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

by William L. Shirer

  And personally I’m getting a little tired of the censorship restrictions on our telling even a modicum of truth about this air war to America. I shall not stand for it much longer.

  BERLIN, September 8

  All Sunday morning papers carry the same headline: “BIG ATTACK ON LONDON AS REPRISAL.”

  BERLIN, September 9

  A typical Nazi trick was played on me today. The three censors fought with me so long over the script of my two p.m. broadcast, which they charged was unduly ironic about the “reprisal” bombings of London, which it was, that by the time they had finally okayed it, there was no time for me to go on the air. My five minutes of air time was over.

  There was no objection to this, since the censors have a perfect right to hold up a script they don’t like, just as I have the right not to talk if I think they’ve censored the true sense out of my talk. But this evening I learn from Paul White in New York, through channels which permit me to receive cables from him without the Germans knowing their contents, that the shortwave director of the German Broadcasting Company cabled him today an explanation of why I did not broadcast at two p.m. The cable read: “Regret Shirer arrived too late today to broadcast.”

  The British bombers failed to come over last night or the night before. Official explanation to the German people: The British planes tried to get through both nights to Berlin, but were turned back. Whenever the British choose not to bomb Berlin henceforth, I hear, Goebbels has ordered the people to be told that they tried to but were repulsed by the capital’s magnificent defences.

  Whenever the British come over Germany now, most of the German radio stations hurriedly go off the air so as not to serve as radio beacons for the British pilots. The German radio announced tonight that its broadcasts, already greatly curtailed in the last fortnight on “military grounds,” will be further curtailed. “This is no time,” said the announcement, “to explain further the reasons for this.”

  BERLIN, September 10

  A light raid last night, though a few houses were demolished. Commenting on the bombing, the Lokal Anzeiger says: “The fliers of His Britannic Majesty have given a heavy blow to the laws governing an honourable and manly conduct of war.”

  At the Propaganda Ministry today we were shown one of Britain’s “secret weapons,” a new sort of incendiary weapon. It looks like a large calling card—about two inches square—and is made of a celluloid substance. Two celluloid sheets are pasted together and between them is a tablet of phosphorus. The British drop them in a dampened condition. When they dry, after a few minutes of sun, or ten minutes of dry, daytime air, they ignite and cause a small flame that burns for two or three minutes. Actually, they were first used by the Irish Republicans, who dropped them in letterboxes to burn the mail in England. The Germans admit they have set fire to fields of grain and hay as well as a few forests. Probably the British, who started dropping them in August, hoped to burn up a considerable acreage of grain. Unfortunately, we had a very wet August and few of them got dry enough to ignite.

  BERLIN, September 11

  Last night the severest bombing yet. And the German papers are beside themselves. The Börsen Zeitung calls our pilot visitors of last evening “barbarians” and bannerlines: “CRIME OF BRITISH ON BERLIN.” According to the Nazis, only five persons were killed, but for the first time the British dropped a considerable number of fire bombs and there were quite a few small fires. Three incendiaries fell in the yard of the Adlon, five in the garden of the Embassy next door, and a half-dozen more in the garden of Dr. Goebbels just behind the Embassy. The office of the Minister of Munitions between the Adlon and the Embassy also was hit. All the incendiaries were put out before they did any damage. Actually the British were aiming at the Potsdamer Bahnhof, and they had bad luck. They took almost a perfect run for it, their first bombs hitting the Reichstag and then falling in a direct line towards the Potsdamer station on the Brandenburger Tor, the Embassy, and in the gardens behind. But the last one was about three hundred yards short of the station.

  Today the BBC claims that the Potsdamer station was hit, but this is untrue and at least three Germans today who heard the BBC told me they felt a little disillusioned at the British radio’s lack of veracity. The point is that it is bad propaganda for the British to broadcast in German to the people here that a main station has been set on fire when it hasn’t been touched.

  I almost met a quick end last night. Racing home from the Rundfunk after the all-clear at fifty miles an hour in my car, I suddenly skidded into some debris and came to a stop twenty feet from a fresh bomb crater on the East-West Axis about a hundred and fifty yards from the Brandenburger Tor. In the black-out you could not see it, and the air-wardens had not yet discovered it. A splinter from the bomb that made this crater hurtled two hundred yards through the air to the American Embassy and crashed through the double window of the office of Donald Heath, our First Secretary. It cut a neat hole in the two windows, continued directly over Don’s desk, and penetrated four inches into the wall on the far side of the room. Don was supposed to have had night duty last night and would have been sitting at his desk at the time, but for some reason Chargé d’Affaires Kirk had told him to go home and himself had done the night trick.

  BERLIN, September 12

  Off to Geneva for a few days so that I can talk some matters over with New York on the telephone without being overheard by the Nazis. The Germans want Hartrich, my assistant, to leave, and I’m against it.

  The rumour is that the big invasion hop against England is planned for the night of September 15, when there will be a full moon and the proper tide in the Channel. I’ll chance this trip anyway.

  GENEVA, September 16

  The news coming over the near-by border of France is that the Germans have attempted a landing in Britain, but that it has been repulsed with heavy German losses. Must take this report with a grain of salt.

  Lunch with John Winant, head of the International Labour Office, who strives valiantly to keep his institution, and what it stands for, from going under after the blow the war has given it. More than any other American in public life whom I know, he understands the social forces and changes that have been at work in the last decade both at home and in Europe, and that are now in new ferment as a result of the war. We talked about the job to be done after the war if Britain wins and if the mistakes of 1919 are not to be repeated. He spoke of his own ideas about reconstruction and how war economy could be replaced by a peace economy without the maladjustment, the great unemployment and deflation and depression that followed the last war. Personally I cannot look that far ahead. I cannot see beyond Hitler’s defeat. To accomplish that first is such a gigantic task and so overwhelmingly important that all else seems secondary, though undoubtedly it is a good thing that some are taking a longer view.

  Winant is a likable, gaunt, awkward, Lincolnesque sort of man and was a good enough politician and executive to be re-elected Governor of New Hampshire a couple of times. I think he would make a good president to succeed Roosevelt in 1944 if the latter gets his third term.

  BERLIN, September 18

  Somewhere near Frankfurt on the train from Basel last night the porter shouted: “Flieg er-Alarm!” and there was a distant sound of gun-fire, but nothing hit us. We arrived at the Potsdamer Bahnhof right on time and I observed again that the station had not been hit despite the claims of the BBC. I noticed several lightly wounded soldiers, mostly airmen, getting off a special car which had been attached to our train. From their bandages, their wounds looked like burns. I noticed also the longest Red Cross train I’ve ever seen. It stretched from the station for half a mile to beyond the bridge over the Landwehr Canal. Orderlies were swabbing it out, the wounded having been unloaded, probably, during the night. The Germans usually unload their hospital trains after dark so that the populace will not be unduly disturbed by one of the grimmer sides of glorious war. I wondered where so many wounded could have come from, as the armies in the west stop
ped fighting three months ago. As there were only a few porters I had to wait some time on the platform and picked up a conversation with a railway workman. He said most of the men taken from the hospital train were suffering from burns.

  Can it be that the tales I heard in Geneva had some truth in them after all? The stories there were that either in attempted German raids with sizable landingparties on the English coast or in rehearsals with boats and barges off the French coast the British had given the Germans a bad pummelling. The reports reaching Switzerland from France were that many German barges and ships had been destroyed and a considerable number of German troops drowned; also that the British used a new type of wireless-directed torpedo (a Swiss invention, the Swiss said) which spread ignited oil on the water and burned the barges. Those cases of burns at the station this morning bear looking into.

  Ribbentrop suddenly went off to Rome tonight. Many guesses as to why. Mine: to break the news to Mussolini that there will be no attempt at invading Britain this fall. This will put II Duce in a hole, as he has already started an offensive on Egypt and advanced a hundred miles over the desert to Sidi-el-Barrani. But this Italian effort, it seems, was originally planned only to distract attention from the German invasion of Britain. It begins to look now (though I still think Hitler may try to attack England) as though the war will shift to the Mediterranean this winter, with the Axis powers trying to deliver the British Empire a knockout blow by capturing Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Palestine. Napoleon did this once, and the blow did not fell the British Empire. (Also, Napoleon planned to attack Britain, gathered his ships and barges just where Hitler has gathered his, but never dared to launch the attack.) But the Axis seizure of Suez might knock out the British Empire now. The reason Franco’s handyman, Serrano Suñer, is here in Berlin is that Hitler wants him either to take Gibraltar himself or to let the German army come in from France to do the job. Much talk here, I find, of Germany and Italy dividing up Africa between themselves, giving Spain a larger slice if Franco plays ball.

  Only one air-raid here since I left, and the five million people in Berlin have caught up on their sleep and are full of breezy confidence again. They really think the British planes can’t get through. Churchill is making a mistake in not sending more planes over Berlin. A mere half-dozen bombers per night would do the job—that is, would force the people to their cellars in the middle of the night and rob them of their sleep. Morale tumbled noticeably in Berlin when the British visited us almost every evening. I heard many complaints about the drop in efficiency of the armament workers and even government employees because of the loss of sleep and increased nervousness. The British haven’t enough planes to devastate Berlin, but they have enough—five or six for Berlin each night—to ruin the morale of the country’s most important centre of population. Can it be that the British hope to get the Germans to stop their terrible bombing of London by laying off Berlin? This would be a very silly calculation.

  BERLIN, September 19

  Having saved a little extra gasoline from my ration of thirty-seven gallons a month, I drove out to Siemensstadt with Joe Harsch and Ed Hartrich this afternoon to see if there had been any damage by bombing to the Siemens Electrical Works, one of the most important war industrial plants in Germany. I was also curious to see what mood the workers were in. We drove slowly around the plant, but could find no trace of any damage. The thousands of workers filing out after the afternoon shift seemed well fed and quite contented. Some of them looked downright prosperous and lit up cigars as they came out. During the fortnight that the British came over practically every night, the strain of working a full ten-hour shift after a night without sleep had begun to affect them, several Germans had told me. But today they looked disgustingly fit.

  Returning to town somewhat disheartened by our findings, we noticed a large crowd standing on a bridge which spanned a railroad line. We thought there had been an accident. But we found the people staring silently at a long Red Cross train unloading wounded. This is getting interesting. Only during the fortnight in September when the Poles were being crushed and a month this spring when the west was being annihilated have we seen so many hospital trains in Berlin. A diplomat told me this morning his Legation had checked two other big hospital trains unloading wounded in the Charlottenburg railroad yards yesterday. This makes four long trains of wounded in the last two days that I know have arrived here.

  Not since the war started has the German press been so indignant against the British as today. According to it, the British last night bombed the Bodelschwingh hospital for mentally deficient children at Bethel in western Germany, killing nine youngsters, wounding twelve.

  The same newspapers which have now begun to chronicle with glee the “reprisal” attacks on the centre of London town and which, to show the success of the “reprisals,” published British figures telling of the thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, killed by German bombs, today are filled with righteous indignation against the British for allegedly doing the same thing to Germans. Some of the headlines tonight: Nachtausgabe: “NIGHT CRIME OF BRITISH AGAINST 21 GERMAN CHILDREN—THIS BLOODY ACT CRIES FOR REVENGE.” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: “MURDER OF CHILDREN AT BETHEL; REVOLTING CRIME.” B.Z. am Mittag: “ASSASSINS’ MURDER IS NO LONGER WAR, HERR WINSTON CHURCHILL!—THE BRITISH ISLAND OF MURDERERS WILL HAVE TO TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES OF ITS MALICIOUS BOMBINGS.”

  Editorial comment is in a similar vein. The Börsen Zeitung writes: “They wished, on the orders of Churchill, simply to murder…. Albion has shown herself to be a murder-hungry beast which the German sword will liquidate in the interest not only of the German people but of the whole civilized world…. The sadistic threats of the British apostles of hate will end in the smoke of their cities.”

  This paper in the very same editorial points out how stores in the west of London as well as a subway station there have been hit by German bombs.

  The Diplo, written and edited in the Foreign Office, says pontifically tonight: “It is a fact that Germany is waging war with clean weapons and in a chivalrous manner.” (And London bombed indiscriminately nearly every night now, the British fighter defence having stopped the Luftwaffe’s day-time attacks.)

  One must keep in mind that the newspapers here do not reflect public opinion. This hysterical indignation is artificially created from above. No doubt the real reason for it is to justify in the minds of the German people what the Luftwaffe is doing to London.

  Censorship of our broadcasts is growing daily more impossible. I had a royal scrap with one Nazi censor tonight. He wouldn’t let me read the newspaper headlines quoted above. He said it gave America a “wrong impression.” He said I was too ironic, even in my selection of headlines.

  BERLIN, September 20

  Another beautiful example today of Nazi hypocrisy. I wrote in both my broadcasts today that the German press and radio were making the most of a New York report that the British censor had decided to forbid foreign correspondents in London to mention air-raids while they were on. The German Propaganda Ministry jumped on this dispatch and through its shortwave and foreign-press services tried to tell the world that henceforth America was going to be deprived of trustworthy news from London. I pointed out, incidentally, that the Nazis had clamped the same kind of censorship on us some time ago. My censors would not hear of my saying any such thing.

  I ask myself why I stay on here. For the first eight months of the war our censorship was fairly reasonable—more so than Sevareid and Grandin had to put up with in Paris. But since the war became grim and serious—since the invasion of Scandinavia—it has become increasingly worse. For the last few months I’ve been trying to get by on my wits, such as they are; to indicate a truth or an official lie by the tone and inflexion of the voice, by a pause held longer than is natural, by the use of an Americanism which most Germans, who’ve learned their English in England, will not fully grasp, and by drawing from a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or their juxtaposition,
all the benefit I can. But the Nazis are on to me. For some time now my two chief censors from the Propaganda Ministry have been gentlemen who understand American as well as I, Professor Lessing, who long held a post in an American university, and Herr Krauss, for twenty years a partner in a Wall Street bank. I cannot fool them very often. Personally, both are decent, intelligent Germans, as is Captain Erich Kunsti, former Program Director of the Austrian Broadcasting System and now my principal military censor. But they must do what they’re told. And the Foreign Office and Propaganda Ministry keep receiving reports from the United States—not only from the Embassy at Washington, but from their well-organized intelligence service throughout our country—that I’m getting by with murder (which I’m not) and must be sat upon. Dr. Kurt Sell, the Nazi man in Washington whose duty, among other things, is to report to Berlin on what we send, has several times reported unfavourably on the nature of my broadcasts. I haven’t the slightest interest in remaining here unless I can continue to give a fairly accurate report. And each day my broadcasts are forced by the censorship to be less accurate. Tonight I noticed for the first time that one of the young Germans who do my modulating (call New York on the transmitter until time for me to speak) and follow my script to see that I read it as written and censored was scanning a copy of my broadcast as I spoke, making funny little lines under the syllables as we used to do in school while learning to scan poetry. He was trying to note down, I take it, which words I emphasized, which I spoke with undue sarcasm, and so on. I was so fascinated by this discovery that I stopped in the middle of my talk to watch him.