Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

by William L. Shirer

  BERLIN, November 18

  Yesterday nine young Czech students at the University of Prague were lined up before a German firing squad and executed. At the press conference this noon we asked the authorities why and they replied that the students had staged anti-German demonstrations in Prague on October 23 and November 15. “There can be no joking in war-time,” said our spokesman, a little bored by our question. Later in the day the Germans admitted that three more Czechs, two of them policemen, were shot for “attacking a German.” I would bet my shirt that in the twenty years that three million Sudeten Germans lived under Czech rule not a single one of them was ever executed for taking part in any kind of demonstration.

  Here in Germany three youths were executed yesterday for “treason.” And two youngsters aged nineteen were sentenced to death in Augsburg today for having committed a theft in the home of a soldier.

  Beach Conger of the Herald Tribune, who arrived here only a month ago, left today by request. The Nazis didn’t like a story he had written. They demanded a retraction. He declined. At the last minute, Beach says, a high Nazi official called him in and “offered” to get him the job as Berlin correspondent of a big American radio network, which rather surprised him, as it did me. Most of the American correspondents were at the station to see him off, and there were flowers for Mrs. Conger.

  Though the Nazis don’t like me, I suppose I shall never get kicked out of here. The trouble is my radio scripts are censored in advance, so that whatever I say over the air cannot be held against me. The newspaper correspondents can telephone out what they please, subject to the risk of getting what Conger got. This is almost a worse form of censorship than we have, since the New York offices of the press associations and New York newspapers do not like their correspondents to be kicked out.

  BERLIN, November 19

  For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air. From talks with German military people, however, I’m convinced it would be a mistake to think that Germany will accept the Allied challenge to fight this war largely on the economic front. That is just the kind of war in which the Reich would be at a disadvantage. And that’s one of the reasons why most people here expect military action very soon now.

  Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, today decreed that the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw henceforth must be shut off from the rest of the capital by barricades and placed under sharp police control. He says the Jews are “carriers of diseases and germs.” An American friend back from Warsaw tonight tells me the Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews. They are being herded into eastern Poland and forced to live in unheated shacks and robbed of any opportunity of earning bread and butter. Several thousand Jews from the Reich have also been sent to eastern Poland to die, he says.

  BERLIN, November 20

  The Nazis forced poor Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the Kaiser, to appear before our press conference at the Propaganda Ministry this evening and deny that Hitler had done anything to any member of the Hohenzollern family, as rumour had had it of late. “Auwi,” as he’s popularly called, is the only Hohenzollern who was once an active Nazi. He was in fact a storm trooper in the S.A. and was introduced to us today by Dr. Boehmer as “Obergruppenführer Prince August Wilhelm.” Nervous and a bit ashamed of his role, he told us what he had been told to say, ending his remarks with a resounding “Heil Hitler!” A curious end, I mused, for the Hohenzollerns, that resourceful Prussian family which produced Frederick the Great and Frederick’s father and Wilhelm II and raised first Prussia and then Germany to a world power.

  BERLIN, November 21

  Gestapo chief Himmler claimed today that he has found the man who planted the bomb that so narrowly missed blowing Hitler to bits at Munich a fortnight ago. His name is given as Georg Elser, thirty-six, and behind him, says Himmler, was the British Intelligence Service and Otto Strasser, a former Nazi leader and now a bitter enemy of Hitler, who lives in France. Himmler’s account of how Elser did it sounds fishy indeed. As one German put it to me today after reading the account: “Now I’m sure Himmler planted that bomb.”13

  Himmler also announced today, as if to confuse the public, that the alleged leader of the British Intelligence Service for Western Europe, a certain Mr. Best, and his accomplice, a certain Captain Stevens, had been nabbed by the Gestapo on November 9 at the German-Dutch frontier. This clears up the kidnapping case we heard about from Amsterdam. The Dutch say it took place on Dutch soil.

  A writer in the Völkische Beobachter will say tomorrow that after seeing Elser “you almost forget you are in the presence of a satanic monster. His eyes are intelligent and the face rather soft.”

  What Himmler and his gang are up to, obviously, is to convince the gullible German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides. The censor today cut out all reference in my script to the Reichstag fire.

  BERLIN, November 23

  Thanksgiving today. At the home of Chargé d’Affaires Alexander Kirk a hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table. At dinner I had another turkey at the Oechsners’, dragging Dorothy [Oechsner] over to the studio at midnight with me for a little interview on the air as to how she did it in war-time rationed Germany. She explained nicely how she got the whipped cream for the pumpkin pie by use of a new-fangled machine which extracts cream from butter.

  After December 1, horses, cows, and pigs not residing on regular farms are to get food cards too.

  BERLIN, November 26

  Bill White, son of William Allen, has been here and this week helped me make a study of night life in war-time which CBS wants me to air tonight. We found it booming. Off to Geneva tomorrow for a few days.

  GENEVA, December 1

  The Soviet Union has invaded Finland! Yesterday Red air-force bombers attacked Helsinki, killing seventy-five civilians, wounding several hundred. The great champion of the working class, the mighty preacher against “Fascist aggression,” the righteous stander-up for the “scrupulous and punctilious observance of treaties” (to quote Molotov as of a month ago), has fallen upon the most decent and workable little democracy in Europe in violation of half a dozen “solemn” treaties. The whole moral foundation which the Soviets have built up for themselves in international relations in the last ten years has collapsed like a house of cards, which the skeptics and anti-Communists always claimed it was. Stalin reveals himself of the same stamp as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japs. Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as “imperialist” as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

  I have raged for thirty hours; could not sleep last night, though I got little chance to. Since yesterday noon I have been continually on the telephone to Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Bern, Amsterdam, and London, organizing communications from Finland for our broadcasts, determined to get them through not only for our own sakes, but so the Finnish case may get a hearing at home. It has been hard sledding, one defeat after another, but we’re getting our broadcasts through. To begin with, Maxie tied up the Geneva transmitter, our only neutral outlet, for NBC. He also got to the Finns and Swedes first and somehow put over the idea that the talks of the Finnish President, Kallio, and the Foreign Minister, Erkko, were to be exclusive for NBC. A telephone call to the authorities in Helsinki cleared that up so far as the Finns were concerned, but I had great trouble convincing the Swedes in Stockholm, on whom I must depend for relaying everything from Finland, that the talks were not exclusive for NBC but were for us too. Searched all yesterday afternoon for a transmitter. The RRG in Berlin would give me neither a transmitter nor transit telephone lines through Germany. They have orders not to offend Russia. Called Amsterdam and tried to get the Dutch to lend me a transmitter but they were too frightened for their neutrality, which of course neither Russia nor Germany will respect one day if it is profitable not to. Finally Ed [Murrow] solved all our difficulties, though we will not tell the
Germans nor the Swedes nor even the Finns. He got the BBC to pick up the Swedish medium-wave transmitter, which in turn was taking the Helsinki broadcast by telephone line from Finland, and rebroadcasting it. The BBC then piped their pick-up to Rugby, where it was short-waved to our studios in New York. The ordinary way to have done a broadcast from Helsinki would have been to bring it by telephone line from Helsinki through Sweden and Germany to Switzerland and then short-wave it to New York through the Geneva transmitter. But Germany’s refusal to give us transit telephone facilities and Maxie’s tying up the local transmitter balked that. New York says our transmission from Helsinki was infinitely better than the opposition’s; theirs apparently was done by having Geneva pick up the Stockholm medium-waver, but since London has better facilities for receiving than has Geneva, our hook-up was bound to be superior.

  This afternoon I arranged with the Helsinki correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor to do the first eyewitness account of the Helsinki bombing—a scoop. And Harald Diettrich, head of Germany’s shortwave organization and a cool and fine technician (he has almost an artist’s appreciation of the technical job American broadcasters are doing to get their European pick-ups, and though a fanatical Nazi who bears watching, he is the one man in Germany I work smoothly and successfully with), told me on the phone he would do his best to get Goebbels to allow us transit telephone facilities if I guarantee my speakers are all Americans.

  Running a temperature from the flu, but shall keep going on these Finnish broadcasts. Tess pitched in wonderfully, spending several hours shouting into the phone in several languages, including the Scandinavian, which (Danish) she speaks perfectly, dispatching and receiving telegrams, which must be done exclusively over the phone, and generally helping. My telephone bill yesterday and today, including numerous urgent calls to Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and New York, has run over a thousand dollars and my cable and telegraph bill must come to almost half that. But Paul White and Klauber say: “Get the broadcasts.”

  BERLIN, December 7

  Caught Bill White by telephone in Stockholm and got him off to Helsinki to cover the Finnish war for us.14 Amusing note: Some of our people in New York thought one of his broadcasts from here the other night was very unneutral and cabled that while they personally agreed with Bill’s personal anti-Nazi bias, he should strive to be more objective. When I got to the Hundfunk House on my return day before yesterday, Diettrich approached me with Bill’s manuscript in his hand. I thought he was going to make an angry scene.

  “Read this,” he said.

  “What’s the matter with it?” I said, determined to defend it, though it had gone rather far in its biting irony against the Nazis.

  “Why, it’s wonderful! We here thought it was a wonderful broadcast, witty but fair—the kind you might do some time if you could forget your personal antipathy to Nazism,” he said.

  If I live in Germany a hundred years I shall never understand these people.

  BERLIN, December 10

  Ed [Murrow] and I on this Sabbath evening have just had the first telephone conversation to take place between Berlin and London since the telephone lines were cut at the beginning of the war. It was broadcast. Paul White’s idea, I believe, he being a fiend for “features.” Our voices actually travelled a long way. I heard Ed’s after it had gone by short-wave from London to New York, from where it was short-waved back to Berlin. Mine travelled the same route in the opposite direction. So that we would not give information of benefit to the enemy, we worked out our conversation in advance, I submitting my questions and Ed’s answers as well as his questions and my answers beforehand to the Germans and he doing the same with the British. Both sides proved very decent about the whole script. It was good to hear Ed’s voice. Once or twice he faded out and I couldn’t hear the cue to cut in, but on the whole it was great fun.

  It seems that Eleanor K. was arrested by the Gestapo at Bentheim near the Dutch border on her way from Amsterdam to Berlin and jumped out of the top storey of the local hotel where she had been confined. By a miracle she was not killed, though she broke her back, both legs, and an arm. She has now been released and has left for New York, I hear. Must get to the bottom of this. I am positive the secret police had nothing on her.

  BERLIN, December 13

  The liner Bremen has successfully run the British blockade and made its way back from Murmansk along the Norwegian coast to a German port. The British navy hasn’t looked very good on this one. Jordan and I scrapping as to who shall have the radio interview with Commodore Ahrens, the Bremen’s skipper. I do not like this kind of competition. By scrapping we play right into Nazi hands. The Propaganda Ministry is now insisting that Lothrop Stoddard, the American author who once skyrocketed himself to fame with the book The Rising Tide of Color and whose writings on racial subjects, I’m told, are featured in Nazi school textbooks, do the interview for both of us. I can’t have the Propaganda Ministry name my speakers, and have rejected the proposal even if CBS loses the broadcast.

  Ribbentrop’s White Book entitled Documents on the Origins of the War, published by the Foreign Office, is out today in several languages. From a first hasty perusal, I conclude it is about as dishonest as the man himself and the master he serves. Somewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler criticizes the old Imperial government for its lukewarm propaganda between 1914 and 1918 as to the origins of the war. Berlin at that time, it seems, took the stand that Germany in 1914 was no more to blame for the war than any other nation. Hitler thought that was bad propaganda. He says the Imperial government should have dinned it into the ears of all Germans that the Allies were exclusively responsible for the war. He’s doing that now.

  In an introduction Ribbentrop repeats an old lie which Hitler has assiduously built up as a gospel truth in this country: namely, that after Versailles Great Britain opposed every attempt by Germany to free herself from the chains of the peace treaty by peaceful means. Did Britain oppose German conscription in 1935? The occupation of the Rhineland in 1936? The Anschluss in 1938? The ceding to Germany of the Sudetenland, which had never belonged to it, in 1938?

  The Christmas trees are in and being snapped up. No matter how tough or rough or pagan a German may be, he has a childish passion for Christmas trees. People everywhere bravely trying to make this Christmas seem like the old ones in the time of peace. I did a little Christmas shopping today, and it was a bit sad. There were so many nice things in the windows which you couldn’t buy because they were only there for show, on the orders of the authorities. Germans usually give wearing apparel and soaps and perfumes and candy to one another for Christmas, but this year, with these articles rationed, they must find something else. In the shops, which were crowded, they were buying today mostly books, radios, gramophones, records, and jewelry. I tried to buy some gramophone records for the four girl secretaries at the Rundfunk who have been most friendly and helpful to me, but found you could only buy new records if you turned in your old ones. Having none, I was out of luck. The government is loosening up a little on rations over Christmas. Everyone will get a quarter of a pound of butter and a hundred grams of meat extra, and four eggs Christmas week instead of one.

  New title for Churchill in the Nazi press these days: Lügenlord—“lying lord.” Most common reference to Churchill in the Nazi press is simply by his initials W.C., the letters painted on every water-closet in Germany, which is why the Nazis use them.

  BERLIN, December 14

  The German papers tonight celebrate a great sea victory of the pocket-battleship Graf Spee over three British cruisers off Montevideo. On the radio I heard London hailing it as a British victory, which reminds one of Jutland, it, too, having been celebrated as a triumph by both Britain and Germany. The German papers claim the British cruisers used mustard-gas shells, though in German naval circles this charge is not taken seriously. Dr. Goebbels is certainly going to town on this story.

  BERLIN, December 18

  The populace is still a little
bit puzzled about how the big victory of the Graf Spee suddenly ended by the pocket-battleship scuttling itself off Montevideo yesterday afternoon. But Goebbels and Göring have pulled a neat one to make them forget it as soon as possible. The attention of the German people tomorrow morning will be concentrated by the press and radio on something else, an alleged victory—this time in the air—off Helgoland. An official statement which the papers and radio have been told to bang for all it’s worth says that thirty-four out of forty-four British bombers were shot down this afternoon north of Helgoland. A very timely victory. We had just left the evening press conference after firing embarrassing questions about the Graf Spee and were putting on our overcoats downstairs when Dr. Boehmer rushed in breathlessly and said he had some big news and would we please return upstairs to the conference room. Then he read us in breathless tones the communiqué about the thirty-four British planes being shot down. Suspect it is eyewash.

  Hear that the navy is fuming to Hitler about the way Goebbels bungled the propaganda on the Graf Spee. The admirals are especially sore because the day before it sank itself, Goebbels had the press play up a dispatch (and radioed photographs) from Montevideo saying the pocket-battleship had suffered only superficial damage and that British reports that it had been badly damaged were pure lies.

  More astute propaganda is that which tries to whip up the support of the people for this war by telling them of the dire consequences should the Allies win. Tomorrow the Völkische Beobachter will publish a map showing how Germany will look in case of a Franco-British victory. Newspapers in the Allied lands have already published it, the V.B. claims, though I doubt not that the Nazi editors have done some neat touching-up. According to this map, France has the Rhineland, Poland has eastern Germany, Denmark has Schleswig-Holstein, Czechoslovakia has Saxony, and to the south there is a huge Habsburg Empire which includes most of southern Germany. What is left of Germany is labelled “Occupied Territory.” Clever propaganda, and the German people will fall for it.