Berlin Diary

by William L. Shirer

  More drunkenness on the Kurfürstendamm last night than I’ve ever seen in Berlin. Himmler had thousands of police scattered over town to see that no one used his car and that the cafés shut up promptly at one a.m. Saw the old year out at Sigrid Schultz’s, then an hour or so with the Germans at the Rundfunk, then with Russell Hill over to Virginia’s. About two a.m. in the Kurfürstendamm we jumped into a taxi. A German, his wife and daughter, aged about twelve, sprang in through the other door and we agreed to share it, there being practically no taxis out. A soldier and his girl then climbed in next to the driver. We had not gone far when a policeman stopped us and ordered us all out, on the ground that we could not ride in a taxi unless we were on state business. I admitted I had no state business at two a.m. on New Year’s Eve, but pointed out that we had a child with us and that she was ill. He finally allowed us to pile in again. We rode a few blocks and then the soldier began to throw a fit—whether from drink or shell-shock I couldn’t tell. At any rate, he clamoured for the driver to stop and let him out, and his girl screamed first at him and then at the driver to do something. The driver, whether from drink or nature I don’t know, was inclined to do nothing. We kept on going. Then the alarming psychological atmosphere of the front seat began to spread to the rear one, where we five were jammed in. The little girl suddenly started to scream, whether from claustrophobia or fear of the screaming soldier, or both, Russell and I were not sure. She too cried to get out. Her mother joined her. Then her father. Finally the driver, apparently awakened by the bedlam, decided to stop. Out on the curb the father and the soldier began to engage in a fierce argument as to who had spoiled whose New Year’s Eve. Russell and I and the taxi-driver stole away, leaving them to fight it out. The frayed nerves of the war, we decided.

  BERLIN, January 3

  I learned today what the Russians have promised to deliver to Germany this year:

  1,000,000 tons of fodder and grain;

  500,000 tons of oil seeds;

  500,000 tons of soya beans;

  900,000 tons of petroleum;

  150,000 tons of cotton (this is more cotton than Russia had to export to the whole world last year);

  Three million gold marks’ worth of leather and hides.

  This looks good on paper, but I would bet a lot the Russians deliver no more than a fraction of what they have promised.

  An official statement announces that Göring is to become absolute dictator of Germany’s war economy—a job he has had in effect for a long time. The press is beginning to harp about “Britain’s aggressive designs in Scandinavia.” Hitler, we hear, has told the army, navy, and air force to rush plans for heading off the Allies in Scandinavia should they go in there to help Finland against Russia. The army and navy are very pro-Finnish, but realize they must protect their trade routes to the Swedish iron-ore fields. If Germany loses these, she is sunk.

  BERLIN, January 8

  Did a mike interview with General Ernst Udet tonight, but Göring, his boss, censored our script so badly that it wasn’t very interesting. I spent most of the day coaching the general on his English, which is none too good. Udet, a likable fellow whom I used to see occasionally at the Dodds’, is something of a phenomenon. A professional pilot, who only a few years ago was so broke he toured America as a stunt flyer, performing often in a full-dress suit and a top hat, he is now responsible for the designing and production of Germany’s war planes. Though he never had any business experience, he has proved a genius at his job. Next to Göring and General Milch, he is given credit in inner circles here for building up the German air force to what it is today. I could not help thinking tonight that a man like Udet would never be entrusted with such a job in America. He would be considered “lacking in business experience.” Also, businessmen, if they knew of his somewhat Bohemian life, would hesitate to trust him with responsibility. And yet in this crazy Nazi system he has done a phenomenal job. Amusing: last night Udet put on a little party in his home, with three generals, napkins slung over their shoulders, presiding over his very considerable bar. There were pretty girls and a great deal of cutting up. Yet these are the men who have made the Luftwaffe the most terrible instrument of its kind in the world.

  BERLIN, January 9

  Harry C., probably the best-informed man we have in the Moscow Embassy, passed through today with his wife, who is going to have her baby in America.

  Harry, no Bolo-baiter, had some weird tales. He says the one and only thought of a Russian nowadays is to toe the Stalin line so that he can save his job or at least his life. The Russians, he says, have hopelessly bungled the attack on Finland. A hundred thousand casualties already, the hospitals in Leningrad and the north jammed with wounded. But they are the lucky ones because thousands of lightly wounded died of cold and exposure. Harry says everyone in Moscow, from Stalin down, thought the Red army would be in Helsinki a week after the attack started. They were so sure that they timed an attack on Bessarabia for December 6, and only called it off at the last minute.

  This has been one of the coldest days I’ve experienced in fourteen years in Europe. Tens of thousands of homes and many offices are without coal. Real suffering among many. With the rivers and canals, which transport most of the coal, frozen over, the Germans can’t bring in adequate supplies. Learn that eighteen Poles were killed and thirty wounded recently in a Polish prison camp. The S.S. here claim there was a “revolt.” The army is protesting to Hitler about the senseless brutality of the Gestapo in Poland, but I doubt if that will change matters.

  Must note a new propaganda campaign to convince the German people that this is not only a war against the “plutocratic” British and French, but a holy struggle against the Jews. Says Dr. Ley in the Angriff tonight: “We know that this war is an ideological struggle against world Jewry. England is allied with the Jews against Germany…. England is spiritually, politically, and economically at one with the Jews…. For us England and the Jews remain the common foe….”

  BERLIN, January 11

  Cold. Fifteen degrees below zero centigrade outside my window. Half the population freezing in their homes and offices and workshops because there’s no coal. Pitiful to see in the streets yesterday people carrying a sack of coal home in a baby-carriage or on their shoulders. I’m surprised the Nazis are letting. the situation become so serious. Everyone is grumbling. Nothing like continual cold to lower your morale.

  Hitler is back in town and last night at the Chancellery, I hear, he and Göring lambasted the big industrialists, who had been hurriedly convoked from the Rhineland, for being slack. These great tycoons, who made it possible with their money for Hitler to climb to power, sat there, I’m told, with red faces and never dared utter a peep. Hitler also saw the military yesterday and today and there is talk about a big push in the spring. The army, according to my spies, is still against an offensive on the Maginot Line despite party pressure for it. Will the Germans try to go through Holland, as many think? They want air bases on the Dutch coast for the take-off against Britain. Also fantastic talk here of an invasion of England; of the Germans going into Sweden to sew up their Swedish iron-ore supplies, the justification to be that the Swedes are plotting to let in Allied armies to fight in Finland.

  Learned today from a traveller back from Prague that producers of butter, flour, and other things in Slovakia and Bohemia are marking their goods destined for Germany as “Made in Russia.” This on orders from Berlin, the idea being to show the German people how much “help” is already coming from the Soviets.

  A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was “only two years.”16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: “Gott strafe England!”—whereupon the children are supposed to answer: “He will.”

  AMSTERDAM, January 18

  Ed [Murrow] and I here for a few days to discuss our European coverage, or at l
east that’s our excuse. Actually, intoxicated by the lights at night and the fine food and the change in atmosphere, we have been cutting up like a couple of youngsters suddenly escaped from a stern old aunt or a reform school. Last night in sheer joy, as we were coming home from an enormous dinner with a fresh snow drifting down like confetti, we stopped under a bright street-light and fought a mighty snow-ball battle. I lost my glasses and my hat and we limped back to the hotel exhausted but happy. This morning we have been ice-skating on the canals with Mary Marvin Breckinridge, who has forsaken the soft and dull life of American society to represent us here. The Dutch still lead the good life. The food they consume as to both quantity and quality (oysters, fowl, meats, vegetables, oranges, bananas, coffee—the things the warring peoples never see) is fantastic. They dine and dance and go to church and skate on canals and tend their businesses. And they are blind—oh, so blind—to the dangers that confront them. Ed and I have tried to do a little missionary work, but to no avail, I fear. The Dutch, like everyone else, want it both ways. They want peace and the comfortable life, but they won’t make the sacrifices or even the hard decisions which might ensure their way of life in the long run. The Queen, they say, stubbornly refuses to allow staff talks with the Allies or even with the Belgians. In the meantime, as I could observe when I crossed the border, the Germans pile up their forces and supplies on the Dutch frontier. If and when they move, there will be no time for staff talks with the Allies. The Dutch tell you that if they even whisper to the Allies about joint defence plans, Hitler will consider that an excuse to walk in. As though Hitler will ever want for an excuse if he really decides to walk in.

  Ed a little alarming with his tales of British muddling and the comfortable belief in Britain that the Allies will win the war without losing many men or doing much fighting by merely maintaining the blockade and waiting until Germany cracks. We broadcast together tonight to America from Hilversum.

  AMSTERDAM, January 20

  Ed off today to Paris and I, alas, must head back tonight to Berlin. I’ve invited Marvin to come up next month and do the “women’s angle.” Ran into Tom R., an American businessman, in the bar of the Carlton this afternoon. He gave me the story at last of what happened to Eleanor K.17 He himself was involved. He had given her a couple of business letters to certain parties in Germany which he says he did not think were compromising, but which obviously were. These were the letters which in the end almost led to her death. Eleanor did not look at them, merely tucking them into her bag. At Bentheim, on the Dutch-German border, the Gestapo discovered them. They arrested her, but allowed her to be confined in the local hotel, there being no suitable jail. Each day there were long hours of questioning, with the Gestapo inquisitioners trying to break her down and make her admit what she in truth refused to: that she knew the contents of her letters and was really a courier in the service of shady business interests inside and outside Germany which were engaging in unlawful financial practices. To make matters worse, one of the letters was to a Jew in Berlin. One night in the hotel Eleanor fell into a mood of deep depression. The Gestapo had questioned and threatened her all day. She saw herself receiving a long prison sentence. She had intended to return to America for good in a few weeks. Now she would spend years in a Nazi concentration camp or a damp prison cell. She decided to make sure she wouldn’t. She decided to kill herself. The resolve made, she prepared for it coolly. She procured a rope, tied one end to the radiator, the other around her neck, opened the window, sat down on the window-ledge, and began to swallow strong sleeping-pills. She would soon be unconscious, she knew, would topple out of the window, and the rope would do the rest. Why it didn’t, she will never know, Tom says. Probably the rope slipped off the radiator. All she knows is that some days later they told her in the hospital that the snow in the street below had broken her fall, that she had lain there for five hours until someone had stumbled across her half-frozen form in the first light of dawn, and that she had broken almost every bone in her body, but probably would recover. Eventually she was removed to a prison hospital in Berlin, where the American consulate, in great secrecy, procured her release and quietly got her out of the country. She is now in America, Tom says.

  BERLIN, January 22

  I got an idea yesterday of how German transportation, at least of railroad passengers, has been paralysed by the severe winter and the demands of the army. At the German border we were told that the usual express train to Berlin had stopped running. With fifty other passengers I took refuge from the blizzard in the station at Bentheim and waited several hours until the railroad officials organized a local train which they said would take us some twenty-five miles of the two hundred and fifty miles to Berlin. The train, which was unheated, soon stopped; we piled out in the snow with our luggage as best we could, there being no porters in Germany nowadays. By the time it was dark, we had progressed on various local trains about seventy-five miles when in one little station word came that an express train from Cologne would be coming along soon and would pick us up for Berlin. But when it came in, it was jammed and there were at least five hundred people on the platform who wanted to get aboard. There was a free-for-all fight. I used college football tactics and charged in behind my baggage, just managing to squeeze into the outer platform of a third-class coach, the rest of the crammed passengers shouting and cursing at me. For the next eight hours I stood in that unheated spot until we got almost to Berlin. Several hundred irritable passengers stood in the corridors most of the night, and there were thousands on the station platforms we stopped at who never got on the train at all. Such grumbling I have not heard from Germans since the war started.

  BERLIN, January 24

  I think Percival W., a retired American businessman of German parentage who has spent most of his life in this country, sees something I’ve been trying to get straight. I had never met him before, but he dropped up to my room this morning for a chat. We discussed the German conception of ethics, honour, conduct. Said he: “For Germans a thing is right, ethical, honourable, if it squares with the tradition of what a German thinks a German should do; or if it advances the interests of Germanism or Germany. But the Germans have no abstract idea of ethics, or honour, or right conduct.” He gave a pretty illustration. A German friend said to him: “Isn’t it terrible what the Finns are doing, taking on Russia? It’s utterly wrong.” When Mr. W. remonstrated that, after all, the Finns were only doing what you would expect all decent Germans to do if they got in the same fix—namely, defending their liberty and independence against wanton aggression—his friend retorted: “But Russia is Germany’s friend.”

  In other words, for a German to defend his country’s liberty and independence is right. For a Finn to do the same is wrong, because it disturbs Germany’s relations with Russia. The abstract idea there is missing in the German mentality.

  That probably explains the Germans’ complete lack of regard or sympathy for the plight of the Poles or Czechs. What the Germans are doing to these people—murdering them, for one thing—is right because the Germans are doing it, and the victims, in the German view, are an inferior race who must think right whatever the Germans please to do to them. As Dr. Ley puts it: “Right is what the Führer does.” All this confirms an idea I got years ago: that the German conception of “honour,” about which Germans never cease to talk, is nonsense.

  Mr. W. tells me he was in Germany until shortly before we entered the war in 1917 and that until the winter of 1916–17 there was no suffering among the civilian population at all. He says the present rations and shortages are about the same as Germany experienced in the third year of the World War. He is sure things cannot go on as at present, with the front quiet and nothing but hardship, especially the suffering from the cold we’ve had for more than a month now. “What the Germans must have,” he said in departing, “are a lot of quick victories.”

  Joe [Harsch] dropped in yesterday. He said it was so cold in his flat when he was trying to type his dispatch tha
t he had to keep a pan of water warming on the kitchen stove and dip his fingers into it every five minutes in order to hit the keys of his typewriter. Today the burgomaster warns the populace that they must not use gas for heating rooms or water. Hot water, even if you have coal, is restricted now to Saturdays. I’ve started another beard therefore.

  BERLIN, January 25 (midnight)

  Dined alone at Habel’s. A 1923 half-bottle of Bordeaux rouge, but despite the waiter’s assurances, it was not a good enough wine to withstand that age; 1934 is the best year now for ordinary wines. I was about to leave when a white-haired old duffer sat down at my table. As he had no fat card for a meat dish he had ordered, I offered him one of mine. We started talking.

  “Who will win the war?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why, selbstverständlich, Germany,” he laughed. He argued that in 1914 Germany had the whole world against her, now only Great Britain and France, and Russia was friendly.

  “Each side thinks it will win,” I said. “In all the wars.”

  He looked at me with pity in his old eyes. “Germany will win,” he said. “It is certain. The Führer has said so.”

  But as we talked I was conscious that my remarks were jarring him. He became aggressive, irritated. He said Britain and France started the war.

  “But you attacked Poland, and some people feel that started the war,” I put in. He drew himself up in astonishment.

  “I beg your pardon,” he gasped, and then proceeded for ten minutes to repeat every lie about the origins of the war that Hitler has told. (The German people do believe Hitler then, I mused.) “The documents issued by our Foreign Office have proved beyond the shadow of doubt,” he went on, “that Britain and France started the war and indeed planned it for more than a year.”