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

by William L. Shirer

  Will Brussels be bombed, after last night’s German threat? P., always well informed on German intentions, thinks Hitler will bomb Paris and London to daylights within the next forty-eight hours.

  I just saw two uncensored news-reels at our press conference in the Propaganda Ministry. Pictures of the German army smashing through Belgium and Holland. Some of the more destructive work of German bombs and shells was shown. Towns laid waste, dead soldiers and horses lying around, and the earth and mortar flying when a shell or bomb hit. Yelled the German announcer: “And thus do we deal death and destruction on our enemies!” The film, in a way, summed up the German people to me.

  Towards sundown Joe [Harsch] and I took a walk in the Tiergarten and agreed: The savage destruction by high explosives and steel of the other fellow is a beautiful thing and the fulfilment of a high aim in Germanic life; blow up his home and his wife and his children. But let him do the same to you—then he is a barbarian destroying the innocent. The film, we recalled, switched back to Freiburg, where the Germans now claim some thirty-five people, including thirteen children (though Goebbels forgot to mention the children until twenty-four hours after he had announced the bombing and the number of victims), were killed by Allied bombs. Said the announcer angrily: “Thus do our brutal and unscrupulous enemies bomb and kill and murder innocent German children.”

  “It’s the old story,” I said to Joe. “The German always wants it both ways.”

  How would I get through the war without the Tiergarten, one of God’s great parks? We remarked on what a deep green the grass had today and argued about the respective merits of mowing grass, as at home, and letting it grow long, for hay, as here. Curious that the lawn-mower is almost unknown on the Continent. The foliage around the little stream in the middle of the park was so luxuriant today, it reminded me of the Barbizon paintings. Or of a Normandy lily pond by Monet. Missing was only a stately lady clad in fin de siècle garb sitting very upright in a rustic boat in the middle of the pond.

  Picked up on the shortwave Roosevelt reading a special message to Congress. He came through very clearly. In great form, I thought. He proposed we build 50,000 (!) planes a year and deliver Allied orders immediately. He said Germany now had 20,000 planes to the Allies’ 10,000 and was still building them faster. This is a truth obvious to all of us here, but when we used to report it we were accused of making Nazi propaganda. Roosevelt received the greatest ovation I’ve ever heard in a broadcast from Congress. It makes you feel good that they’re waking up at home at last.

  How long before we’re in this war, as at least a mighty supplier to the Allies—if there’s still time? The Germans say we’re too late. The Herald Tribune came out today, according to the BBC, for a declaration of war on Germany. This led some of the American correspondents at dinner tonight to speculate as to what chances we who are stationed here would have of getting out, were diplomatic relations to be severed. The majority thought we would be interned. No one liked the prospect.

  We’re on the eve tonight of a great battle, perhaps the decisive battle of the war, on a front stretching for 125 miles from Antwerp through Namur to a point south of Sedan. It looks as though the Germans were going to throw in everything they have, which is plenty. Their drive through Belgium appears to have been halted yesterday on the Meuse River and the Dyle Line farther north. But it is only a pause before the great final attack. Hitler must win it, and all the battles in the next weeks or months, or he’s finished. His chances look very good. But great decisive battles in history have not always been won by the favourites.

  BERLIN, May 17

  What a day! What news! At three p.m. the High Command came out with its daily communiqué. I would not have believed it except that the German land army has seldom misled us since the first days of the Polish war on what it has accomplished. Often its claims have sounded incredible, only to turn out in the end to have been correct.

  Today the High Command states its armies have broken through the Belgian Dyle defence line south of Wavre and have taken the “northeast front” of the fortress of Namur. More important still—it claims its forces have broken through the Maginot Line on a one-hundred-kilometre front (!) stretching from Maubeuge to Carignan, southeast of Sedan. This indeed looks bad for the Allies. And it begins to look too as if the help—especially in badly needed planes (for the Germans are winning this campaign largely through effective use of a superior airforce), which Roosevelt offered to the Allies yesterday—will come too late. Unless the Germans are immediately slowed down, and then stopped. That they haven’t been yet, the BBC admitted this evening. It spoke of fighting going on at Rethel, which is half-way to Reims from Sedan. We here had no idea the Germans had broken through that far. At the Rundfunk tonight I noticed the military people for the first time spoke of a “French rout.”

  I went on the air as soon as I could translate the communiqué—at three thirty p.m.—with an extra broadcast of the news. I returned to the Embassy, where I found everyone dazed at events. A few seemed cheered by an editorial in the D.A.Z. which declared that the big decision had not yet fallen and that a hard road still lay ahead for the Germans. But hell, this offensive is only eight days old. And the Germans have overrun Holland and half of Belgium and are now half-way from the French border to Reims!

  Worried about Tess. Phoned her this noon and urged her to get off today over France towards Spain with the baby. Now, tonight, I hope she hasn’t done it, especially as the French are making them go way north to Paris first, in order to get to Bordeaux. Paris is no place to get into now, after today’s news. The Germans may beat her there. Annoyed because I couldn’t get through to her again on the phone tonight, which makes me think she already has left for France. Think best thing for her to do is to take refuge in a Swiss mountain village. Perhaps Hitler won’t bomb a small Swiss mountain village.

  Today turned warm and sunny, and you couldn’t tell from the apathetic, almost lazy attitude of Berliners taking the sun in the Tiergarten that a decisive, perhaps the decisive battle of the war was on. Not a single air-raid alarm here yet since the new offensive started, though we hear that the Ruhr and the Rhine towns are catching it at night.

  LATER.—The High Command late tonight announced that German troops entered Brussels at sundown. During the day they had pierced the Allied lines north and south of Louvain. Things seem to be moving fast. In 1914 it took sixteen days for the Germans to reach Brussels. This time, eight days.

  BERLIN, May 18

  Going to the front tomorrow. At last will get a chance—maybe—to see how this German army colossus has been doing it, walking through Belgium, Holland, and now northern France, so fast.

  I hesitated about going for fear the decision might come in France while I was away and that the story in that case would really be here and I’d miss it. Also they’ve given us so many dud trips since this war started last September that it’s highly possible we shan’t see anything of real interest.

  I finally decided to take the chance. We leave at ten a.m. tomorrow, and will first drive to Aachen. Nine in the party: four Americanos, three Italians, a Spaniard, and a Jap.

  Antwerp fell today. And while the German army is rolling back the Allied forces in Belgium towards the sea, the southern army, which broke through the Maginot Line between Maubeuge and Sedan, is driving rapidly towards Paris. A piece in the well-informed (on military matters) Börsen Zeitung tonight hints that the German armies now converging on Paris from the northeast may not try to take Paris immediately, as they did in 1914, but strike northwest for the Channel ports in an effort to cut off England from France. A second force, it hints, may strike in the opposite direction and try to take the Maginot Line in the east from behind.

  German reports admit the Allies are putting up fierce resistance in Belgium and France, but say that they are being “outclassed” by the sheer mass of German metal, especially tanks and airplanes. Perhaps in the next few days I’ll be able to see for myself.

 
AACHEN, HOTEL INTERNATIONAL, May 19 (midnight)

  Most amazing thing about this Ruhr district, the industrial heart of Germany, which Allied planes were to have (and could have, we thought) knocked out in a few days, is that, so far as I can see, the night bombings of the British have done very little damage.

  I thought the night bombings of western Germany, the deadly effects of which the BBC has been boasting since the big offensive began, would have affected the morale of the people. But all afternoon, driving through the Ruhr, we saw them—especially the womenfolk—standing on the bridges over the main roads cheering the troops setting off for Belgium and France.

  We drove through many of the Ruhr centres which the Allies were supposed to have bombed so heavily the last few nights. We naturally couldn’t see all the factories and bridges and railroad junctions in the Ruhr, but we saw several, and nothing had happened to them. The great networks of railroad tracks and bridges around Essen and Duisburg, where British night bombings had been reported from London, were intact. The Rhine bridges at Cologne were up. The factories throughout the Ruhr were smoking away as usual.

  Just east of Hannover there had been a night raid by the British a few hours before we arrived. Local inhabitants told us twenty civilians, all in one house, had been killed. Fifteen miles east of Hannover we spotted a big Handley-Page bomber lying smashed in a field two hundred yards off the Autobahn. Gendarmes told us it had been brought down by anti-aircraft fire. The crew of five escaped in parachutes. Four had given themselves up to the village burgomaster in the town near by; one was still at large and the peasants and the gendarmes were scouring the countryside for him. We inspected the machine. Gunner’s rear cockpit very small, and he had no protection. Front engines and pilot’s cabin badly smashed and burned. Funny: the glass in the rear cockpit had not been broken. German air-force mechanics were busy removing the instruments and valuable metal. The Germans need all they can find. Hundreds of peasants stood by, looking at the debris. They didn’t seem at all unnerved.

  We kept getting lost all day. Very dumb chauffeur leading our column of four cars. Our driver remarked: “In peace-time he was a taxi chauffeur. He’s always getting lost and always taking the longest way round.” We missed Cologne completely after we’d spotted the towers of the Cathedral across the green fields, and only turned back after we were half-way to Frankfurt and it began to get dark. Almost a full moon towards the end, and it was very beautiful driving into Aachen along a road arched with trees. Along the road, endless columns of troops, in trucks and on foot, were moving up to the front, singing and in good spirits.

  (An example of the German army’s terrific attention to detail: For three hundred miles along the Autobahn from Berlin to Cologne, broken-down farm implements made to look like anti-aircraft guns from any altitude at all were placed every two hundred yards. Ploughs with the shaft pointed to the sky to look like a gun; rakes, harrows, wheelbarrows, sewing-machines—every conceivable old implement had been carefully arranged to look like a piece of flak,21 so that an Allied pilot flying along the road would get the idea that it was suicide to swoop down on that road. Noticed on the map found in the British plane near Hannover that strong concentrations of German anti-aircraft were marked in red ink. Another purpose of the farm machines of course was to impede the landing of Allied planes on the highway. Telephone posts driven into the narrow strip of ground between the double lanes also served this purpose.)

  Except for a few German bombers starting out from near Hannover, we saw not a single plane in the sky all day, even when we drew close to the Belgian frontier. We passed the Cologne airdrome. It was packed with planes, but the hangars had not been touched. Beautifully camouflaged with netting they were. Obviously these night attacks of the British have failed not only to put the Ruhr out of commission, but even to damage the German flying fields. A phony sort of war the Allies still seem to be fighting.

  My room here in the Hotel International is on the very top floor, or rather in the attic. Unpleasant room to be in if the British bombers come over tonight. But it has been dark for two hours now (one a.m.) and no sign of them yet.

  LATER. Three thirty a.m.—They came over at two fifty a.m. I awoke to the crashing of anti-aircraft cannon and the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun on the roof across the street. The British, judging by the sound of their motors, and by the way a gun on the station a hundred yards from my window kept firing away, were hitting for the Aachen railroad yards. No air-raid alarm. We got our first warning from the sudden thunder of the flak guns. I went out into the hall to see what people do on such occasions, how they react. A half-dozen frightened women were frantically rushing downstairs in their nightgowns, fear frozen on their faces. A few men, whom I took to be officers, sauntered down. But none of our party of nine journalists. False bravery? Because the army officers were not frightened, just taking no unnecessary chances. The raid lasted twenty-five minutes, and then all was quiet. I feel very sleepy, but we must be up at five.

  AACHEN, May 20 (midnight)

  This has been a day in my life. To have seen the destruction of war, what guns and bombs do to houses and people in them, to towns, cities, bridges, railroad stations and tracks and trains, to universities and ancient noble buildings, to enemy soldiers, trucks, tanks, and horses caught along the way.

  It is not pretty. No, it is not beautiful. Take Louvain, that lovely old university town, burned in 1914 by the Germans in their fury and rebuilt—partly by American aid. A good part of it is a shambles. The great library of the university, rebuilt by the donations of hundreds of American schools and colleges, is completely gutted. I asked a German officer what happened to the books.

  “Burned,” he said.

  I must have looked a little shocked as I watched the desolation and contemplated this one little blow to learning and culture and much that is decent in European life.

  The officer added: “Too bad. A pity. But, my friend, that’s war. Look at it.”

  I did. But it hurt.

  My broadcast, which I’m to make from Cologne at four thirty a.m., if I get there, gives a résumé of what we saw today. Here is a more or less chronological account:

  We were off shortly after dawn from Aachen (Aixla-Chapelle) across the Dutch province of Limburg to Maastricht. Little evidence that the Dutch did much fighting here. The houses whole, the windows unshattered. An occasional Dutch pillbox showed signs of having been hit by machine-gun fire, but nothing heavier. Apparently the Dutch made no attempt to slow up the Germans by blowing up the road to Maastricht. One bridge over a creek had been damaged. That was all.

  We crossed over the Maas (Meuse) at Maastricht. The river is broad here and was a natural line of defence, though the Dutch did not take much advantage of it. They had done a half-hearted job of blowing up the bridges. Blown up one out of seven or eight spans on the two bridges I saw. The Germans evidently had substitute spans, made of steel frames, waiting in the rear, and within a few hours of bringing them up had the bridges good as new. German supply columns were thundering over both bridges when we arrived.

  7.30 a.m.—Arrived at the Albert Canal. With its steep banks, thirty feet high, which the Belgians had cemented to make it impossible to climb them, it was a good defence line, especially against tanks. Only the Belgians had not blown up the bridge. I asked a German officer why.

  “We were too quick for them,” he said. Apparently what happened here, and at most of the other important bridges over the Albert Canal, all leading to Liége, was that German parachutists rushed the bridges from behind, wiped out the defending machine-gun crews, even overpowered the pillboxes also defending the bridges, and cut the wires leading to the explosive charges in the bridges before the Belgians could set them off. This particular bridge over the canal was protected by a bunker at the Belgian end of the bridge itself, and by two other bunkers lying a hundred yards to the right and left of the bridge. The bunker at the bridgehead must have been taken in the same mysterious way that Fort Eben-Emael
was taken at Liège—by parachutists with some newfangled weapon.

  The German officer warned us not to go inside the bunker, as mines were still lying about, but a couple of us ventured in. I saw at once that there had been a fire inside the bunker. From that I concluded—though with several reservations—that the parachutists who took the pillbox from behind must have had a fire-pistol of some kind and shot their flames inside the pillbox. Near by I noticed freshly dug graves over which Belgian steel helmets were posed on sticks. Probably the crew of the pillbox.

  Speed played a role too, with its resultant surprise. The motorized Germans had crossed the Dutch border twenty miles away at five a.m. and were over this canal into Belgium (past Maastricht, which should have been strongly defended but wasn’t) at ten a.m.—five hours.

  You were immediately struck by the difference between Holland and Belgium. As soon as we crossed into Belgium, we started running into blocks of pulverized houses along the road. Obviously the Belgians were of a different metal from the Dutch. At the outset they fought like lions. From house to house.

  7.45. Tongres.—Here for the first time we suddenly came across real devastation. A good part of the town through which we drove was smashed to pieces. Stuka dive-bombers and artillery, an officer explained. The railroad station was a shambles; obviously hit by Stukas. The railroad tracks all around torn and twisted; cars and locomotives derailed. One could—or could one?—imagine the consternation of the inhabitants. When they had gone to bed that Thursday night (May 9), Belgium had been at peace with the world, including Germany. At dawn on Friday the German bombers were levelling the station and town—the houses in which they had gone to bed so peacefully—to a charred mass of ruins. The town itself was absolutely deserted. Two or three hungry dogs nosed sadly about the ruins, apparently searching for water, food, and their masters.