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

by William L. Shirer

  Tonight Ed and I did the Casino. The gaming rooms were full of a weird assortment of human beings, German and British spies, male and female, wealthy refugees who had mysteriously managed to get a lot of money out and were throwing it about freely, other refugees who were obviously broke and were trying to win their passage money in a few desperate gambles with the fickle roulette wheel, and the usual international sharpsters you find at such places. Neither Ed nor I had any luck at roulette and we adjourned to the ballroom, where the same kind of people were trying to drown whatever feelings they had in drink and jazz.

  ESTORIL, December 11

  A visit to a Lisbon dentista. He gave me some herbs to boil for my ulcerated tooth, which has made sleep impossible since I arrived.

  Ed depressed at a wire from London this afternoon telling him that his new office was bombed and demolished by the Germans last night. Fortunately no one was killed. His old office was destroyed by a German bomb a couple of months ago.

  ESTORIL, December 12

  We sat up until four o’clock this morning batting out a joint broadcast scheduled for tonight. We feel rather pleased with it.

  LATER.—No broadcast. The talk was set for two a.m. this night and we sent the script over to the local radio at eight p.m. so the Portuguese censors would have plenty of time. At midnight the censor telephoned and said very politely that he had only been able to translate two of the ten pages, but that he found it very interesting and no doubt would be able to finish it by next week, and we could broadcast then. We argued until almost air-time, but it was obvious that the Portuguese had no intention of risking wounding the feelings of either the British or the Germans. We got New York to postpone the show until four a.m., but by three thirty we had made no progress whatsoever, and finally, defeated, we went to bed.

  ABOARD THE Excambion, December 13 (midnight)

  All day both of us depressed at leaving, for we have worked together very closely, Ed and I, during the last three turbulent years over here and a bond grew that was very real, a kind you make only a few times in your life, and somehow, absurdly no doubt, sentimentally perhaps, we had a presentiment that the fortunes of war, maybe just a little bomb, would make this reunion the last.

  We paced up and down the dock in the darkening light of dusk, waiting for the ship to go. There was a little open-air bar for the stevedores on the dock with a tough, frowzy Portuguese blonde behind it. She kept chattering and pouring the drinks. Soon it was dark and they began pulling the gangway in. I climbed aboard and Ed disappeared into the night.

  A full moon was out over the Tagus, and all the million lights of Lisbon and more across the broad river on the hills sparkled brightly as the ship slid down to sea. For how long? Beyond Lisbon over almost all of Europe the lights were out. This little fringe on the southwest corner of the Continent kept them burning. Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out here by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitler’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?

  Five other American correspondents going home from the war, from England, from Germany, from France, sat in the ship’s little bar over “old-fashioneds.” It was a very good way of cushioning your farewell. I joined them. I had one. But alcohol is not always enough. I felt restless, excited. I went up on deck. For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.

  NOTES

  1 A right-wing organization of some eight hundred thousand members. France’s other four million war veterans were organized in the Fédération des Anciens Combattants.

  2 The text: Law for the Re-Creation of the National Defence Forces.

  The Reich government has decreed the following law, which is herewith proclaimed:

  1. Service in the defence forces is based on universal military service.

  2. The German peace army, inclusive of police units incorporated therein, comprises twelve corps commands and thirty-six divisions.

  3. Supplementary laws for regulating universal military service will be drafted and presented to the Reich Cabinet by the Reich Minister of Defence.

  3 Sir Nevile Henderson in Failure of a Mission has told us since that during the first talk after Chamberlain had outlined his plan of complete surrender to Hitler, the Führer looked at him and said: “Es tut mir furchtbar leid, aber das geht nicht mehr (I’m awfully sorry, but that won’t do any more).” Chamberlain, says Henderson, expressed his “surprise and indignation.”

  4 In the next days it furnished the only means of communication between Prague and the outside world.

  5 Panton was arrested in Copenhagen in April 1940, when the Germans marched in, and interned on a Danish island. The French Minister in Copenhagen insisted on taking out all French and Polish correspondents caught there by the Germans. The British Minister made no effort to and the four English journalists there were all arrested and interned.

  6 Only on the night of August 31, nine hours before the war started, did we learn that the reply contained a demand that Poland send a representative invested with plenipotentiary powers on Wednesday, August 30—that is, within twenty-four hours. Henderson remarked to Hitler: “That sounds like an ultimatum,” but the Great Man denied it. Throughout this period the correspondents were kept largely in the dark about the negotiations, with the Wilhelmstrasse tipping us (falsely) to take “an optimistic line.”

  7 Even this was not true. Henderson revealed later that Ribbentrop—in a most insolent mood—read the sixteen points to him so rapidly that he could not grasp them. When he asked for a copy of them, the German Foreign Minister refused!

  8 Actually Bonnet boasted after the Franco-German armistice that he had refused the plea of Halifax for a simultaneous declaration of war. He played for peace at any price until the very end.

  9 Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft—the German State Broadcasting Company.

  10 Many months later I learned from an unimpeachable source that Fritsch did seek death and that three letters he wrote shortly before the action proved it. It is said in German army circles that his wound, though serious, would in all probability not have caused his death had he not refused the pleas of his adjutant to let himself be carried to the rear. He would not listen to it. He bled to death.

  11 About 3.3 by 1.5 yards.

  12 Later the British Admiralty confirmed his version of both the Royal Sceptre episode and the saucy message to Mr. Churchill, including the fact that Schultze had not been captured.

  13 For months we were to ask at nearly every Nazi press conference when the trial of Elser would take place. At first we were told he would be tried before the Supreme Court at Leipzig as were the “perpetrators” of the Reichstag fire, which seemed appropriate enough, since both events cast suspicion on the Nazis themselves. After a few weeks our daily question: “When will Elser be tried?” provoked scarcely restrained laughter from the correspondents and increasing embarrassment for Dr. Boehmer, foreign press chief of the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Schmidt, press chief of the Foreign Office, and the latter’s deputy, Baron von Stumm. Finally we were given to understand that the question wasn’t funny any more, and after some months, having squeezed all we could out of our joke, we dropped it. So far as is known, Elser was never tried. Whether he was executed also is not known.

  14 His moving Christmas broadcast from the Finnish front was to Inspire Robert Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night.

  15 To which Stalin replied: “The frie
ndship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm”!

  16 The official German decree read: “All Jews from fourteen to sixty years of age are subject to forced labour. The length of forced labour is two years, but it will be prolonged if its educational purpose is not considered fulfilled. Jews called up for forced labour must report promptly, and must bring food for two days and their bedding. Skilled Jewish workers must report with their tools. Those who don’t are subject to sentences running to ten years in the penitentiary.”

  17 See pages 228–9 and 261.

  18 Within or without wedlock. On October 28, 1939 Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police and leader of the S.S., decreed: “Beyond the borders of perhaps necessary bourgeois laws, customs, and views, it will now be the great task, even outside the marriage bond, for German women and girls of good blood, not in frivolity but in deep moral earnestness, to become mothers of the children of soldiers going off to war…. On the men and women whose place remains at home by order of the state, these times likewise impose more than ever the sacred obligation to become again fathers and mothers of children.” (Italics mine.) Himmler promised that the S.S. would take over the guardianship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of Aryan blood whose fathers met death at the front.

  19 This was a lie, as later entries will show.

  20 The destroyer, we would learn later, was the Glow-worm, the only craft in the whole British navy to encounter any of the scores of German war vessels and transports which stole up the Norwegian coast before April 9. It sighted the German 10,000-ton cruiser Admiral Hipper off the Norwegian coast on April 8, but was blown to bits before it could get away. Had just a small British naval force, such as later went into Narvik, been within striking distance of the Norwegian coast on April 8, Hitler’s Norwegian venture would have failed. One can only conclude that the British navy was caught napping.

  21 German for anti-aircraft gun.

  22 There was no sniping in 1940.

  23 A fair example of Göring’s exaggerations. When I visited the beach of Dunkirk two and a half months later, I found the wrecks of only two freighters, two destroyers, and one torpedo boat.

  24 Later named by Marshal Pétain French Ambassador in Washington.

  25 Within less than four months he was killed in a British bomber returning from a raid on the Italian lines in Albania.

  26 It is only fair to state that the officials of the German State Broadcasting Company, who treated me with the greatest courtesy throughout the war, never objected to my listening to what the enemy had to say on the BBC. They usually put a radio set at my disposal for this purpose. Foreign correspondents were exempted from the decree prohibiting listening to foreign radio stations as long as they did not pass on what they heard to Germans. Radio provided the only means we in Berlin had of learning what was going on in the outside world. Sale of foreign newspapers except those from Italy or the occupied cities was forbidden. Occasionally a few American newspapers and periodicals got through in the mails, but they were from two to six months old by the time they arrived.

  27 Most of them were turned back at the Spanish frontier.

  28 See entry for September 21.

  29 On December 6, 1940 the Vatican condemned the “mercy killings.” Responding to the question whether it is illicit for authorities to order the killing of those who, although they have committed no crime worthy of death, nevertheless are considered no longer useful to society or the state because of physical or mental deficiencies, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office held that “such killings are contrary to both natural and divine law.” It is doubtful if the mass of German Catholics, even if they learned of this statement from Rome, which is improbable, understood what it referred to. Only a minority in Germany know of the “mercy deaths.”

  30 Amann is also president of the Reich Press Chamber, in which capacity he rules the newspapers of Germany. Through the Eher Verlag and subsidiary holding companies, Amann has also gained financial control of most of the large newspapers in the country.

  31 He publicly admitted it in a speech on December 10, 1940. Contrasting the totalitarian and democratic worlds, he said: “We can never be reconciled with this world…. One of these worlds must break asunder…. These are two worlds, and I believe one of these worlds must crack up.”