William L. Shirer - Pre-war Years

Pre-war Years

As a print journalist and later as a radio reporter for CBS, Shirer covered the strengthening one-party rule in Nazi Germany beginning in 1934. Shirer reported on Adolf Hitler's peacetime triumphs like the return of the Saarland to Germany and the remilitarization of the Rhineland.

Shirer was hired in 1934 for the Berlin bureau of the Universal News Service, one of William Randolph Hearst's two wire services. In Berlin Diary, Shirer described this move, in a self-proclaimed bad pun, as going from “bad to Hearst”. When Universal News Service folded in August 1937, Shirer was first taken on as second man by Hearst's other wire service, International News Service, then laid off a few weeks later.

On the day when Shirer received two weeks' notice from INS, he received what was a wire from Edward R. Murrow, European manager of Columbia Broadcasting System, suggesting the two meet. At their meeting a few days later in Berlin, Murrow said he couldn't cover all Europe from London and was seeking an experienced correspondent to open a CBS office on the Continent. He offered Shirer a job subject to an audition—a "trial broadcast"—to let CBS directors and vice presidents in New York judge Shirer's voice.

Shirer feared his reedy voice was unsuitable for radio, but he was hired. As European bureau chief, he set up headquarters in Vienna, a more central and more neutral spot than Berlin. His job was to arrange broadcasts, and early in his career he expressed disappointment at having to hire newspaper correspondents to do the broadcasting; at the time, CBS correspondents were prohibited from speaking on the radio.

Shirer was the first of "Murrow's Boys," broadcast journalists who provided news coverage during World War II and afterward.

CBS's prohibition of correspondents talking on the radio, viewed by Murrow and Shirer as "absurd," ended in March 1938. Shirer was in Vienna on March 11, 1938, when the German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) took place after weeks of mounting pressure by Nazi Germany on the Austrian government. As the only American broadcaster in Vienna (NBC rival Max Jordan was not in town), Shirer had a scoop but lacked the facilities to report it to his audience. Occupying German troops controlling the Austrian state radio studio would not let him broadcast. At Murrow's suggestion, Shirer flew to London via Berlin; he recalled in Berlin Diary that the direct flight to London was filled with Jews trying to escape German-occupied Austria. Once in London, Shirer broadcast the first uncensored eyewitness account of the annexation. Meanwhile, Murrow flew from London to Vienna to cover for Shirer.

The next day, CBS's New York headquarters asked Shirer and Murrow to produce a European roundup, a 30-minute broadcast featuring live reporting from five European capitals: Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Rome, and London. The broadcast, arranged in eight hours using the telephone and broadcasting facilities of the day, was a major feat. This first news roundup established a formula still used in broadcast journalism. It was also the genesis of what became CBS World News Roundup, still on the network each morning and evening, network broadcasting's oldest news series.

Shirer reported on the Munich Agreement and Hitler's march into Czechoslovakia before reporting the growing tensions between Germany and Poland in 1939 and the German invasion of Poland that launched World War II on September 1, 1939. During much of the pre-war period, Shirer was based in Berlin and attended Hitler's speeches and several Nazi party rallies (Reichsparteitage) in Nuremberg.