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

by William L. Shirer

We turned left down the rue Pelletier to the Grand Boulevard. I noticed the Petit Riehe was closed. The boulevard too was deserted except for a few German soldiers, staring into the windows of the few shops that did not have their shutters down. The Place de I’Opéra now. For the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone garçon was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them. Then we turned at the Madeleine, its façade also covered with sandbags, and raced down the rue Royale. Larue’s and Weber’s, I noted, were closed. Now before us, the familiar view. The Place de la Concorde, the Seine, the Chambre des Députés, over which a giant Swastika flag flies, and in the distance the golden dome of the Invalides. Past the Ministry of the Marine, guarded by a big German tank, into the Concorde. We drew up in front of the Hôtel Crillon, now German Headquarters. Our officer went in to inquire about quarters. I, to the displeasure of the German officials with us, stepped over to pay a call at the American Embassy next door. Bullitt, Murphy—everyone I knew—were out to lunch. I left a note for Bullitt.

  We got rooms in the Scribe, where I had often stayed in the civilized days. To my surprise and pleasure, Demaree Bess and Walter Kerr, who had stayed on in Paris after almost all of their colleagues had left, were in the lobby. They came up to my room and we had a talk. Walter seemed more nervous than ever, but just as likable. Demaree was his old stolid self. He and Dorothy had been in the Elysées Park Hotel on the Rond-Point. The day before the city fell, the patron of the hotel had come panting to them and begged them to flee too; at any rate, he was scooting and closing the hotel. They persuaded him to turn the hotel over to them! …I inquired about my friends. Most of them had left Paris.

  Demaree says the panic in Paris was indescribable. Everyone lost his head. The government gave no lead. People were told to scoot, and at least three million out of the five million in the city ran, ran without baggage, literally ran on their feet towards the south. It seems the Parisians actually believed the Germans would rape the women and do worse to the men. They had heard fantastic tales of what happened when the Germans occupied a city. The ones who stayed are all the more amazed at the very correct behaviour of the troops—so far.

  The inhabitants are bitter at their government, which in the last days, from all I hear, completely collapsed. It even forgot to tell the people until too late that Paris would not be defended. The French police and fire departments remained. A curious sight to see the agents, minus their pistols, directing traffic, which consists exclusively of German army vehicles, or patrolling the streets. I have a feeling that what we’re seeing here in Paris is the complete breakdown of French society—a collapse of the army, of government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe.

  PARIS, June 18

  Marshal Pétain has asked for an armistice! The Parisians, already dazed by all that has happened, can scarcely believe it. Nor can the rest of us. That the French army must give up is clear. But most of us expected it to surrender, as did the Dutch and Belgian armies, with the government going, as Reynaud had boasted it would, to Africa, where France, with its navy and African armies, can hold out for a long time.

  The inhabitants got the news of Pétain’s action by loud-speaker, conveniently provided by the Germans in nearly every square in town. I stood in a throng of French men and women on the Place de la Concorde when the news first came. They were almost struck dead. Before the Hôtel Crillon—where Woodrow Wilson stayed during the Peace Conference when the terms for Germany were being drawn up—cars raced up and unloaded gold-braided officers. There was much peering through monocles, heel-clicking, saluting. In the Place there, that square without equal in Europe, where you can see from one spot the Madeleine, the Louvre, Notre-Dame in the distance down the Seine, the Chamber of Deputies, the golden dome of the Invalides, where Napoleon is buried, then the Eiffel Tower, on which floats today a huge Swastika, and finally, up the Champs-Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe—the people in the Place de la Concorde did not notice the bustle in front of German Headquarters at the Crillon. They stared at the ground, then at each other. They said: “Pétain surrendering! What does it mean? Comment? Pourquoi?” And no one appeared to have the heart for an answer.

  This evening Paris is weird and, to me, unrecognizable. There’s a curfew at nine p.m.—an hour before dark. The black-out is still enforced. The streets tonight are dark and deserted. The Paris of gay lights, the laughter, the music, the women in the streets—when was that? And what is this?

  I noticed today some open fraternizing between German troops and the inhabitants. Most of the soldiers seem to be Austrian, are well mannered; and quite a few speak French. Most of the German troops act like naïve tourists, and this has proved a pleasant surprise to the Parisians. It seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the thousands today, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides. Thousands of German soldiers congregate all day long at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the flame still burns under the Arc. They bare their blond heads and stand there gazing.

  Two newspapers appeared yesterday in Paris, La Victoire (as life’s irony would have it) and Le Matin. I saw Bueno-Varilla, publisher of the Matin, at the Embassy yesterday. I’m told he’s anxious to please the Germans and see that his paper gets off to a favourable start. It has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament! La Victoire, run by a crank, urges Parisians no longer to refer to the Germans as “Boches.” Its editorial yesterday ended: “Vive Paris! Vive la France!”

  The German army moved into Bess’s hotel yesterday, but they valiantly held on to their floor.

  PARIS, June 19

  The armistice is to be signed at Compiègne! In the same wagon-lit coach of Marshal Foch that witnessed the signing of that other armistice on November 11, 1918 in Compiègne Forest. The French don’t know it yet. The Germans are keeping it secret. But through somebody’s mistake I found out today.

  At four thirty p.m. the military rushed me out to Compiègne. That was the mistake. They shouldn’t have. But orders got mixed up, and before they could get unentangled I was there. Yesterday Hitler and Mussolini met at Munich to draw up the armistice terms for France. Driving out, I recalled that yesterday I had asked a German Foreign Office official, half jokingly, if Hitler (as rumour had it) would insist on the armistice being signed at Compiègne. He did not like my question and replied coolly: “Certainly not.”

  But when we arrived on the scene at six p.m., German army engineers were feverishly engaged in tearing out the wall of the museum where Foch’s private car in which the 1918 armistice was signed had been preserved. The building itself was donated by one Arthur Henry Fleming of Pasadena, California. Before we left, the engineers, working with pneumatic drills, had demolished the wall and hauled the car out from its shelter.

  The plan is, the Nazis tell me, to place the car in exactly the same spot it occupied in the little clearing in Compiègne Forest that morning at five a.m. on November 11, 1918, and make the French sign this armistice here…. We talked over technical details for broadcasting the story with various German officers and officials. It will make a spectacular broadcast, but a tragic one for Americans. Some colonel showed me through the armistice car. Place cards on the table showed where each had sat at that historic meeting in 1918.

  Returning to Paris towards evening, we stopped on the road that winds over the wooded hills between Compiègne and Senlis. A small French column had been bombed there on the road. Scattered along a quarter of a mile were twenty hastily dug graves. The dead horses, buried very shallow, still stunk. A “75” stood near the road with the other leavings, which from the look of them—blankets, coats, shoes, socks, guns, ammunition, etc.—had been abandoned in great haste. I looked at the date of the cannon. 1918! Here the
French defended the most important road to the capital with World War guns!

  It is still a mystery to me how this campaign has been won so easily by Hitler. Admitted, the French fought in the towns. But even in the towns not many of the millions of men available could have fought. There was not room. But they did not fight in the fields, as in all other wars. The grain twenty yards from the main roads has not been touched by the tramping feet of soldiers or their tens of thousands of motorized vehicles. I do not mean to say that at many places the French did not fight valiantly. Undoubtedly they did, But there was no organized, well-thought-out defence as in the last war. From all I’ve seen, the French let the Germans dictate a new kind of warfare. This was fought largely along the main roads; rarely on a line running across the country. And on the roads the Germans had everything in their favour: utter superiority in tanks and planes, the main implements for road fighting. An Austrian soldier told me last night that it was unbelievably simple. They went down the roads with tanks, with artillery support in the rear. Seldom did they meet any serious resistance. Dug-outs or posts here and there would fire. Usually the heavily armoured German tanks paid no attention, just continued down the road. Infantry units on trucks behind, with light artillery, would liquidate the pillboxes and the machinegun nests. Once in a while, if resistance was a little strong, they’d phone or radio or signal back for the artillery. If the big guns didn’t silence it, an order went back for the Stukas, which invariably did. So it went, he said, day after day.

  I keep asking myself: If the French were making a serious defence, why are the main roads never blown up? Why so many strategic bridges left untouched? Here and there along the roads, a tank barrier, that is, a few logs or stones or debris—but nothing really serious for the tanks. No real tank-traps, such as the Swiss built by the thousands.

  This has been a war of machines down the main highways, and the French do not appear to have been ready for it, to have understood it, or to have had anything ready to stop it. This is incredible.

  General Glaise von Horstenau (an Austrian who betrayed Schuschnigg shamelessly and has now been named by Hitler one of the chief official historians of this war) put it another way last night. His idea is that Germany caught the Allies at one of the rare moments in military history when, for a few weeks or months or years, offensive weapons are superior to those of defence. He explains that this fantastic campaign probably could have taken place only in this summer of 1940. Had it been delayed until next year, the Allies would have had the defensive weapons—anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft guns, and fighter airplanes—to have offset the offensive arms of Germany. There then would have ensued, he thinks, the kind of stalemate which developed on the western front from 1914 to 1918, when the powers of offence and defence were about equal.

  Another thing: I do not think the losses on either side have been large. You see so few graves.

  PARIS, June 20

  The men who went down to Orléans and Blois yesterday tell a horrible tale. Along the road they saw what they estimated to be 200,000 refugees—people of all classes, rich and poor, lying along the roadside or by the edge of the forests, starving—without food, without water, no shelter, nothing.

  They are just a few of the millions who fled Paris and the other cities and towns before the German invaders. They fled, tearing in fright along the roads with their belongings on their backs or on bikes or in baby-carriages, and their children atop them. Soon the roads were clogged. Troops also were trying to use them. Soon the Germans came over, bombing the roads. Soon there were dead and dying. And no food, no water, no shelter, no care. Bullitt estimates there are seven million refugees between here and Bordeaux. Almost all face starvation unless something is done at once. The German army is helping a little, but not much. It has had to carry most of its own food into France from Germany. The Red Cross is doing what it can, but is wholly inadequate.

  A human catastrophe, such as even China has not experienced. (And how many Frenchmen or other Europeans softened their hearts when a flood or a famine or a war snuffed out a million Chinese?)

  Lunch with Bullitt, at his residence. He is still stunned by what has happened. Though Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Goebbels hate him almost as much as they loathe Roosevelt, he reported that the German military authorities had shown him every courtesy. The Nazis had made the three American representatives of the three American press associations pledge not to see Bullitt or even call at the American Embassy (a pledge they scrupulously kept, though Fred Oechsner had the courage to phone the Embassy and pay his respects). I feel under no obligation not to act as a free American citizen here, despite Nazi pressure, and gladly accepted the invitation of the Ambassador, whom I’ve known for many years. Most talkative guest at lunch was M. Henry-Haye,24 senator, and mayor of Versailles. He is one of the few politicians who stuck to his post. His bitterness at the British during the luncheon talk was only matched by his bitterness at the Germans. I couldn’t tell which he blamed most for the French collapse; he sputtered away at both. He was in a great state of emotion. Yesterday, he related, a young German officer had brushed into his mayoralty office at Versailles and summarily ordered him to have his car repaired. If the car wasn’t ready in an hour, said the German, M. Henry-Haye would be arrested. This was too much for the senator-mayor.

  “You are speaking, sir,” he said he told the German, “to a French senator and the mayor of Versailles. I shall report your conduct immediately to your military superiors in Paris.”

  Whereupon, though his gasoline supply was short, he sped off to Paris to make good his word.

  “Oh, les Boches!” he kept muttering, a word which, I must say, we all tossed across the table with some frequency.

  PARIS, June 21

  On the exact spot in the little clearing in the Forest of Compiègne where at five a.m. on November 11, 1918 the armistice which ended the World War was signed, Adolf Hitler today handed his armistice terms to France. To make German revenge complete, the meeting of the German and French plenipotentiaries took place in Marshal Foch’s private car, in which Foch laid down the armistice terms to Germany twenty-two years ago. Even the same table in the rickety old wagon-lit car was used. And through the windows we saw Hitler occupying the very seat on which Foch had sat at that table when he dictated the other armistice.

  The humiliation of France, of the French, was complete. And yet in the preamble to the armistice terms Hitler told the French that he had not chosen this spot at Compiègne out of revenge; merely to right an old wrong. From the demeanour of the French delegates I gathered that they did not appreciate the difference.

  The German terms we do not know yet. The preamble says the general basis for them is: (1) to prevent a resumption of the fighting; (2) to offer Germany complete guarantees for her continuation of the war against Britain; (3) to create the foundations for a peace, the basis of which is to be the reparation of an injustice inflicted upon Germany by force. The third point seems to mean: revenge for the defeat of 1918.

  Kerker for NBC and I for CBS in a joint half-hour broadcast early this evening described today’s amazing scene as best we could. It made, I think, a good broadcast.

  The armistice negotiations began at three fifteen p.m. A warm June sun beat down on the great elm and pine trees, and cast pleasant shadows on the wooded avenues as Hitler, with the German plenipotentiaries at his side, appeared. He alighted from his car in front of the French monument to Alsace-Lorraine which stands at the end of an avenue about two hundred yards from the clearing where the armistice car waits on exactly the same spot it occupied twenty-two years ago.

  The Alsace-Lorraine statue, I noted, was covered with German war flags so that you could not see its sculptured work nor read its inscription. But I had seen it some years before—the large sword representing the sword of the Allies, and its point sticking into a large, limp eagle, representing the old Empire of the Kaiser. And the inscription underneath in French saying: “TO THE HEROIC SOLDIERS OF FRANCE… DEF
ENDERS OF THE COUNTRY AND OF RIGHT… GLORIOUS LIBERATORS OF ALSACE-LORRAINE.”

  Through my glasses I saw the Führer stop, glance at the monument, observe the Reich flags with their big Swastikas in the centre. Then he strode slowly towards us, towards the little clearing in the woods. I observed his face. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else, difficult to describe, in his expression, a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.

  Now he reaches the little opening in the woods. He pauses and looks slowly around. The clearing is in the form of a circle some two hundred yards in diameter and laid out like a park. Cypress trees line it all round—and behind them, the great elms and oaks of the forest. This has been one of France’s national shrines for twenty-two years. From a discreet position on the perimeter of the circle we watch.

  Hitler pauses, and gazes slowly around. In a group just behind him are the other German plenipotentiaries: Göring, grasping his field-marshal’s baton in one hand. He wears the sky-blue uniform of the air force. All the Germans are in uniform, Hitler in a double-breasted grey uniform, with the Iron Cross hanging from his left breast pocket. Next to Göring are the two German army chiefs—General Keitel, chief of the Supreme Command, and General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the German army. Both are just approaching sixty, but look younger, especially Keitel, who has a dapper appearance with his cap slightly cocked on one side.

  Then there is Erich Raeder, Grand Admiral of the German Fleet, in his blue naval uniform and the invariable upturned collar which German naval officers usually wear. There are two non-military men in Hitler’s suite—his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in the field-grey uniform of the Foreign Office; and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, in a grey party uniform.