Although the duke had many political enemies in the 1820s and 1830s, by the time he died he was a national icon. The same was far from true of the Russian generals who lived as long as him. Just after Alexander I’s death in 1825 a group of officers, the so-called Decembrists, attempted to overthrow the absolute monarchy and install a constitutional regime or even a republic. Among them were officers such as Mikhail Orlov and Prince Serge Volkonsky who had distinguished themselves in the wars. The coup was crushed. Key heroes of the wars such as Aleksandr Chernyshev, Alexander Benckendorff and Petr Volkonsky played a part in its suppression and went on to serve as ministers under Nicholas I well into the mid-nineteenth century.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 294-95  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:17 PM

The Decembrist revolt and its suppression was the beginning of the exceptionally bitter split between right and left in Russia which ended in the revolution of 1917.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 364-67  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:33 PM

many of the generals were first-rate and staffs were performing much better than at the beginning of the 1812 campaign. On the battlefield in 1813–14 reserves were often utilized and cavalry, infantry and artillery coordinated much more effectively than had previously been the case. Given the enormous distance of military operations from the army’s bases, the reinforcement and supply of the field armies was managed with remarkable skill.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 429-35  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:42 PM

In reality, however, the Napoleonic Wars were largely confined to Europe because the British were getting closer to winning their hundred-years-war with France for global supremacy. The most basic fact about the Napoleonic Wars was that British seapower locked French imperialism into Europe. For many reasons it was far harder to create any species of empire in Europe than overseas. As a number of Russian observers understood, it was in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras that Britain consolidated its hugely powerful global empire, both territorial and commercial. Looked at from one angle, Napoleon’s attempt to create a European empire was simply a last, heroic effort to balance British imperialism and avoid defeat in France’s century-long conflict with Britain. The odds were very much against Napoleon, though by 1812 he had come seemingly very close to success.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 439-41  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:43 PM

Here, too, for example, one finds discussion of the events of the afternoon of 21 May 1813, when Marshal Michel Ney’s mistakes robbed Napoleon of decisive victory in the battle of Bautzen and probably thereby denied him the chance to decide the 1813 campaign and keep Austria out of the war.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 447-49  | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:44 PM

On the battlefield an opportunity for victory that existed at two o’clock in the afternoon had often gone by four. Chance, misperception and confusion accounted for much of what happened. Decisions had consequences which rippled through the following days and weeks.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 574-78  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:25 AM

For the tsarist state, as for all the other great powers, the great challenge of the Napoleonic era was to mobilize resources for war. There were four key elements to what one might describe as the sinews of Russian power.9 They were people, horses, military industry and finance. Unless the basic strengths and limitations of each of these four elements is grasped it is not possible to understand how Russia fought these wars or why she won them.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 582-87  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:26 AM

By European standards, therefore, the Russian population was large but it was not yet vastly greater than that of its Old Regime rivals and it was much smaller than the human resources controlled by Napoleon. In 1812 the French Empire, in other words all territories directly ruled from Paris, had a population of 43.7 million. But Napoleon was also King of Italy, which had a population of 6.5 million, and Protector of the 14 million inhabitants of the Confederation of the Rhine. Some other territories were also his to command: most notably from the Russian perspective the Duchy of Warsaw, whose population of 3.8 million made a disproportionate contribution to his war effort in 1812–14. A mere listing of these numbers says something about the challenge faced by Russia in these years.10
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 619-21  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:29 AM

Next only to men as a military resource came horses, with which Russia was better endowed than any other country on earth. Immense herds dwelt in the steppe lands of southern Russia and Siberia. These horses were strong, swift and exceptionally resilient. They were also very cheap.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 685-89  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:35 AM

Given the problems it faced, the Russian arms industry performed miracles in the Napoleonic era. Despite the enormous expansion of the armed forces in these years and heavy loss of weapons in 1812–14, the great majority of Russian soldiers did receive firearms and most of them were made in Tula. These muskets cost one-quarter of their English equivalents. On the other hand, without the 101,000 muskets imported from Britain in 1812–13 it would have been impossible to arm the reserve units which reinforced the field army in 1813.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 703-6  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:38 AM

The fourth and final element in Russian power was fiscal, in other words revenue. Being a great power in eighteenth-century Europe was very expensive and the costs escalated with every war. Military expenditure could cause not just fiscal but also political crisis within a state. The most famous example of this was the collapse of the Bourbon regime in France in 1789, brought on by bankruptcy as a result of the costs of intervention in the American War of Independence.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 709-14  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:39 AM

Similarly, in 1809 Austria was faced with the choice of either fighting Napoleon immediately or reducing the size of its army, since the state could not afford the current level of military expenditure. The Austrians chose to fight, were defeated, and were then lumbered with a war indemnity which crippled their military potential for years to come. An even more crushing indemnity was imposed on Prussia in 1807. In 1789 Russia had a higher level of debt than Austria or Prussia. Inevitably the wars of 1798–1814 greatly increased that debt. Unlike the Austrians or Prussians, in 1807 Russia did not have to pay an indemnity after being defeated by Napoleon. Had it lost in 1812, however, the story would have been very different.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 718-21  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:40 AM

Even before 1800 most of the deficit had been covered by printing paper rubles. By 1796 the paper ruble was worth only two-thirds of its silver equivalent. Constant war after 1805 caused expenditure to rocket. The only way to cover the cost was by printing more and more paper rubles. By 1812 the paper currency was worth roughly one-quarter of its ‘real’ (i.e. silver) value. Inflation caused a sharp rise in state expenditure, not least as regards military arms, equipment and victuals. To increase revenue rapidly enough to match costs was impossible.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1022-27  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 04:43 PM

In 1807–14 Constantine was not just the heir to the throne but, apart from Alexander, the only adult male in the Romanov family. In the Russia of that time, it was unthinkable to overthrow the monarchy or displace the Romanov family by other candidates for the throne. Memories of the anarchy two hundred years before – the so-called Time of Troubles – when the extinction of the ruling dynasty had led to civil war, foreign invasion and the state’s disintegration, put a taboo on any such ideas. But however frustrated Russian aristocrats might be with Alexander, few would dream of putting Constantine on the throne in his place.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 68 | Loc. 1029-31  | Added on Thursday, November 19, 2015, 04:43 PM

The inherently unpredictable nature of foreign policy under an autocracy was already sufficient reason to worry about relying on Russia, even without a personality such as Constantine’s lurking in the wings.54
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1492-95  | Added on Friday, November 20, 2015, 07:47 PM

Alexander had no such reason for pretence when writing to his sister Catherine, who was probably the person whom he trusted more than anyone else in the world. After departing from Erfurt and bidding an unctuous farewell to Napoleon he wrote to her that ‘Bonaparte thinks that I am nothing but an idiot. “They laugh longest who laugh last!” I put all my trust in God.’23
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1562-64  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 11:44 AM

The real value of the government’s tax income that year was 73 per cent of what it had been five years before. At a time when Russia needed to prepare for war against Napoleon’s empire this was nothing short of a potential catastrophe.29
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 1575-79  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 11:46 AM

Dire financial crisis as well as Russian pride was involved in his stubbornness. Both the emperor and Rumiantsev might have been more inclined to compromise had they not come to the correct conclusion that the Continental System had largely been transformed from a measure of economic war against Britain into a policy whereby France bled the rest of Europe white in order to boost its own trade and revenues. At a time when Napoleon was demanding the virtual elimination of Russian foreign trade, he was issuing more and more licences for French merchants to trade with Britain.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1676-82  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 11:54 AM

it was crucial to have large reserve forces held well in the rear so that the war could not be lost by a single battle. But if the Russians could ‘sustain this war for three campaigns then the victory will certainly be ours, even if we don’t win great victories, and Europe will be delivered from its oppressor’. Chernyshev added that this was very much his own view too. Russia must mobilize all its resources, religion and patriotism included, to sustain a long war. ‘Napoleon’s goal and his hopes are all directed towards concentrating sufficient strength to deliver crushing blows and decide the matter in a single campaign. He feels strongly that he cannot remain away from Paris for more than one year and that he would be lost if this war lasted for two or three years.’37
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1716-19  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 11:58 AM

Rostopchin was a sharp and amusing conversationalist. He could be unguarded. It is said that he once commented that Austerlitz was God’s revenge on Alexander for the part he had played in his father’s overthrow. The emperor took his own high-mindedness very seriously and did not take kindly to sly comments at his expense. His father’s murder and his own role in the disaster at Austerlitz were the bitterest memories of his life.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1821-26  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:11 PM

To Frederick William, Alexander was even more explicit. In May 1811 he wrote to the king: We have to adopt the strategy which is most likely to succeed. It seems to me that this strategy has to be one of carefully avoiding big battles and organizing very long operational lines which will sustain a retreat which will end in fortified camps, where nature and engineering works will strengthen the forces which we use to match up to the enemy’s skill. The system is the one which has brought victory to Wellington in wearing down the French armies, and it is the one which I have resolved to follow.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1853-58  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:28 PM

Perhaps the only comparison in the Napoleonic Wars was the siege of Saragossa, which the French finally took after immense bloodshed and resistance. The terrain of the Balkans helps to explain why siege warfare often prevailed in this theatre. Unlike in western Europe, there were few good roads and population densities were low. A good fortress could block the only viable invasion route into a district. The Ottomans were also experts at ravaging the countryside, and at raids and ambushes. An army which sat down to besiege a fortress would find its supply columns raided and its foraging parties forced to scatter over great distances.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1893-94  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:31 PM

In the famous expression of the American historian Paul Schroeder, Napoleon could never see a jugular without going for it.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1895-98  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:32 PM

The Napoleonic empire was above all the result of the sudden increase in French power brought about by the Revolution of 1789. This increased power took everyone by surprise. French expansion was partly driven by the army’s desire for plunder and the French government’s wish that other countries should pay this army’s costs. Napoleon’s personality was also a major factor.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1899-1901  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:32 PM

After 1793 British naval superiority more or less confined French imperialism to the European continent. The enormous gains made by the British outside Europe since 1793, not to mention their ever-growing economic power, meant that, unless Napoleon created some form of French empire within Europe, the struggle with Britain was lost.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 1945-50  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:37 PM

despite the triumphs of France and its current dominance, within less than fifty years nothing will remain to it but the empty glory of having overthrown and oppressed Europe. It will have acquired no real benefits from this for the French nation, which will find itself exhausted of men and treasure once it can no longer raise them from its neighbours. France’s immense current influence depends wholly on the existence of a single individual. His great talents, his astonishing energy and impetuous character will never allow him to put limits on his ambition, so that whether he dies today or in thirty years’ time he will leave matters no more consolidated than they are at present.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1950-52  | Added on Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:37 PM

Meanwhile, added Pahlen, as a new European Thirty Years War continued, the Americas would grow enormously in strength. Of the European powers only the English would be in a position to derive any advantages from this.57
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2568-73  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 12:30 PM

It is a truism among military historians that armies can only fight wars in line with their ‘military doctrine’, which is elaborated in the pre-war years. In the early nineteenth century formalized military doctrine in the modern sense existed nowhere. This would have to wait for staff colleges and the whole paraphernalia of modern military education and training. In an informal sense, however, the Russian army did have a ‘doctrine’ in 1812 and it was wholly committed to offensive strategy and tactics. From his first moments in his regiment the young officer was encouraged to be daring, fearless, confident and aggressive. Every lieutenant was expected to believe that one Russian was worth five Frenchmen. Male pride was at stake in the ‘game’ to capture trophies such as flags and drive the enemy off the battlefield.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Bookmark on Page 169 | Loc. 2587  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 12:32 PM


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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2585-90  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 12:32 PM

private secretary to Alexander’s wife Empress Elizabeth, Nikolai Longinov, wrote in July that ‘although I am convinced that our people would not accept the gift of freedom from such a monster, it is impossible not to worry’. In December 1812, with the danger passed, John Quincy Adams wrote that among the Petersburg elite there was great relief that ‘the peasants had not shown the least disposition to avail themselves of the occasion to obtain their freedom…. I see this is what most touches the feelings of all the Russians with whom I have conversed on the subject. This was the point on which their fears were the greatest, and upon which they are most delighted to see the danger past.’
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2888-92  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:00 PM

Whichever Russian army was threatened by Napoleon’s main body must withdraw and refuse battle, while the other Russian armies must strike into the ever-lengthening enemy flanks and rear. But this strategy was only fully realizable by the autumn of 1812 when Napoleon’s armies had been hugely depleted and their immensely long flanks were vulnerable to the Russian armies brought in from Finland and the Balkans. Launching Bagration into the flank of Napoleon’s main body in June 1812 was almost as sure a recipe for disaster as allowing him to mount a diversion into the Duchy of Warsaw.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2961-65  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:06 PM

In the thick of the fire Ostermann-Tolstoy sat unmoved on his horse, sniffing his tobacco. To messengers of doom requesting permission to retreat or warning that more and more Russian guns were being put out of action, Ostermann-Tolstoy responded by his own example of calm and by orders to ‘stand and die’. Radozhitsky commented that ‘this unshakeable strength of our commander at a time when everyone around him was being struck down was truly part of the character of a Russian infuriated by the sufferings being inflicted on his country. Looking at him, we ourselves grew strong and went to our posts to die.’31
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2987-91  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:09 PM

the Russian army had made its retreat, always covered by its numerous Cossacks, and without abandoning a single cannon, cart or sick man.’ The Count de Segur was on Napoleon’s staff and recalls an inspection of Barclay’s camp on the day after the Russians had departed: ‘nothing left behind, not one weapon, nor a single valuable; no trace, nothing in short, in this sudden nocturnal march, which could demonstrate, beyond the bounds of the camp, the route which the Russians had taken; there appeared more order in their defeat than in our victory!’34
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3094-99  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:23 PM

Anyone who has been through the experience of a first hot, dangerous and noisy battle can imagine the feelings of a soldier of my age. Everything seemed incomprehensible to me. I felt that I was alive, saw everything that was going on around me, but simply could not comprehend how this awful, indescribable chaos was going to end. To this day I can still vividly recall Neverovsky riding around the square every time the cavalry approached with his sword drawn and repeating in a voice which seemed to exude confidence in his troops: ‘Lads! Remember what you were taught in Moscow. Follow your orders and no cavalry will defeat you. Don’t hurry with your volleys. Shoot straight at the enemy and don’t anyone dare to start firing before my word of command.’45
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 3127-30  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:26 PM

Predictably, the Grand Duke Constantine’s was the loudest and most hysterical voice, screaming out within earshot of junior officers and men that ‘it isn’t Russian blood that flows in those who command us’. Barclay de Tolly also knew that his decision to retreat would anger Alexander and probably wreck his standing with the emperor. It took great resolution, unselfishness and moral courage for Barclay to act in the way he did. Perhaps Napoleon cannot be blamed for failing to predict this.47
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3194-3200  | Added on Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 05:32 PM

Unfortunately, however, confusion on the Moscow road very nearly allowed the French to get first to Lubino, block the paths out of the forest, and undermine everything Eugen and his men had achieved. Barclay had just made what arrangements he could to deal with the emergency facing Eugen, when he was informed that Second Army had retreated eastwards along the Moscow road without waiting for First Army, leaving the vital crossroads near Lubino open for the French to seize. Friedrich von Schubert was alone with Barclay when the message was delivered and he recalled that the commander-in-chief, normally so self-controlled and calm in crisis, said out aloud: ‘Everything is lost.’ Barclay can be forgiven his temporary loss of composure because this was one of the most dangerous moments for the Russians in the 1812 campaign.51
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 243 | Loc. 3719-23  | Added on Wednesday, November 25, 2015, 04:13 PM

More probably, Kutuzov and Toll were unwilling to weaken the force guarding their vital line of communication until absolutely convinced that Napoleon did not intend to strike in this direction. The price of defensive tactics is that troops must be deployed on the basis of assumptions and fears about where the enemy will strike. Given Napoleon’s reputation for surprise and daring this might result in many units being wasted far from the battlefield.
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Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (Dominic Lieven)
- Highlight on Page 305 | Loc. 4665-70  | Added on Thursday, December 03, 2015, 11:47 AM

Napoleon had entered Moscow on 15 September, and left the city on 19 October. During that period the relative strength of the rival armies changed in ways that had a decisive impact on the autumn campaign. While in Moscow Napoleon was reinforced by substantial numbers of infantry, which brought his overall numbers back over 100,000 and filled most of the gaps left by Borodino. Some of these infantry units were of good quality. They included, for example, the First Guards division, which had not been present at Borodino. By definition, infantry which had marched all the way from central and western Europe to Moscow was relatively tough. The core of Napoleon’s army was his Guards. Very few of these excellent troops had seen any action since the beginning of the campaign, as Kutuzov knew.