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

by William L. Shirer

  Wounded sailors and soldiers who escaped with their lives from the Blücher are arriving with horrible burns on their faces and necks. It seems that when the cruiser went down, it set loose on the water a lot of burning oil. Many men swimming about were burned to death. I suppose some of them died half from drowning, half from burning—a nice combination.

  Not a word about these things in the press. The German people are spoon-fed only the more pleasant and victorious aspects of the war. I doubt that in their present mood they could stand much bad news.

  Note that the Danes have been ruined by the German occupation. Denmark’s three million cows, three million pigs and twenty-five million laying hens live on imported fodder, mostly from North and South America and Manchukuo. Those supplies are now cut off. Denmark must slaughter most of its livestock, one of its main sources of existence.

  BERLIN, April 19

  An official communiqué today: “In view of the hostile attitude of the Norwegian King and the former Norwegian government, the Norwegian Minister and the staff of the Norwegian Legation have been asked to leave German territory by today.” They have.

  Hitler’s fifty-first birthday tomorrow, and the people have been asked to fly their flags. Said Dr. Goebbels in a broadcast tonight: “The German people have found in the Führer the incarnation of their strength and the most brilliant exponent of their national aims.” When I passed the Chancellery tonight, I noticed some seventy-five people waiting outside for a glimpse of the leader. In other years on the eve of his birthday there were ten thousand.

  BERLIN, April 21

  The secrecy of the Allies about where their troops have landed in Norway was lifted by the High Command today. They have landed at Namsos and Aandalsnes, the two railheads north and south respectively of Trondheim, the key port half-way up the Norwegian coast occupied by the Germans. A friend of mine on the High Command tells me that the whole issue in Norway now hangs on the outcome of the battle for Trondheim. If the Allies take it, they have saved Norway, or at least the northern half. If the Germans, pushing northward up the two railway lines from Oslo, get there first, then the British must evacuate. The Germans today occupied Lillehammer, eighty miles north of Oslo, but they still have a hundred and fifty miles to go. What the Germans fear most, I gather, is that the British navy will go into Trondheim Fjord and wipe out the German garrison in the city before the Nazi forces from Oslo can possibly get there. If it does, the German gamble is lost.

  I feel better tonight, after working this out, than at any other time since the war began.

  BERLIN, April 22

  Opposition to the German forces driving northward on Trondheim is stiffening. For the first time tonight the German High Command speaks of stubborn resistance in this sector. But the Luftwaffe is giving the British bases at Namsos, Aandalsnes, and Dombas a terrible pounding. General Milch, Göring’s right-hand man, has been dispatched to Norway to direct the air force. It’s Germany’s biggest hope there now.

  BERLIN, April 23

  Joseph Terboven, the tough young Nazi Gauleiter of Cologne, who was more than a match for Fritz Thyssen there, has been named Reich’s commissar for Norway. In other words, if Hitler wins, Norway will be just another Nazi province.

  Off to Lausanne to a meeting of the International Broadcasting Union. Spring along the lake under the Alps will be good.

  BERLIN, April 29

  Returned this morning from Switzerland. The crucial battle for Trondheim will probably be fought this week. The Germans, I find, are much more confident than a week ago when I left. Apparently the British expeditionary force is not so strong as they had expected. It seems evident from what I heard in Switzerland and here today that the first British troops thrown into the fighting around Lillehammer a week ago were few in numbers and miserably equipped—no tanks, no artillery, few anti-tank guns.

  Fred N., the best-informed man we have on this campaign at the Embassy, shocked me today by saying he still doubted whether the British were really taking the Norwegian campaign seriously. To cheer myself up I recalled to him that in the last war it took the British two years to get within striking distance of Bagdad, and then their main army and their commander-in-chief were captured by the Turks. A year or two later, however, the British took Bagdad and drove the Turks and Germans out of Mesopotamia. What the British army and navy need is a reverse or two. Then perhaps they will become serious.

  I heard just now that the original British force embarked in central Norway has been decimated.

  BERLIN, May 1

  Two days ago, for the fourth or fifth time since the war began, I travelled down the Rhine from Basel towards Frankfurt. The first twenty miles or so out of Basel, you skirt the Rhine where it divides France and Germany. Actually you ride through a sort of no-man’s land, as the main German lines are behind the railroad tracks on the slopes that form the high ground of the Black Forest. Two great armies stand divided by the river. Yet, all was quiet. In one village playground—it was Sunday—German children were playing in full sight of some French soldiers loitering on the other side of the river. In an open meadow, not two hundred yards from the Rhine and in full sight of a French block-house, some German soldiers were frolicking about, kicking an old football. Trains on both sides of the Rhine, some loaded with those very articles which are working such deadly havoc in Norway, chugged along undisturbed. Not a shot was fired. Not a single airplane could be seen in the skies.

  Last night I said in my broadcast: “What kind of war, what kind of game, is this? Why do airplanes bomb communications behind the lines in Norway, as they did in Poland, as they did everywhere in the World War, and yet here on the western front, where the two greatest armies in the world stand face to face, refrain completely from killing?”

  Is gas getting short? In Berlin 300 out of 1,600 taxis stopped running today and some twenty-five per cent of the private cars and trucks still allowed to circulate have been suddenly ordered to cease circulating.

  It’s clear that the Germans, with all the air bases in the north, have complete superiority in the air in Norway. Will this in itself be enough to allow them to advance victoriously to Trondheim? I’m afraid it will. It is this threat of the Luftwaffe that is making the British navy hold back. How otherwise explain the failure of the British to attack Trondheim from the sea, as they attacked Narvik, which is out of the reach of most German planes? But unless the British do go in from the sea, they’ll probably never get it. It’s a race, and the Germans are moving fast.

  LATER.—Today, which is German Labour Day and a holiday for all but munition workers, has seen Hitler issuing a grandiose order of the day to his troops in Norway. Last night the High Command announced that German troops coming north from Oslo and a German detachment coming south from Trondheim had made contact just south of the latter town. The battle for Trondheim has been won by Hitler. Where the Allies are, and what they’re doing, are not clear. But it doesn’t make much difference. They had a wonderful opportunity to stop Hitler and they’ve muffed it. One’s worst suspicions seem to be confirmed—namely, that the British never went into the fight for Trondheim (read Norway) seriously.

  “The intention of the Allies,” cries Hitler triumphantly, “to force us to our knees by a tardy occupation of Norway has failed.” Hitler addresses his order to the “Soldiers of the Norwegian Theatre of War.” Three weeks ago Ribbentrop told us that the Führer had prevented Norway from becoming a “theatre of war.”

  So this May Day turns out to be a day of victory for the Germans. Hitler, for the first time since he came to power, did not speak or make a public appearance. His deputy, Rudolf Hess, spoke in his place—from the Krupp munition works at Essen. He kept referring to Mr. Hambro as “that Jew, Mr. Hamburger.”

  Judging from the looks of the good burghers who thronged the Tiergarten today, the one wish in their hearts is for peace, and to hell with the victories. Still, I suppose this triumph in Norway will buck up morale, after the terrible winter. S., a vet
eran correspondent here, thinks every man, woman, and child in this country is a natural-born killer. Perhaps so. But today I noticed in the Tiergarten many of them feeding the squirrels and ducks—with their rationed bread.

  BERLIN, May 2

  A blue day for the Allies. In Joe’s room we listened to the six p.m. BBC broadcast for the bad news. Chamberlain had just announced in Commons the awful reverse. The British force which had been landed south of Trondheim, and which for the past ten days had been resisting the Germans moving towards Trondheim from Oslo, has been evacuated from Aandalsnes, their coastal base. Thus the British abandon southern and central Norway—the most important parts. The Norwegians in that considerable area, who have been putting up an epic fight, are left to their fate. Chamberlain admitted that it was the German air force that had prevented the British from landing tanks and artillery at Aandalsnes. But what about Churchill’s boast of April 11? What about the British navy?

  The feat of the German army in advancing more than two hundred miles north up the Osterdal and Gudbrandsdal valleys from Oslo to Trondheim, and at the same time easily holding Trondheim with a small force against Allied attacks from both the north and the south, is certainly a formidable one. The whole seizure of Norway, though aided by the basest treachery, has undoubtedly been a brilliant military performance. After three weeks the British, with all their sea power, have not even been able to take Narvik.

  Chamberlain boasted that as a result of the partial destruction of the German fleet the Allies had been able to strengthen their naval forces in the Mediterranean. Mussolini’s bluff that he might hop into the war behind Hitler thus was taken seriously by the old man. It certainly wasn’t here. It seems incredible to us here that Britain would withdraw the naval forces which would have enabled it to take Trondheim and thus defeat Hitler in Norway in order to strengthen its position against the tin-pot strength of Italy in the Mediterranean.

  BERLIN, May 4

  The British have pulled pell-mell out of Namsos to the north of Trondheim, thus completing the debacle of Allied aid to the Norwegians in central Norway.

  Where was the British navy which Churchill only a fortnight ago boasted would drive the Germans out of the Norwegian waters? I saw a German news-reel today. It showed the Germans landing tanks and heavy guns at Oslo. Except for the use of submarines, and apparently not many of these, the Allies made no serious effort to stop German supplies from reaching Norway through Oslo. They didn’t even risk destroyers in the Skagerrak and Kattegat, not to mention cruisers and battleships.

  Is it that air power has shown in this short Norwegian campaign that it has superseded naval power? At least, within flying distance of your land bases? In 1914–18 such a German thrust as has now taken place would have been unthinkable. But with the Luftwaffe holding the flying fields in Denmark and Norway, the Allied fleet not only did not venture into the Kattegat to stop the German shipment of arms and men to Oslo, but has not even attempted action at Trondheim, Bergen, or Stavanger, with the exception of one eighty-minute shelling of the Stavanger airfield the first week of the war. The Germans now boast that air power has demonstrated its superiority over naval power.

  To sum up: Göring’s planes accomplished four vital tasks in Norway: (1) They kept the sea route through the Kattegat to Oslo free of British warships and thus enabled the main German land force to be liberally supplied with men, artillery, tanks. (2) They prevented (or successfully discouraged) the British navy from attacking the vital German-held ports of Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim. (3) By continually bombing the Allied ports of debarkation, they made it almost impossible for the British to land heavy artillery and tanks, as Mr. Chamberlain admitted. (4) By bombing and machine-gunning enemy positions, they made it fairly easy for the German land troops to advance through difficult country.

  In other words, they revolutionized war in and around the North Sea.

  I talked to my policeman friend today. He thinks the war will develop in a few weeks into bombing the big towns, and even gas. I agree. Hitler wants to finish the war this summer if he can. If he can’t, despite all the German victories, he’s probably lost.

  A decree today explains that while there are plenty of oil supplies, consumption must be further reduced. Many cars and trucks still operating are to be taken out of circulation. Two questions pop up: (1) Supplies are not so big? (2) Available oil will be needed for further military action on a big scale now that the British have pulled out of Namsos and the Germans have won the war in Norway?

  The German papers today are full of accusations that Britain now intends to “spread the war.” In the Mediterranean or Balkans or somewhere else, by which I take it they mean Holland.

  As an escape, I suppose, I read some Goethe letters this afternoon. It was reassuring to be reminded of the devastation of Germany that Napoleon wrought. Apparently Jena, near Goethe’s Weimar, was pretty roughly handled by the French troops. But through it all the great poet never loses hope. He keeps saying that the Human Spirit will triumph, the European spirit. But today, where is the European spirit in Germany? Dead…. Dead…

  Goethe harps on the theory that a writer can only get things done by retiring from the world when he has work to do. He complains that the world takes, but does not give. Some of his letters on local administrative problems in Weimar are amusing. He had his small, bickering side. And—surprising—he is very subservient to his Prince Ruler!

  BERLIN, May 6

  Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, in a broadcast to schoolchildren today, sums up pretty well the German mentality in this year of 1940. He says: “God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn’t understand the laws of life’s battles will be counted out, as in the boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them…. The German people under Hitler did not take to arms to break into foreign lands and make other people serve them. They were forced to take arms by states which blocked their way to bread and union.”

  The crying problem of Europe, I am beginning to think, is not Communism or Fascism—is not therefore social. It is the problem of Germanism, of the mentality so clearly expressed by Rust. Until it’s solved, there will be no peace in Europe.

  German schoolgirls today were asked to bring the combings from their hair to school. The combings will be collected to make felt.

  BERLIN, May 7

  For three or four days now the German newspapers have been carrying on a terrific campaign to convince somebody that the Allies, having failed in Norway, are about to become “aggressors” in some other part of Europe. Six weeks ago we had a similar campaign to convince somebody that the Allies were about to become the “aggressors” in Scandinavia. Then Germany, using the alleged Allied intention of aggression as an excuse, went in herself.

  Where is Germany going in next? I’m suspicious of Holland, partly because it’s the one place not specifically mentioned in this propaganda campaign. Or are the Allies, having sucked the German army far from home bases into Norway, going to draw it far into the Balkans?

  Amusing to read the headlines today: “CHAMBERLAIN, THE AGGRESSOR. ALLIED PLANS FOR NEW AGGRESSION!” If the German people were not so intellectually drunk themselves, or so stupid, they might see the humour in it.

  My guess: the war in the next few weeks will be on all over Europe. And, finally, with all the weapons: bombing of open towns, gas, and all.

  BERLIN, May 8

  Could not help noticing a feeling of tension in the Wilhelmstrasse today. Something is up, but we don’t know what. Ralph Barnes, just in from Amsterdam, says the guards on his train pulled down the window-blinds for the first twenty-five miles of the journey from the Dutch-German frontier towards Berlin. I hear the Dutch and Belgians are nervous. I hope they are. They ought to be. I cabled New York today to keep Edwin Hartrich in Amsterdam for the time being. They wanted to send him off to Scandinavia, where the war is over.

  Just before I went on the
air today, Fred Oechsner telephoned to say that Webb Miller had been found dead on a railroad track at Clapham Junction, near London. The news shocked me greatly. I have known him for twelve years, liked him, admired him. In my first years over here as a green newspaperman, he befriended and helped me. In the last decade our paths often crossed, in India, the Near East, the Balkans, Germany, Geneva, Italy, and of course in London, where he was U.P.’s star correspondent and European chief. Webb was an inordinately modest man, despite as distinguished a journalistic career as any American has had in our time. His success never went to his head. I remember him on many a big story being as excited and nervous, and if it were an interview, as shy, as the youngest and most inexperienced of us. His shyness was terrific and he never lost it. I wonder what killed him? Tired? Sleepy? I know it wasn’t suicide.

  I went out to a suburb last night to see the film of havoc wrought by the German air force in Poland. It is called Feuertaufe—or Baptism of Fire. The wanton destruction of Polish towns and villages, but especially of Warsaw, is shown nakedly. The German audience took the film in dead silence.

  LATER.—My censors were quite decent today. They let me hint very broadly that the next German blow would fall in the west,—Holland, Belgium, the Maginot Line, Switzerland. Tonight the town is full of rumours. The Wilhelmstrasse is especially angry at an A.P. report that two German armies, one from Bremen, the other from Düsseldorf, are moving towards the Dutch frontier.