BERLIN, October 18
The place where the German U-boat sank the British battleship Royal Oak was none other than the middle of Scapa Flow, Britain’s greatest naval base! It sounds incredible. A World War submarine commander told me tonight that the Germans tried twice to get a U-boat into Scapa Flow during the last war, but both attempts failed and the submarines were lost.
Captain Prien, commander of the submarine, came tripping into our afternoon press conference at the Propaganda Ministry this afternoon, followed by his crew—boys of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Prien is thirty, clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi, and obviously capable. Introduced by Hitler’s press chief, Dr. Diettrich, who kept cursing the English and calling Churchill a liar, Prien told us little of how he did it. He said he had no trouble getting past the boom protecting the bay. I got the impression, though he said nothing to justify it, that he must have followed a British craft, perhaps a mine-sweeper, into the base. British negligence must have been something terrific.
BERLIN, October 19
Germans shut both NBC and us off the air this noon. I saw Hill’s script beforehand and approved it. The Nazi censor maintained it would create a bad impression abroad. In the afternoon I called on Dr. Boehmer and told him we would stop broadcasting altogether if today’s action meant we could only talk about matters which created a nice impression. He assured me it was all a mistake. Tonight for my broadcast the censor let me say what I wanted. The High Command tonight issues a detailed report of what has been happening on that mysterious western front. Nothing much at all has happened, it says, and I’m inclined to believe it, though Paris has swamped America for weeks with wild tales of a great French offensive against the Westwall. High Command says German losses up to October 17 in the west have been 196 killed, 114 missing, 356 wounded. Which tends to prove how local the action there has been. I’m almost convinced that the German army tells the truth in regard to its actions. The navy exaggerates, the air force simply lies.
BERLIN, October 21
The Wilhelmstrasse furious at the Turks for signing a mutual-assistance pact with the British day before yesterday. Papen jerked back here hurriedly and was called before the master, my spies tell me, for a dressing-down. It’s the first diplomatic blow the Germans have taken in a long time. They don’t like blows.
BERLIN, October 22
Eintopf—one-pot—day—this Sunday. Which means all you can get for lunch is a cheap stew. But you pay the price of a big meal for it, the difference going to the Winter Relief, or so they say. Actually it goes into the war chest. Suddenly and without warning at eight fifteen tonight Goebbels went on the air and blasted away at Churchill, accusing him of having sunk the Athenia. He called Churchill a liar a dozen times and kept shouting: “Your impudent lies, Herr Churchill! Your infernal lies!” From Goebbels!
BERLIN, October 24
The German people who have been hoping for peace until the bitter end were finally told tonight by Ribbentrop in a speech at Danzig that the war will now have to be fought to a finish. I suppose every government that has ever gone to war has tried to convince its people of three things: (1) that right is on its side; (2) that it is fighting purely in defence of the nation; (3) that it is sure to win. The Nazis are certainly trying to pound these three points into the skins of the people. Modern propaganda technique, especially the radio, certainly helps them.
Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady’s handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.
BERLIN, October 28
I hear in business circles that severe rationing of clothing will begin next month. The truth is that, having no cotton and almost no wool, the German people must get along with what clothing they have until the end of the war.
BERLIN, October 29
I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1) Gone with the Wind, translated as Vom Winde Verweht—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s Citadel; (3) Beyond Sing the Woods, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman.
Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1) The Coloured Front, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2) Look Up the Subject of England, a propaganda book about England; (3) Der totale Krieg, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4) Fifty Years of Germany, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5) So This is Poland, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928.
Three anti-Soviet books, I’m told, are still selling well despite official orders to soft-pedal any anti-Soviet or anti-Bolshevik talk since the August pact with Moscow. Most popular of these books is Socialism Betrayed, by a former German Communist named Albrecht. Detective stories still hold their own in war-time Germany, and hastily written volumes about submarine and aerial warfare are also doing well. A German told me today that the only American magazine he could find at his news-stand this afternoon was one called True Love Stories, or something like that, October issue.
Theatres here doing a land-office business, playing mostly the classics, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare. Shaw is the most popular living playwright here now. Only successful German modern play on is Gerhart Hauptmann’s new one, The Daughter of the Cathedral. Poor old Hauptmann, once an ardent Socialist and a great playwright, has now become a Nazi and a very senile man.
In the movie world the big hit at the moment is Clark Gable in Adventure in China, as it’s called here. It’s packing them in for the fourth week at the Marmorhaus. A German film is lucky if it holds out a week.
The power of radio! My remarks about the scarcity of shaving soap and the probability of my having to grow a beard have brought a great response from home. I gave up my beard after ten days. It was pink and straggly and everyone laughed.
BERLIN, October 30
Bad news for the people today. Now that it has become cold and rainy, with snow due soon, the government has decreed that only five per cent of the population is entitled to buy new rubbers or overshoes this winter. Available stocks will be rationed first to postmen, newsboys, and street-sweepers.
BERLIN, October 31
Consider the words of Comrade Molotov, spoken before the Supreme Soviet Council in Moscow today, as reported here: “We stand for the scrupulous and punctilious observance of pacts… and we declare that all nonsense about Sovietizing the Baltic countries is only to the interest of our common enemy and of all anti-Soviet provocateurs.”
The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.
BERLIN, November 2
General Hugh Johnson, one of the few Americans—Lindbergh is another—often quoted in the Nazi press, makes the front pages here today. Johnson’s views on the American ship City of Flint, which was captured by the Nazis the other day are headlined in the 12-Uhr Blatt: “UNCALLED-FOR INDIGNATION OVER THE ‘CITY OF FLINT’—GENERAL JOHNSON AGAINST OBVIOUS AGITATION.”
The anti-Comintern is dead. I learn the Nazi anti-Comintern museum, which used to show us the horrors of Bolshevism here, has quietly closed down. This week the Nazi editor of the Contra-Komintern wrote his subscribers apologizing for the non-appearance of the magazine in September and explaining that it would be coming out under a new name. He intimated that the editors had ascertained that Germany’s real enemies after all were not Bolsheviks, but Jews. “Behind all the enemies of Germany’s ascendancy,” he writes, “stand those who demand our encirclement—the oldest enemies of the German people and of all healthy, rising nations—the Jews.”
BERLIN, November 4
The radio people here in great secrecy had kindly offered to take me up to a Baltic port and let me broadcast the arrival of the City of Flint, which was scheduled for tom
orrow. But the Norwegians seized it day before yesterday and saved me the assignment. The Wilhelmstrasse furious and threatening the Norwegians with dire consequences if they don’t turn the American ship over to Germany.
BERLIN, November 5
CBS wants me to broadcast a picture of Hitler at work during war-time. I’ve been inquiring around among my spies. They say: He rises early, eats his first breakfast at seven a.m. This consists usually of either a glass of milk or fruit-juice and two or three rolls, on which he spreads marmalade liberally. Like most Germans, he eats a second breakfast, this one at nine a.m. It’s like the first except that he also eats a little fruit. He begins his working day by wading into state papers (a job he detests, since he hates detail work) and discussing the day’s program with his adjutants, chiefly S.A. Leader Wilhelm Brückner, and especially with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was once his private secretary and is one of the few men he trusts with his innermost thoughts. During the forenoon he usually receives the chiefs of the three armed services, listens to their reports and dictates decisions. With Göring he talks about not only air-force matters but general economic problems, or rather results, since he’s not interested in details or even theories on this subject.
Hitler eats a simple lunch, usually a vegetable stew or a vegetable omelet. He is of course a vegetarian, teetotaller, and non-smoker. He usually invites a small circle to lunch, three or four adjutants, Hess, Dr. Diettrich, his press chief, and sometimes Göring. A one-percent beer, brewed specially for him, is served at this meal, or sometimes a drink made out of kraut called “Herve,” flavoured with a little Mosel wine.
After lunch he returns to his study and work. More state papers, more conferences, often with his Foreign Minister, occasionally with a returned German ambassador, invariably with some party chieftain such as Dr. Ley or Max Amann, his old top sergeant of the World War and now head of the lucrative Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag, which gets out the Völkische Beobachter and in which Hitler is a stockholder. Late in the afternoon Hitler takes a stroll in the gardens back of the Chancellery, continuing his talk during the walk with whoever had an appointment at the time. Hitler is a fiend for films, and on evenings when no important conferences are on or he is not overrunning a country, he spends a couple of hours seeing the latest movies in his private cinema room at the Chancellery. News-reels are a great favourite with him, and in the last weeks he has seen all those taken in the Polish war, including hundreds of thousands of feet which were filmed for the army archives and will never be seen by the public. He likes American films and many never publicly exhibited in Germany are shown him. A few years ago he insisted on having It Happened One Night run several times. Though he is supposed to have a passion for Wagnerian opera, he almost never attends the Opera here in Berlin. He likes the Metropol, which puts on tolerable musical comedies with emphasis on pretty dancing girls. Recently he had one of the girls who struck his fancy to tea. But only to tea. In the evening, too, he likes to have in Dr. Todt, an imaginative engineer who built the great Autobahn network of two-lane motor roads and later the fortifications of the Westwall. Hitler, rushing to compensate what he thinks is an artistic side that was frustrated by non-recognition in his youthful days in Vienna, has a passion for architects’ models and will spend hours fingering them with Dr. Todt. Lately, they say, he has even taken to designing new uniforms. Hitler stays up late, and sleeps badly, which I fear is the world’s misfortune.
BERLIN, November 7
The Queen of the Netherlands and the King of the Belgians have offered to mediate peace. Small hope. The offer coolly received here. The Dutch and Belgians still decline to have staff talks together. But their historic neutrality, their refusal to ally themselves with one side or the other, may land them in the soup unless they junk it. Much talk here about the Germans pushing through Holland. This would not only turn the Maginot Line, but give the Germans air bases a hundred miles from the English coast.
LATER.—Four or five of us American correspondents had a talk with Göring tonight at—of all places—the Soviet Embassy, to which we had repaired for the annual reception on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Amid the glittering decorations and furnishings left over from Czarist Russia, but with the portrait of Lenin smiling down upon us, Göring stood against the buffet table sipping a beer and smoking a long stogey. He was in an expansive mood, and when a frightened adjutant reminded him he was speaking to the “American press,” he said he didn’t mind. We thought—naïvely, I suppose—that he might be resentful of the repeal a few days ago of our neutrality bill and of the boast at home that we would soon be selling thousands of planes to the Allies to help beat Nazi Germany. He wasn’t. Instead, he kidded us about our capacity to build planes.
“If we could only make planes at your rate of production,” he said, “we should be very weak. I mean that seriously. Your planes are good, but you don’t make enough of them fast enough.”
“Well, will Germany deliver a mass attack in the air before these thousands of American planes are delivered to the Allies?” we asked.
He laughed. “You build your planes, and our enemies theirs, and we’ll build ours, and one day you’ll see who has been building the best and the most planes.”
The talk continued:
“What do you think of the general situation?”
“Very favourable to Germany.”
“So far your air force has only attacked British warships. Why?”
“Warships are very important objects. And they give us good practice.”
“Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?”
“We’re humane.”
We couldn’t suppress our laughter at this, whereupon Göring retorted: “You shouldn’t laugh. I’m serious. I am humane.”
BERLIN, November 8
Without previous notice, Hitler made an unexpected speech in the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich tonight on the anniversary of his 1923 beer-house Putsch. Neither the radio nor the press hinted that he would be speaking tonight, and officials in the Wilhelmstrasse learned about it only an hour before it took place. Speech broadcast by all German stations, but for some reason was not offered to us for transmission to America. Hitler told the people to make up their minds to a long war and disclosed that on the Sunday two months ago when Britain and France came into the war, he ordered Göring to prepare for five years of conflict.
BERLIN, November 9
Twelve minutes after Hitler and all the big party leaders left the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich last night, at nine minutes after nine o’clock, a bomb explosion wrecked the hall, killed seven, wounded sixty-three. The bomb had been placed in a pillar directly behind the rostrum from which Hitler had been speaking. Had he remained twelve minutes and one second longer he surely would have been killed. The spot on which he stood was covered with six feet of debris.
No one yet knows who did it. The Nazi press screams that it was the English, the British secret service! It even blames Chamberlain for the deed. Most of us think it smells of another Reichstag fire. In other years Hitler and all the other bigwigs have remained after the speech to talk over old times with the comrades of the Putsch and guzzle beer. Last night they fairly scampered out of the building leaving the rank and file of the comrades to guzzle among themselves. The attempted “assassination” undoubtedly will buck up public opinion behind Hitler and stir up hatred of England. Curious that the official Nazi paper, the Völkische Beobachter, was the only morning paper today to carry the story. A friend called me with the news just as I had finished broadcasting at midnight last night, but all the German radio officials and the censors denied it. They said it was a silly rumour.
BERLIN, November 11
Armistice Day. An irony! Listened to the broadcast from Munich of the state funeral for the beer-house victims. Hitler present, did not speak. Hess spoke. He said: “This attentat has taught us how to hate.” I think they knew before.
Informed today that someone last night threw a br
ick into the window where the court photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, exhibits his flattering portraits of Hitler. A policeman fired, but the culprit got away in the black-out. Police protection of big shots being increased.
Something’s in the wind. Learned today that Hitler’s headquarters train has steam up. Party gossip about a mass air attack on England. A drive through Holland and Belgium. Or one through Switzerland.
BERLIN, November 12
The Germans announce they’ve shot “by sentence of court-martial” the Polish mayor of Bromberg. They say an investigation showed he was “implicated in the murder of Germans and the theft of city funds.” That, I suppose, is a German peace. I cannot recall that the Allies shot the mayors of German towns after the Rhineland occupation.
BERLIN, November 12
The ration cards for clothing out today, and many long German faces to be seen. There are separate cards for men, women, boys, girls, and babies. Except for the babies, everyone gets a hundred points on his card. Socks or stockings take five points, but you can buy only five pair per year. A pair of pyjamas costs thirty points, almost a third of your card, but you can save five points if you buy a nightgown instead. A new overcoat or suit takes sixty points. I figured out tonight that with my card, which limits your purchases by the seasons, I could buy from December 1 to April 1: two pairs of socks, two handkerchiefs, one muffler, and a pair of gloves. From April 1 to September 1: one shirt, two collars, and a suit of underwear. For the rest of the year: two neckties and one undershirt.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 Page 21