On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet dictator had refused to believe all the warnings not just from his spies but also from Britain and the United States. As a result, German forces initially scored easy victories against the unprepared Red Army troops and pushed deep into Soviet territory, making it look like Hitler’s calculations would be proven right again. In the August 4, 1941, issue of Life magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, America’s most authoritative military writer, argued that the outcome of the war depended on what would happen on the Eastern Front. A successful German campaign would result in the completion of “the conquest of Europe,” he declared, dooming Britain as well. He discussed the possibility that Hitler’s armies could be defeated or at least worn down by a long, costly campaign. “But on the basis of all past experience—on our limited knowledge of the Red Army, on the operations of the first month—the world can anticipate in Russia another quick and decisive German victory,” he concluded.
For the Americans who lived and worked in Germany, however, Hitler’s optimistic predictions looked more and more unrealistic. The further his armies marched, the more strains they noticed on the home front. Life was changing in Hitlerland—for the Americans, but also for the Germans. And it wasn’t for the better.
During the Battle of Britain in August and September 1940, RAF bombers rarely made it to Berlin, but their initial forays were enough to shake the confidence of the inhabitants of the German capital who had been assured that it was invulnerable. On September 10, Berlin endured what Shirer described as “the severest bombing yet,” as firebombs hit the Ministry of Munitions right between the Adlon Hotel and the U.S. Embassy. Although the incendiaries were put out before they did much damage, they were scattered in various places, including the yard of the Adlon and the garden of the embassy. That evening after he had completed his broadcast, Shirer was rushing back to the Adlon in the dark when his car hit some debris, skidded and came to a stop about 20 feet from a fresh bomb crater. “I almost met a quick end last night,” he wrote in his diary the next day.
Shirer recorded that Donald Heath had an even closer call at the embassy. A splinter from the same bomb that made the crater had flown through Heath’s office double window 200 yards away, passing directly over his desk and embedding itself in the wall on the opposite side. Heath had been scheduled for night duty, but chargé d’affaires Kirk had relieved him.
The German press trumpeted headlines vowing revenge for such bombings, which it claimed were targeting children, hospitals and other civilian targets. While London was living under the genuine terror of the Blitz, Berliners could be excused for believing that their country was suffering almost as much. “Night Crime of British Against 21 German Children—This Bloody Crime Cries Out for Revenge,” one newspaper proclaimed. Another warned, “‘Assassins’ Murder Is No Longer War, Herr Winston Churchill!—The British Island of Murderers Will Have to Take the Consequences of Its Malicious Bombings.”
For some time after the Battle of Britain, the Americans in Berlin felt almost eerily detached from the actual fighting. “Except for the outbursts from the Nazi orators… and except for the reports of feverish diplomatic activity and rumours of troop movements, we in Berlin hardly knew a war was on during the early part of 1941,” Flannery recalled. In that period, Americans still noticed relatively few wounded soldiers on the streets of Berlin. “But after the Russian campaign began, I saw them in every block along the principal streets—young men with their arms in slings, with an arm gone, walking with crutches or canes, or without one of their legs,” Flannery added.
When the CBS reporter approached a newsstand one day, he overheard the newsdealer ask a woman if she was all right. In a hollow voice, she replied: “No, I just had bad news, and must phone my husband at work. You know we lost a son in Poland, and another in France. Now I have word that Johann is gone, too, our last son. He has been killed in Russia.”
Even during Germany’s early victories in the Soviet Union, the newspapers left no doubt that the cost was high. Flannery estimated that almost half of German families had suffered a loss—and he saw that people were increasingly depressed. As the RAF bombings intensified, this, too, contributed to the drop in morale. Flannery, who was doing full-time duty in Berlin since Shirer’s departure in November 1940, was leaving his dentist one day when the woman elevator operator began complaining about the war’s hardships. “Mein Gott, mein Gott,” she told him, “warum? Why? It’s all caused by a mere handful of men.”
Flannery found himself within a block of falling bombs on more than one occasion. On a night when Colonel Lovell was watching a raid from the roof of an embassy house near the zoo, the bombs hit so close that the attaché threw himself flat. “I thought I was gone,” he said.
Sigrid Schultz observed another more subtle side of the war that was taking its toll as well. On the train from Berlin to Basel, she shared a compartment with a Luftwaffe colonel who freely discussed how the war was changing family relationships. “I love my wife and my children,” he said, “but when we soldiers get home, all our families can talk about is how many potatoes they get and what kinds of sandwiches other people have in their air-raid shelters.” The implicit message: Germany’s fighting men were impatient with what they often saw as the petty concerns of their families back home.
Earlier, Schultz had talked with a woman who appeared to have none of the material worries of so many of the other civilians; she exuded self-confidence. “I do war work. I am a plastic surgeon,” she said. “I ought to be prosperous; I’m working hard enough beautifying bustlines.”
When Schultz asked her what this had to do with the war, she replied: “Why, when the German men come home from France and the Balkans, they criticize the figures of their wives. All the Nazis have money, you know, so I operate.”
For most Germans who were losing hope of a quick victory, there were far more serious worries—keeping themselves adequately fed and clothed, especially during the winter. And for Jews, there was genuine terror, which had begun long before the war and the bombings, as the remaining Americans knew well.
Angus Thuermer, the young AP correspondent, had first rented a room in a fourth-floor Berlin apartment; one floor below, there was a Jewish family. He recalled that a woman had come out of the third-floor apartment one day and tried to throw herself down the stairwell, but she was stopped from committing suicide. A day later, Thuermer saw that the apartment’s door had its lock removed and a Gestapo seal placed over the empty hole. But another day or so later, he found the door open. Walking in, he saw an “Aryan” family looking around. On the dresser, they spotted several cans of food. “Oh, look at that: see what fancy food they were eating,” one of the Germans said.
Some of the Americans still lived with a lingering sense of guilt decades later about how they failed to respond to appeals for help from Jews. Thuermer recalled a knock on his door very late one night. When the American opened it, he saw a thin man wearing a coat with a yellow star on it; around his neck, he wore the Medal of Honor from the previous war. “I wonder if I could pay you marks here in Germany and you pay me in an account in dollars,” he said. Thuermer tried to explain that, although he was working for the AP and no longer a student, he was still getting a preferential exchange rate provided to foreign students in violation of the rules. This meant he was “a little crooked” already and felt he couldn’t take another risk. His visitor left disappointed.
One night in October 1941, Howard K. Smith, who had just quit the United Press and jumped to CBS to replace Flannery, received a similar knock on the door at around 2 A.M. His visitor was Fritz Heppler, a Jew of about the same age as the young American reporter; they had met during an air raid about a year earlier. Heppler told him that the Gestapo was conducting raids of Jewish apartments all over town, ostensibly looking for hoarded foodstuffs. They had raided his apartment, too, but not finding anything, they released him. Heppler had be
en defiant the previous time he met Smith, but now his fear was palpable. “It’s come,” he said, alluding to the roundups of Jews, who were then deported to the east. “I knew it would come, as soon as they started losing.” He pleaded for Smith to help him get out of the country. The reporter offered him a cigarette and said he would see if he could help him get an American visa, but claimed that he was exaggerating the danger. Then he shoved him out the door.
“My callousness on this occasion can hardly be justified,” Smith wrote later, recalling that he forgot about Heppler the next day and didn’t even attempt to bring his case to the embassy’s attention. “Not that it would have helped him; but it would have helped soothe my own conscience,” he added. Smith never saw Heppler again.
At the American Embassy, Kennan and other diplomats often felt overworked and besieged. Since the German government had ordered the closure of ten U.S. consulates in other cities in 1940, everyone came to the Berlin embassy for help. “The increasingly desperate situation of the German Jews, and Jews from the German-occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the United States, added to the burden,” he wrote. He bitterly noted that he and his colleagues had been put in an impossible position. “These pressures tended often to be generated in powerful congressional circles at home and to be passed on, unmitigated, to us by the Department of State anxious to get itself out of the firing line and too timid to point out to the Congressmen what could and could not (sometimes in light of the laws they themselves had created) be done to aid such people.”
When Alexander Kirk left Berlin in October 1940, Kennan’s personal workload increased further. Leland Morris replaced Kirk as chargé d’affaires, but was a far weaker figure. As a result, Kennan was often the de facto man in charge. Jacob Beam, by then the longest-serving embassy staffer despite his young age, would write later: “Time proved him [Kennan] to be a better historian than executive.” Still, Kennan and the rest of the embassy staff deserved credit for continuing to keep their country’s outpost in Berlin functioning as best they could. Aside from taking on the interests of Britain and France, the embassy assumed responsibility for successive countries that came under Nazi rule. This meant more and more work; it also meant that the American diplomats were feeling more and more alone.
The American journalists felt lonelier as well. Some of the best known of their colleagues had already pulled out. Shirer departed in December 1940, and Harsch and Schultz left in January 1941. Unlike many of their countrymen back home who still were hoping the United States could stay out of the war, those correspondents were convinced that it would prove impossible to stay on the sidelines. Harsch was planning on writing a book in the hopes of enlightening his countrymen, and, to do so, he needed to return. “I felt that perhaps the time had come to get home and write down all the things I had not felt free to say when writing from Berlin itself,” he recalled.
The print journalists didn’t labor under the same heavy censorship as their radio colleagues, but there were always unspoken rules. Foremost among them, as Pierre Huss put it, was that “you must never, either by act or word of mouth or in a dispatch, say or suggest anything which might be a slur or a reflection on the office and the person of the Fuehrer.” Although the International News Service correspondent also pointed out that he and his American colleagues were “the hottest game of the Nazis” right up till mid-1941, since the Germans still hoped to keep the United States out of the war, he complained that afterward the de facto censorship meant that reporters were expected to rely mainly on official information—and disinformation. “Everything else was taboo,” he wrote.
Harsch traced the more hostile attitude toward the American correspondents further back—in particular to Roosevelt’s victory in the November 1940 elections over Wendell Willkie. Although Willkie was a liberal Republican who would later support Roosevelt and do battle with the isolationists, he sent mixed signals during the campaign on what course he would steer if he were elected. His sister Charlotte was married to Commander Paul Pihl, the U.S. naval attaché for air in Berlin, and they would hold frequent Sunday salons attended by officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Luftwaffe. “Many times I heard her say that if her brother were to win the 1940 election he would keep the United States out of the war,” Harsch wrote.
As American support for the British war effort was ramped up in early 1941, the pressures on the foreign correspondents increased as well. Ostensibly, they were given special treatment. Two press clubs were set up to attend to their needs, with plenty of wining and dining included, but the clubs’ primary purpose was to disseminate propaganda and keep tabs on what the reporters were doing. The Gestapo “knew everything about each of us,” Howard K. Smith wrote. “They maintained agents in the two press clubs, vile little fellows who tried to appear chummy.” They also kept agents at other popular hangouts, such as the Adlon Hotel and Die Taverne.
All of which made Smith and others completely disbelieve the official reason why seven Gestapo agents showed up at Richard Hottelet’s door at 7 A.M. on Saturday, March 15, 1941. Taken to the Alexanderplatz Prison, Hottelet, Smith’s colleague in the United Press’s Berlin bureau, was told he had been arrested “on suspicion of espionage.” As Smith curtly put it, “Had he been a spy, the Gestapo would have known it.”
Beam, who was transferred back to the State Department by this time, believed that Hottelet was picked up in retaliation for the arrest of a German journalist in Washington on spying charges. But Smith was convinced that the real reason was both more personal and more general. He pointed out that Hottelet had been bursting with anger at the Nazis—a result of the fact that he had lived in Berlin “too long for his own safety.” Hottelet could “no longer hide his nausea and bob his head stupidly at the inane dinner-table propaganda essays of the little Propaganda Ministry bureaucrats in the Press Club restaurants,” Smith wrote. “To use Dick’s own expressive language: he hated their goddam guts.” Since the Nazis were looking for someone to arrest so that they could intimidate the other American reporters in Berlin, he continued, Hottelet was the obvious target.
Hottelet found himself in a solitary cell with a stool, a cot and a toilet in the corner. From six-thirty in the morning till four-thirty in the afternoon, he wasn’t allowed to sit or lie on the cot. He wasn’t allowed any reading matter initially either, and his glasses were taken away “to prevent suicide.” That meant he spent long hours sitting on the stool and reading what other prisoners had written on the wall. It appeared to be a cell used often for foreigners. Someone had written in English HOME, SWEET HOME, DEAR MOTHER WHERE ARE YOU? Another inscription was VIVE L’INTERNATIONALE. There was writing in Russian, too, but Hottelet couldn’t read it.
His diet consisted mostly of dry black bread, ersatz coffee and bean, noodle or barley soup. He realized that the prison was very international: the inmates were Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Italian. They also included several Catholic priests.
At first, the Gestapo interrogated him often, sometimes twice a day. When he denied the accusation that he was a spy, his interrogators tried to scare him. “You won’t feel quite so confident when you are sweating under the lights and we throw questions at you,” they told him. Or: “You will sit until you confess. You will soften up. You’ll be soft as butter. We’ve got plenty of time.”
But Hottelet’s treatment was radically different than that accorded most prisoners. His nationality and profession still offered him a degree of protection. An official from the American consulate was allowed to visit him, bringing fresh clothes—although the prisoner was denied the soap, toothbrush and toothpaste he also brought. On May 3, Hottelet was transferred to the Moabit Prison in another part of the city, where the food was better. When word got around that he was American, trusties began slipping him extra potatoes, which helped him fend off hunger. Soon he was allowed to receive a daily newspaper and two books a week from the prison library. The mos
t interesting book he found was De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s meditative essay that he wrote during his imprisonment in England.
On July 8, to his complete surprise, Hottelet was released and delivered to a representative from the U.S. Embassy. He had lost fifteen pounds during his incarceration, but this, again, was nothing compared to what routinely happened to other prisoners. Still, Smith and other colleagues understood the message from the Nazis: American reporters were no longer untouchable—and they had better be extra careful. On July 17, Hottelet quietly left Berlin. Describing his sense of freedom as he saw the New York skyline later that month, he wrote, “Now I know doors which I can open myself are something to be thankful for and not to be taken for granted.”
The German press minders abandoned any pretense of friendliness in dealing with the remaining, shrinking contingent of American reporters in Berlin. “Your situation is anomalous,” a Propaganda Ministry official told Smith after he switched to CBS in October 1941. “We do not want you here and you do not want to stay. Why don’t you leave?” For the radio broadcasters, overt censorship was increasingly heavy-handed, disallowing mentioning, as Smith recalled, anti-Jewish measures or the executions of “Czech patriots or of French ‘communists’ and hostages.” His texts were “utterly vapid,” Smith despaired. Like other American reporters, he began methodically destroying all his notes as soon as he had used them, leaving his desk almost empty, except for pencils, pens and ink. The assumption was that anything could prove to be incriminating for the reporters and their sources.
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