Writings of History

William L. Shirer's best‐selling Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941 profoundly shaped US‐American public opinion about Hitler and Nazi Germany. It has been and still is widely used as a source in historiography and historical journalism. The Berlin Diary was also the starting point of Shirer's writing career that led to the publication of the seminal The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). Contrary to the book's self‐image, its paratextual shape and reception, it is not an ‘authentic day‐to‐day record of events’, but a highly edited and literary text: this article compares – for the first time – the distinctly different version of Shirer's diary that can be found among his papers and the published work. Firstly, an error in judgment of 1935 about Hitler that Shirer censored in his 1941 publication (and which he reinstated in 1984 in his memoirs) is analysed in detail. Secondly, further examples of seemingly minor alterations in entries of 1939/40 illustrate to what extent and with what intentions Shirer altered his diary for publication

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