Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

  For American correspondents and officials, the key question was how well prepared were the countries Germany was most likely to attack—first of all, Poland. Knickerbocker, the former Berlin correspondent who was still traveling around Europe, recalled that everyone wanted to know whether the Poles could hold out long enough for the French to mobilize an offensive and come to their rescue. “Optimistic Poles said they could hold out for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year,” he wrote. “The French thought the Poles could hold out for six months.”

  On August 18, Moffat noted in his diary: “The Polish ambassador called. He had little to offer other than to reiterate the belief of his Government that German strength was overrated… He said that the German army was not the army of 1914. The officers had insufficient training and had not been allowed to remain long enough with the same units of troops. The best generals had been liquidated, and the remaining generals were merely ‘Party hacks.’ !! The German people did not want to fight, and it would be suicidal to start a war when conditions were already so bad that people were being rationed as to foodstuffs.”

  Moffat concluded, “The whole conversation represented a point of view of unreasonable optimism and still more unreasoning underrating of one’s opponent, that, if typical of Polish mentality in general, causes me to feel considerable foreboding.”

  As he continued to cover the unfolding drama in Europe for CBS, Shirer was beyond foreboding. He was deeply pessimistic. Even his good friend John Gunther, the former Chicago Daily News reporter who had launched what would prove to be a highly successful career as an author with his 1936 bestseller Inside Europe, was more reserved in his judgments after the sellout of Czechoslovakia. In the introduction to the new edition of the book that was published near the end of 1938, he noted “the death of the Czechoslovak nation in its present form,” but declared, “There is a chance—just a chance but a chance—that the Munich Agreement may bring a European settlement.” As late as July 28, 1939, when Shirer met Gunther in Geneva, the CBS man wrote in his diary, “John fairly optimistic about peace.”

  Returning to Berlin in early August, Shirer found his darkening mood turning into open anger. On the train from Basel, he observed that the passengers “looked clean and decent, the kind that made us like Germans, as people, before the Nazis.” In a discussion with someone he identified as Captain D—“a World War officer of proved patriotism”—Shirer recorded that the German, who had earlier professed to be against a new war, “became violent today at the very mention of the Poles and the British,” taking his cue from Hitler’s attacks on both. His diary entry on August 9 chronicles their heated exchange:

  He thundered: “Why do the English butt in on Danzig and threaten war over the return of a German city? Why do the Poles [sic] provoke us? Haven’t we the right to a German city like Danzig?”

  “Have you the right to a Czech city like Prague?” I asked. Silence. No answer. That vacant stare you get on Germans.

  “Why didn’t the Poles accept the generous offer of the Führer?” he began again.

  “Because they feared another Sudetenland, Captain.”

  “You mean they don’t trust the Führer?”

  “Not much since March 15,” I said, looking carefully around before I spoke such blasphemy to see I was not being overheard. Again the vacant German stare.

  March 15, 1939, was the date when German troops had marched into Prague and Hitler declared, “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!”

  Shirer could see that the same fate awaited Poland. The next day, he marveled: “How completely isolated a world the German people live in.” German newspapers were trumpeting headlines like “Poland? Look Out!” and “Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig—Unbelievable Agitation of the Polish Archmadness.”

  “For perverse perversion of truth, this is good,” Shirer noted. “You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.”

  Convinced that Hitler and the Germans were about to plunge the continent into a new war, he used his diary as a way to release his frustration, not sparing anyone. “Struck by the ugliness of German women on the streets and cafés,” he wrote. “As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to.”

  From Berlin, Shirer went to Danzig, finding the city “completely Nazified,” but he quickly concluded the real issue was not the status of that purportedly “Free City.” In a broadcast from the neighboring Polish port city of Gdynia on August 13, he talked about the relative calm in Danzig, despite all the speculation that “this powder-keg of Europe” was about to ignite a new war. He concluded that Hitler might not be pushing for a confrontation over the status of that city as quickly as generally believed. But Danzig, he warned, “is only a symbol—for both sides. The issue, of course, for the Poles, is the future of Poland as an independent nation with a secure outlet to the sea. For the Germans it’s the future of East Prussia cut off from the motherland, the future of the whole German stake in the East. And for most of the rest of Europe the issue is that of German domination on the continent.”

  Taking the train from Gdynia to Warsaw right after making that broadcast, Shirer chatted with two Polish radio engineers who expressed confidence about their country’s ability to resist Hitler. “We’re ready. We will fight,” they told him. “We were born under German rule in this neighborhood and we’d rather be dead than go through it again.” In the Polish capital, he was further impressed by how “calm and confident” the inhabitants seemed, despite the relentless propaganda onslaughts from Berlin. His worry, though, was that the Poles were “too romantic, too confident” and they were ignoring the signals that the Soviet Union might also have designs on them.

  By the time he left Warsaw to return to Berlin a week later, Shirer had formed a judgment about how the Poles would react to any attempted takeover of their country. “I think the Poles will fight,” he concluded. “I know I said that, wrongly, about the Czechs a year ago. But I say it again about the Poles.”

  On August 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in a Kremlin ceremony, with Stalin looking on. Two days earlier, Anthony Biddle, the American ambassador to Poland, had asked for permission from Washington to begin evacuating the families of his staffers. The news of Ribbentrop’s imminent mission to Moscow was already out, and, as Moffat wrote in his diary that day, it came as a “bombshell.” The senior State Department official concluded: “There is no doubt that Germany has pulled off one of the greatest diplomatic coups for many years… It looks to me as though Germany had promised Russia no objection to the latter taking over Estonia and Latvia and, in effect, agreeing to some form of new partition of Poland.” In his own mind, Moffat had already upped the odds of war breaking out to 60–40 in midsummer, and now he raised them further to 75–25.

  In Berlin, many of the American correspondents were as usual keeping late hours at their favorite restaurant, Die Taverne, on the night of August 23–24, when they heard the official news about the pact. “It goes much further than anyone dreamed,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “It’s a virtual alliance and Stalin, the supposed arch-enemy of Nazism and aggression, by its terms invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland.”

  Several German editors who had been writing virulently anti-Soviet articles up till then came into the restaurant and ordered champagne, Shirer observed, and they were suddenly presenting themselves “as old friends of the Soviets!” The seemingly hardened American reporter was stunned by the enormity of the agreement between the two totalitarian systems. While Shirer knew what it meant, he clearly didn’t understand the Soviet leader as well as he did Hitler. “That Stalin would play such crude power politics and also play into the hands of the Nazis overwhelms the rest of us,” he wrote.

  Shirer and an American colleague he only identified as Joe sat down with the G
erman editors and promptly got into a heated argument. “They are gloating, boasting, sputtering that Britain won’t dare to fight now, denying everything that they have been told to say these last six years by their Nazi lords [about the Soviet Union],” Shirer recorded. The two Americans pushed back, reminding them of how they had written about the Bolsheviks until then. “The argument gets nasty,” Shirer concluded. “Joe is nervous, depressed. So am I. Pretty soon we get nauseated. Something will happen if we don’t get out.” The Americans made their excuses and left, walking through the Tiergarten to cool off in the night air.

  As news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact sank in, Britain and France reaffirmed their commitments to Poland. In the wake of the takeover of Czechoslovakia in March, both countries had pledged to defend Poland, and on August 25, British and Polish officials formally signed the Anglo-Polish military alliance in London. But Hitler was still counting on outmaneuvering Britain, as he continued to exchange messages with Prime Minister Chamberlain’s government in London and meet with its ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson. Shirer was convinced that war was coming, but he pointed out: “The people in the streets are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war.”

  The State Department urged Americans not to travel to Europe unless absolutely necessary. American diplomats in Berlin could monitor the war preparations firsthand, making them even less likely to see a chance for avoiding a conflict than their bosses back in Washington. Jacob Beam recalled: “From about the middle of August, searchlights pierced the Berlin skies, pin-pointing planes at what seemed to be very great heights. Troop convoys crossed the city escorted by roaring motorcycle brigades manned by goggled riders looking like men from Mars.” On August 26, he added, the government issued a new long list of items to be rationed, including food, shoes and soap. Those who owned automobiles were instructed to turn in any backup batteries they had.

  As Hitler and his entourage saw it, Germany was now fully prepared to strike.

  Recalling the final days of August 1939 seventy years later, Angus Thuermer still felt somewhat sheepish about how he handled his assignment at the time. Lochner, his bureau chief, had instructed the junior AP reporter to travel to Gleiwitz, along the Polish border, since he knew “something was going to happen.” That proved to be quite an understatement.

  One evening, Thuermer took a taxi outside of town and promptly found himself in the midst of a Wehrmacht regiment marching along the border. Realizing that he had better leave before he got into trouble, Thuermer ordered the taxi to take him back to Gleiwitz. A couple of evenings later—August 31, to be exact—he was awakened by sounds outside his hotel. He looked out of his seventh-floor window and saw German troops in a field car followed by countless others marching. Then a band suddenly appeared. That convinced him it was only an exercise. “You don’t take a band to go to war,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time. So he went back to sleep. The next morning, September 1, he looked out the window again and saw trucks bringing back wounded German soldiers from Poland. The German invasion of Poland was under way.

  Alarmed that he had slept through the first night of the conflagration that would become World War II, Thuermer rushed to find the press officer of a German Army unit that had moved into his hotel. Introducing himself, he explained that he was eager to accompany German troops into Poland, since it was normal practice for AP reporters to do so. They had been allowed to accompany German troops into Austria and the Sudetenland, he pointed out. “Yes, Herr Thuermer, but this time it is different,” the German press officer replied. “You go back to Berlin and to the Propaganda Ministry and they will tell you what is happening.”

  The German officer was right, of course: This time was different. This was really war.

  Back in Berlin, some American diplomats had received almost as clear signals on the eve of the German invasion. Walking to work on August 31, William Russell, a twenty-four-year-old clerk in the embassy’s consular section, had already seen the morning headlines in the German papers: “Last Warnings” and “Unendurable Outrages” and “Murderous Poles.” He jumped as a siren shrieked nearby, evidently a test of the air raid warning system, and he observed the traffic jam in Potsdamer Platz caused by army trucks full of soldiers, along with motorcycles and cannon transporters. He could also see aircraft circling above Berlin. “The excitement of a city preparing for war pounded in my veins,” he recalled.

  Just as Russell was approaching the embassy, a small man with a shaved head, holding a gray hat in his trembling hand, touched his arm. “I must talk to you,” he said in a whisper.

  The man quickly confirmed that Russell, whom he had seen in the immigration section, indeed worked there. Hans Neuman was a Jew who hadn’t been able to push his way through the crowd to the door of the embassy that morning, and he was frantic. Russell instructed him to keep walking as he explained more. Neuman said he had been released a week earlier from Dachau, and now he was desperate for an American visa. “The Gestapo ordered me out of the country ten days ago,” he pleaded. “I’ve got to get out today, or never.”

  Russell asked him if he was telling the truth, since a lot of applicants were willing to say anything that would get them a visa. “My God, look at my head if you don’t believe me,” Neuman replied. The American noted the red gashes under the bit of hair that had grown back since his head was recently shaved—the telltale sign of a prisoner.

  And Neuman offered a concrete reason why he had to get out that day. “War is going to start tonight. I have friends who know,” he told Russell. “If I don’t get across the border, I’ll lose my last chance to escape. God knows what they’ll…”

  Although the young American had heard many similar pleas, he believed Neuman and promised to help him. Entering the embassy, Russell was confronted by “a madhouse” overflowing with others clamoring for a prized American visa to get out. He found Neuman’s paperwork and appealed to Vice-Consul Paul Coates to let him jump the long queue, but Coates chastised him for allowing his personal sympathy for Neuman to sway him. “It’s not fair to all the others,” he said.

  Russell wouldn’t give up. “I know it’s not fair,” he replied. “Nothing’s fair, if you want to be strictly truthful. It’s not fair of the German police to order this man to get out of his homeland when he has violated no law and has no place to go to. It isn’t fair to push a man around until he’s half crazy. I’m not concerned about fairness.”

  Russell overheard a woman nearby imploring another colleague to do something for her husband, who was imprisoned in Dachau. “I’m sorry,” the American told her. “There are thousands of applicants registered before your husband. He has at least eight years to wait.”

  “But you will just have to do something,” the woman pleaded. “He will die there. If war comes, they will never let him out of that place.”

  The consular official shook his head, signaling an end to their conversation. As she gathered her paperwork and left, the woman broke into tears. American quota laws hadn’t changed to accommodate the mostly Jewish applicants who, according to Russell, “were to be found in every nook and cranny” of every American consulate in Germany.

  Still, Russell worked all day to get Neuman his visa. Seeing his determination, another consular officer finally relented near closing time, finding him a quota number to assign to Neuman. He even suggested that Russell drive him to the airport to make sure he was allowed to get on a plane to Rotterdam, since it was too late at that point for him to get a Dutch visa. At Tempelhof Airport, two storm troopers, dressed in black uniforms, and two other officials examined Neuman’s passport. They also asked Russell what he was doing there. The American explained that he was from the embassy and wanted to make sure that Neuman got on the plane to Rotterdam, since he had an American visa and was due to sail from the Dutch port to the United States.

  “Herr Neuman has a visa to the United States,” one of the storm troopers said sarcastically, pointing out that he didn’t have a Dutch
visa. “Well, isn’t that nice?”

  But then one of the other officials intervened. “Let him go,” he said. “We’d have one Jew less. Let the Dutch worry about what to do with him.”

  A customs officer took a final look at Neuman’s passport and stamped it. “See that you don’t come back to Germany,” he told him. “If you do, you’ll be sent back to a certain place.”

  Neuman’s story would prove to be one of the few with a happy ending on that last day before the war broke out. Later, he sent Russell a postcard confirming that he had sailed from Rotterdam.

  Another story with a happy ending involved Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Germany. His British counterpart, Sir Nevile Henderson, had called Lipski to inform him about his stormy meeting with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, which had left little doubt that the Germans were about to attack Poland. That conversation had taken place at 2 A.M. on August 31. Around noon the same day, Jacob Beam spotted Lipski sitting in his car at a Shell station, waiting for his tank to be filled. After the war, Beam met Lipski and told him he had seen him then. Lipski explained that he had stayed with his car, fearing that the Germans might seize it. Early that evening, only a few hours before the Germans invaded, Lipski escaped back to his homeland.

  If many American diplomats and journalists in Berlin had a better sense of the enormity of the storm that Hitler was unleashing than others looking from afar, most of them still hadn’t recognized how quickly Hitler’s forces would be able to overwhelm Poland and later most of continental Europe.

  In his address to the Reichstag on September 1, Hitler wore an army jacket. “I have once more put on that coat which was most sacred and dear to me,” he declared. “I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I shall not survive the outcome.” Hitler claimed he had made “endless attempts” to keep the peace, but that Polish troops had attacked German territory, leaving him no choice but to act. Beam, who was in the Reichstag to hear him, found the speech impressive, aimed at convincing Britain and France not to enter the fray. He called his language “less belligerent and intimidating” than in earlier speeches.