
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 30, 1993                   TAG: 9312300194
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Short

`THIRD REICH' AUTHOR WILLIAM SHIRER DIES AT 89

Journalist and author William L. Shirer, who wrote the acclaimed chronicle of Hitler's regime, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," died Tuesday at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had been hospitalized since Dec. 5 with heart ailments. He was 89.

His reporting career took him across Europe in the '20s and '30s. From 1939 until December 1940, he reported for CBS from wartime Berlin, sometimes attempting to foil German censors by using American slang to give information on the operations of the German army.

Shirer said of two of the main subjects he covered: "It's sort of ironic that in my journalistic career that the two great men that I spent most of my life covering were Gandhi and Hitler. Both of them geniuses, but Hitler an evil genius."

"The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," published in 1960, was based on extensive diaries he kept in Germany and smuggled out when he left, as well as on voluminous, confidential German archives that the Allies captured at the close of the war.

During the McCarthy era he was blacklisted for his support of Hollywood writers accused of leftist tendencies and for his early support of anti-fascists in Spain.

Despite the hardships, he called the years out of work "the best thing that happened to me" because he had the time to complete "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

by CNB