Berlin Diary
The Journal of a
Foreign Correspondent
1934-1941
William L. Shirer
Copyright
Berlin Diary
Copyright © 1941, renewed 1968 by William L. Shirer
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795316982
To Tess
Who Shared So Much
Contents
Foreword
Part I—Prelude to War
January 11, 1934—December 2, 1934
January 14, 1935—December 30, 1935
January 4, 1936—December 25, 1936
April 8, 1937—December 25, 1937
February 5, 1938—December 26, 1938
January 11, 1939—September 1, 1939
Part II—The War
September 1, 1939, Later—December 31, 1939
January 1, 1940—December 13, 1940
Notes
FOREWORD
Most diaries, it may well be, are written with no thought of publication. They have no reader’s eye in view. They are personal, intimate, confidential, a part of oneself that is better hidden from the crass outside world.
This journal makes no pretence to being of that kind. It was recorded for my own pleasure and peace of mind, to be sure, but also—to be perfectly frank—with the idea that one day most of it might be published, if any publisher cared to commit it to print. Obviously this was not because I deemed for one second that I and the life I led were of the slightest importance or even of any particular interest to the public. The only justification in my own mind was that chance, and the kind of job I had, appeared to be giving me a somewhat unusual opportunity to set down from day to day a first-hand account of a Europe that was already in agony and that, as the months and years unfolded, slipped inexorably towards the abyss of war and self-destruction.
The subject of this diary therefore is not, except incidentally, its keeper, but this Europe which he watched with increasing fascination and horror plunge madly down the road to Armageddon in the last half of the 1930’s. The primary cause of the Continent’s upheaval was one country, Germany, and one man, Adolf Hitler. Most of my years abroad were spent in that country in proximity to that man. It was from this vantage point that I saw the European democracies falter and crack and, their confidence and judgment and will paralysed, retreat from one bastion to another until they could no longer, with the exception of Britain, make a stand. From within that totalitarian citadel I could observe too how Hitler, acting with a cynicism, brutality, decisiveness, and clarity of mind and purpose which the Continent had not seen since Napoleon, went from victory to victory, unifying Germany, rearming it, smashing and annexing its neighbours until he had made the Third Reich the militant master of the Continent, and most of its unhappy peoples his slaves.
I jotted down these things from day to day. Unfortunately some of my original notes were lost; others I burned rather than risk them and myself to the tender mercies of the Gestapo; a few things I dared not write down, attempting to imprint them in my memory to be recorded at a later and safer date. But the bulk of my notes and copies of all my broadcasts, before they were censored, I was able to smuggle out. Where there are lapses, I have drawn freely upon my dispatches and radio scripts. In a few cases I have been forced to reconstitute from memory the happenings of the day, conscious of the pitfalls of such a method and the demands of ruthless honesty.
And, finally, certain names of persons in Germany or with relatives in Germany have been disguised or simply indicated by a letter which has no relation to their real names. The Gestapo will find no clues.
Chappaqua, New York
April 1941
PART I
Prelude to War
WLS
LLORET DE MAR, SPAIN, January 11, 1934
Our money is gone. Day after tomorrow I must go back to work. We had not thought much about it. A wire came. An offer. A bad offer from the Paris Herald. But it will keep the wolf away until I can get something better.
Thus ends the best, the happiest, the most uneventful year we have ever lived. It has been our “year off,” our sabbatical year, and we have lived it in this little Spanish fishing village exactly as we dreamed and planned, beautifully independent of the rest of the world, of events, of men, bosses, publishers, editors, relatives, and friends. It couldn’t have gone on for ever. We wouldn’t have wanted it to, though if the thousand dollars we had saved for it had not been suddenly reduced to six hundred by the fall of the dollar, we might have stretched the year until a better job turned up. It was a good time to lay off, I think. I’ve regained the health I lost in India and Afghanistan in 1930–1 from malaria and dysentery. I’ve recovered from the shock of the skiing accident in the Alps in the spring of 1932, which for a time threatened me with a total blindness but which, happily, in the end, robbed me of the sight of only one eye.
And the year just past, 1933, may very well have been one not only of transition for us personally, but for all Europe and America. What Roosevelt is doing at home seems to smack almost of social and economic revolution. Hitler and the Nazis have lasted out a whole year in Germany and our friends in Vienna write that fascism, both of a local clerical brand and of the Berlin type, is rapidly gaining ground in Austria. Here in Spain the revolution has gone sour and the Right government of Gil Robles and Alexander Lerroux seems bent on either restoring the monarchy or setting up a fascist state on the model of Italy—perhaps both. The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow—I have no illusions about that. It almost seems as though the world we are plunging back into is already a different one from that we left just a year ago when we packed our clothes and books in Vienna and set off for Spain.
We stumbled across Lloret de Mar on a hike up the coast from Barcelona. It was five miles from the railroad, set in the half-moon of a wide, sandy beach under the foot-hills of the Pyrenees. Tess liked it at once. So did I. We found a furnished house on the beach—three storeys, ten rooms, two baths, central heating. When the proprietor said the price would be fifteen dollars a month, we paid the rent for a year. Our expenses, including rent, have averaged sixty dollars a month.
What have we done these past twelve months? Not too much. No great “accomplishments.” We’ve swum, four or five times a day, from April to Christmas. We’ve hiked up and around the lower reaches of the Pyrenees that slope down to the village and the sea, past a thousand olive groves, a hundred cork-oak forests, and the cool whitewashed walls of the peasants’ houses, putting off until tomorrow and for ever the climb we were always going to make to the peaks that were covered with snow late in the spring and early in the fall. We’ve read—a few of the books for which there was never time in the days when you had a nightly cable to file and were being shunted from one capital to another—from Paris and London to Delhi. Myself: some history, some philosophy, and Spengler’s Decline of the West; Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution; War and Peace; Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, the most original French novel since the war; and most or all of Wells, Shaw, Ellis, Beard, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Dreiser. A few friends came and stayed: the Jay Aliens, Russell and Pat Strauss, and Luis Quinta
nilla, one of the most promising of the younger Spanish painters and a red-hot republican. Andres Segovia lived next door and came over in the evening to talk or to play Bach or Albeniz on his guitar.
This year we had time to know each other, to loaf and play, to wine and eat, to see the bull-fights in the afternoon and Barcelona’s gaudy Barrio Chino at night; time to sense the colours, the olive green of the hills, the incomparable blues of the Mediterranean in the spring, and the wondrous, bleak, grey-white skies above Madrid; time too to know the Spanish peasant and worker and fisherman, men of great dignity and guts and integrity despite their miserable, half-starved lives; and at the Prado and Toledo just a little time for Greco, whose sweeping form and colour all but smote us down and made all the Renaissance painting we had seen in Italy, even the da Vincis, Raphaels, Titians, Botticellis, seem pale and anaemic.
It has been a good year.
PARIS, February 7
A little dazed still from last night. About five p.m. yesterday I was twiddling my thumbs in the Herald office wondering whether to go down to the Chamber, where the new premier, Edouard Daladier, was supposed to read his ministerial declaration, when we got a tip that there was trouble at the Place de la Concorde. I grabbed a taxi and went down to see. I found nothing untoward. A few royalist Camelots du Roi, Jeunesses Patriotes of Deputy Pierre Taittinger, and Solidarité Française thugs of Perfumer François Coty—all right-wing youths or gangsters—had attempted to break through to the Chamber, but had been dispersed by the police. The Place was normal. I telephoned the Herald, but Eric Hawkins, managing editor, advised me to grab a bite of dinner near by and take another look a little later. About seven p.m. I returned to the Place de la Concorde. Something obviously was up. Mounted steel-helmeted Mobile Guards were clearing the square. Over by the obelisk in the centre a bus was on fire. I worked my way over through the Mobile Guards, who were slashing away with their sabres, to the Tuileries side. Up on the terrace was a mob of several thousand and, mingling with them, I soon found they were not fascists, but Communists. When the police tried to drive them back, they unleashed a barrage of stones and bricks. Over on the bridge leading from the Place to the Chamber across the Seine, I found a solid mass of Mobile Guards nervously fingering their rifles, backed up by ordinary police and a fire-brigade. A couple of small groups attempted to advance to the bridge from the quay leading up from the Louvre, but two fire-hoses put them to flight. About eight o’clock a couple of thousand U.N.C. (Union Nationale des Combattants1) war veterans paraded into the Place, having marched down the Champs-Elysées from the Rond-Point. They came in good order behind a mass of tricoloured flags. They were stopped at the bridge and their leaders began talking with police officials. I went over to the Crillon and up to the third-floor balcony overlooking the square. It was jammed with people. The first shots we didn’t hear. The first we knew of the shooting was when a woman about twenty feet away suddenly slumped to the floor with a bullet-hole in her forehead. She was standing next to Melvin Whiteleather of the A.P. Now we could hear the shooting, coming from the bridge and the far side of the Seine. Automatic rifles they seemed to be using. The mob’s reaction was to storm into the square. Soon it was dotted with fires. To the left, smoke started pouring out of the Ministry of Marine. Hoses were brought into play, but the mob got close enough to cut them. I went down to the lobby to phone the office. Several wounded were laid out and were being given first aid.
The shooting continued until about midnight, when the Mobile Guards began to get the upper hand. Several times the Place de la Concorde changed hands, but towards midnight the police were in control. Once—about ten o’clock it must have been—the mob, which by this time was incensed, but obviously lacked leadership, tried to storm the bridge, some coming up along the quais, whose trees offered them considerable protection, and others charging madly across the Place. “If they get across the bridge,” I thought, “they’ll kill every deputy in the Chamber.” But a deadly fire—it sounded this time like machine-guns—stopped them and in a few minutes they were scattering in all directions.
Soon there was only scattered firing and about ten minutes after twelve I started sprinting up the Champs-Élysées towards the office to write my story. Near the President’s Élysée Palace I noticed several companies of regular troops on guard, the first I had seen. It is almost a mile up hill along the Champs-Élysées to the Herald office and I arrived badly out of breath, but managed to write a couple of columns before deadline. Officially: sixteen dead, several hundred wounded.
LATER.—Daladier, who posed as a strong man, has resigned. He gives out this statement: “The government, which has the responsibility for order and security, refuses to assure it by exceptional means which might bring about further bloodshed. It does not desire to employ soldiers against demonstrators. I have therefore handed to the President of the Republic the resignation of the Cabinet.”
Imagine Stalin or Mussolini or Hitler hesitating to employ troops against a mob trying to overthrow their regimes! It’s true perhaps that last night’s rioting had as its immediate cause the Stavisky scandal. But the Stavisky swindles merely demonstrate the rottenness and the weakness of French democracy. Daladier and his Minister of the Interior, Eugène Frot, actually gave the U.N.C, permission to demonstrate. They should have refused it. They should have had enough Mobile Guards on hand early in the evening to disperse the mob before it could gather strength. But to resign now, after putting down a fascist coup—for that’s what it was—is either sheer cowardice or stupidity. Important too is the way the Communists fought on the same side of the barricades last night as the fascists. I do not like that.
PARIS, February 8
Old “Papa” Doumergue is to head the government of “national union.” They’ve dragged him from his village of Tournefeuille, where he had retired with his mistress, whom he married shortly after stepping down from the presidency. He says he will form a cabinet of former premiers and chiefs of parties, but it will be Rightish and reactionary. Still, the moderate Left—men like Chautemps, Daladier, Herriot—have shown they can’t govern, or won’t.
PARIS, February 12
A general strike today, but not very effective, and there’s been no trouble.
LATER.—Dollfuss has struck at the Social Democrats in Austria, the only organized group (forty per cent of the population) which can save him from being swallowed up by the Nazis. Communications with Vienna were cut most of the day, but tonight the story started coming through to the office. It is civil war. The Socialists are entrenched in the great municipal houses they built after the war—models for the whole world—the Karl Marx Hof, the Goethe Hof, and so on. But Dollfuss and the Heimwehr under Prince Starhemberg, a play-boy ignoramus, and Major Fey, a hatchet-faced and brutal reactionary, have control of the rest of the city. With their tanks and artillery, they will win—unless the Socialists get help from the Czechs, from near-by Bratislava.
This, then, is what Fey meant yesterday. I was struck by a report of his speech which Havas carried last night: “During the last few days I have made certain that Chancellor Dollfuss is a man of the Heimwehr. Tomorrow we shall start to make a clean breast of things in Austria.” But I put it down to his usual loud-mouthedness. And what a role for little Dollfuss! It’s only a little more than a year ago that I, with John Gunther and Eric Gedye, had a long talk with him after a luncheon which the Anglo-American Press Club tendered him. I found him a timid little fellow, still a little dazed that he, the illegitimate son of a peasant, should have gone so far. But give the little men a lot of power and they can be dangerous. I weep for my Social Democrat friends, the most decent men and women I’ve known in Europe. How many of them are being slaughtered tonight, I wonder. And there goes democracy in Austria, one more state gone. Remained at the office until the paper was put to bed at one thirty a.m., but feel too weary and depressed by the news to sleep.
PARIS, February 15
The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches s
ay. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.
February 23
My birthday. Thirty. And with the worst job I’ve ever had. Tess prepared a great birthday banquet and afterwards we went out to a concert. How the French slide over Beethoven! Elliot Paul used to say that if the French musicians would stop reading L’Intransigeant or Paris-Soir during a performance they would do better. Must see Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at the Comédie Française, which the Left people charge has some anti-democratic lines. Heard today that Doll fuss had hanged Koloman Wallisch, the Social Democrat mayor of Bruck an der Mur. Claude Cockburn, who should know better, came out the other day in Week with an absurd account of the February 6 riots. Described them as a “working class” protest. Curiously enough, his description of that night reads suspiciously like that which Trotsky has written of the first uprising in Petrograd in 1917 in his History of the Russian Revolution. The fact is that February 6 was an attempted fascist coup which the Communists, wittingly or not, helped.
PARIS, June 30
Berlin was cut off for several hours today, but late this afternoon telephone communication was re-established. And what a story! Hitler and Göring have purged the S.A., shooting many of its leaders. Röhm, arrested by Hitler himself, was allowed to commit suicide in a Munich jail, according to one agency report. The French are pleased. They think this is the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Wish I could get a post in Berlin. It’s a story I’d like to cover.
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