William Lawrence Shirer (/ˈʃaɪrər/; February 23, 1904 – December 28, 1993) was an American journalist, war correspondent, and historian.

His The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany, has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 60 years; its 50th anniversary was marked by a new edition of the book.

Working his way to Europe on a cattle boat with the intention of spending the summer, he remained there for fifteen years.

As European bureau chief, he set up headquarters in Vienna, a more central and more neutral spot than Berlin.

Shirer was thus 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.

On the day before the armistice was to be signed, Hitler ordered all foreign correspondents covering the German Army from Paris to move back to Berlin.

Shirer avoided being returned to Berlin by leaving the press hotel early in the morning and hitching a ride to Compiègne with a German officer who despised Hitler.

Once on site, Shirer was able to give an eye-witness account of that historical moment, "I am but fifty yards from [Hitler].

After the armistice was signed, Shirer was allowed to transmit his own broadcast to Berlin, but only for recording and release after the Nazi version had been disseminated.

Shirer spent five minutes before he went on the air calling CBS radio in New York, hoping that the broadcast would get through.

When German engineers in Berlin heard Shirer calling New York, they assumed that he was authorized to broadcast.

However, as the war continued and as Britain began to bomb German cities, including Berlin, Nazi censorship became more onerous to Shirer and his colleagues.

As the summer of 1940 progressed, the Nazi government pressed Shirer to broadcast official accounts that he knew were incomplete or false.

Shirer was subsequently tipped off that the Gestapo was building an espionage case against him, which carried the death penalty.

Shirer received a 1946 Peabody Award for Outstanding Reporting and Interpretation of News for his work at CBS.

Shirer briefly provided analysis for the Mutual Broadcasting System and then found himself unable to find regular radio work.

He was named in Red Channels (1950), which practically barred him from broadcasting and print journalism, and he was forced into lecturing for income.

Fawcett Crest gained paperback rights for $400,000 – a record for the time – and a further 1 million copies were sold at $1.65 (equivalent to $17 in 2023).

CBS received thousands of letters and phone calls protesting the end of Shirer's broadcasts.

Though the two chatted, Shirer steered the conversation away from contentious issues between the two men, and they never had another opportunity to speak before Murrow died in 1965.

Shirer's daughter also writes that, shortly before her father's death in 1993, he rebuffed her attempts to learn the source of the breach that opened between the two journalists 45 years earlier.