Berlin Diary

by William L. Shirer

  In the meantime the German army closes in on Paris. It looks dark for the Allies tonight. Roosevelt is broadcasting at one fifteen a.m. tonight.

  BERLIN, June 11

  Roosevelt came through very clearly on the radio last night. He promised immediate material help for the Allies. Scorched Mussolini for his treachery. Not a word about the speech in press or radio here.

  The Wilhelmstrasse keeps making the point that American aid will come too late. A man just back from seeing Hitler tells me the Führer is sure that France will be finished by June 15—that is, in four days—and Great Britain by August 15 at the latest! He says Hitler is acting as if he had the world at his feet, but that some of the generals, although highly pleased with the military successes, are a little apprehensive of the future under such a wild and fanatical man.

  Word here is that the French government has left Paris. The Germans tonight are roughly about as near Paris as they were on September 1, 1914. This led the High Command to point out to us today that the German position is much better than it was then. First, because their right wing is stronger, and has maintained its advance west of Paris, whereas in 1914 it wheeled east of Paris. Second, there is no real British army to help the French. Third, there is no eastern front, so that, not as in 1914, the entire German army can now be hurled against Paris. (In 1914, two army corps were hurriedly withdrawn from France to stop the Russians in the east. How Paris and London are now paying for their short-sighted anti-Russian policy! Before Munich, even after Munich, even a year ago this June, they could have lined up the Russians against Germany.)

  After my twelve forty-six broadcast tonight we were sitting in D.’s room at the Rundfunk when we picked up a broadcast from New York saying that the liner Washington, a day out from Lisbon en route for Gal-way, Ireland, and packed with American refugees, mostly women and children, had been halted by an unknown submarine just at dawn and given ten minutes to lower boats before being sent to the bottom. Tess and child had booked on that voyage of the Washington, but had been unable to get to Bordeaux in time after the liner had cancelled its scheduled stop at Genoa. Finally at zero hour, after the ten minutes had elapsed, the U-boat commander signalled: “Sorry. Mistake. Proceed.” A German naval officer, himself a U-boat commander in the last war, happened to be listening with me. He became quite angry. “A British submarine! No doubt of it!” he exclaimed. “Those British will stop at nothing!” The captain added angrily, when I suggested that maybe it might have been a German U-boat: “Impossible. Why, a German commander who did such a thing would be court-martialled and shot.”

  BERLIN, June 12

  It was a German submarine that stopped the Washington, after all.

  This was officially admitted in Berlin after the Wilhelmstrasse had kept silent all day. The Germans blame it on the State Department or our Embassy for it. They claim that our Embassy neglected to inform the German government that the Washington was proceeding to Ireland from Lisbon.

  If the government didn’t know it, the German press and radio certainly did. They’ve announced it for days.

  I went over to our Embassy to check this, but they seemed a little troubled and asked us to let the State Department answer, which was reasonable enough. It would have been a hell of a slip-up if they hadn’t informed the Germans.

  The official statement here also gives another curious explanation. It says the “error” came about because the German U-boat commander mistook the Washington for a Greek (!) steamer which he had stopped before and told to change its course. When the American boat appeared on the horizon, he thought, says the official statement, it was the Greek boat disobeying his instructions, and that’s why he stopped it.

  One might ask: (1) Have the Greeks a single vessel anywhere near the size of the Washington, which is a 24,000-ton liner? The answer: No. (2) Why did a German submarine commander order the passengers and crew to their boats before he had properly identified the steamer? (3) If the commander thought it was his Greek steamer, why did he wait ten minutes after the Washington had signalled that it was an American ship? These points are not taken up in the official statement. In my broadcast the censors allowed me to mention only the first point. Their view was that the last two questions were unfair.

  In view of the suspicious German warning of June 3, in which Berlin claimed to have knowledge that the British intended to torpedo the Washington, I’m convinced that Berlin itself gave orders to sink that ship. It then intended to launch a terrific propaganda campaign charging that the British did the deed and pointing out that the German government had already warned Washington on June 3 of what would happen. I think Ribbentrop naïvely believed he could thus poison Anglo-American relations and put a damper on our sending supplies to Britain. German naval men tell me that the U-boat held up the Washington just at dawn. Washington dispatches say the ship was somewhat behind schedule. It is highly possible, then, that the German submarine commander planned to torpedo the ship while it was still too dark for his craft to be identified. But the Washington did not arrive on the scene until dawn, a couple of hours later than expected, and the commander refrained from launching his torpedo only out of fear that in the prevailing light his U-boat could be recognized as German. It was not submerged and therefore was easily recognizable.

  I had a nasty scare this afternoon. I was listening to the three fifteen BBC broadcast when the announcer suddenly reported that Geneva had been bombed last night, that bombs had fallen in a residential suburb, and that there had been killed and wounded. For a moment I was floored. Our home is in one of the few residential suburbs.

  It took hours to get through to Geneva with an urgent call. But about eight I heard Tess’s voice. The bombs did fall in our district, she said, shook the house, and hit a hotel down the street where we formerly lived, killing five or six and injuring a score more. They had two air-raid alarms and she took the baby to the cellar. I told her she and the child must come to Germany, much as we both hate the idea. It’s the safest place now. They’re cut off from any possibility of getting home.

  The B.Z. am Mittag plays up the farewell broadcast of the CBS man from Paris Monday night, probably Eric Sevareid. It quotes him as concluding: “If in the next days anyone talks to America from Paris, it won’t be under the control of the French government.” I suppose I’m nominated. It’s my job. It will be the saddest assignment of my life.

  Though the German High Command does not mention it, the truth is that the Germans are at the gates of Paris tonight. Thank God, the city will not be destroyed. Wisely the French are declaring it an open city and will not defend it. There was some question as to whether the Germans would recognize it as an open city, but about midnight it became plain that they would.

  The taking of Paris will be a terrific blow to the French and the Allies. To the east of Paris, too, the Germans appear to have broken through to Châlons.

  BERLIN, June 14

  Paris has fallen. The hooked-cross flag of Hitler flutters from the Eiffel Tower there by the Seine in that Paris which I knew so intimately and loved.

  This morning German troops entered the city. We got the news on the radio at one p.m., after loud fanfares had blazed away for a quarter of an hour, calling the faithful to hear the news. The news was a war communiqué from the Supreme Command. It said: “The complete collapse of the entire French front from the Channel to the Maginot Line at Montmédy destroyed the original intention of the French leaders to defend the capital of France. Paris therefore has been declared an open city. The victorious troops are just beginning to march into Paris.”

  I was having lunch in the courtyard of my hotel. Most of the guests crowded around the loud-speaker in the bar to hear the news. They returned to their tables with wide smiles on their faces, but there was no undue excitement and everyone resumed eating.

  In fact, Berlin has taken the news of the capture of Paris as phlegmatically as it has taken everything else in this war. Later I went to Halensee for a swim, it being w
arm and I feeling the need of a little relaxation. It was crowded, but I overheard no one discussing the news. Out of five hundred people, three bought extras when the newsboys rushed in, shouting the news.

  It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the taking of Paris has not stirred something very deep in the hearts of most Germans. It was always a wish dream of millions here. And it helps wipe out the bitter memories of 1918 which have lain so long—twenty-two years—in the German soul.

  Poor Paris! I weep for her. For so many years it was my home—and I loved it as you love a woman. Said the Völkische Beobachter this morning: “Paris was a city of frivolity and corruption, of democracy and capitalism, where Jews had entry to the court, and niggers to the salons. That Paris will never rise again.” But the High Command promises that its soldiers will behave—will be “as different as night is from day, compared to the conduct of the French soldiers in the Rhine and Ruhr.”

  The High Command also said today: “The second phase of the campaign is over with the capture of Paris. The third phase has begun. It is the pursuit and final destruction of the enemy.”

  I walked into a door in the Herald Tribune office tonight. First time since the black-out that it has been closed. Cut my nose considerably, but got it patched up at a near-by first-aid station and recovered sufficiently to go out and do my midnight broadcast.

  Tomorrow, probably, I shall leave for Paris. I do not want to go. I do not want to see the heavy-heeled German boots tramping down the streets I loved.

  BERLIN, June 15

  Leaving for Paris today.

  NEAR MAGDEBURG, June 15 (later)

  Spending the night in a hostelry along the Autobahn. Very good and modern, and better food than in Berlin. Our car broke down six miles out of Berlin on the way to Potsdam. This held us up two hours waiting for a new car. I fear we shall not get to Paris tomorrow. At ten p.m. in the restaurant of the road-house we heard the news. Verdun taken! The Verdun that cost the Germans six hundred thousand dead the last time they tried to take it. And this time they take it in one day. Granted that the French army is in a fix; that the fall of Paris has demoralized it still further. Still you ask: What has happened to the French? Germans also claim Maginot Line broken through.

  MAUBEUGE, June 16

  Got up at three a.m., started at four a.m. from the little road-house for Aachen. In the Ruhr there was little evidence of the British night bombings. We arrived at Aachen at eleven a.m. Thence through Limburg to Liège and Namur. Surprised to see so little destruction along this route. It’s quite unlike the road from Aachen to Brussels, where most of the towns lie in ruins. We drove all afternoon up the valley of the Meuse. Amazingly little evidence of the war. Dinner at Charleroi. Bitter faces in the streets. No bread in the town, and water only for drinking. But we got some meat and salad in a little bistro.

  I bought the local journal, the Journal de Charleroi. It publishes both the German and French war communiqués. An order in the paper said the German troops and the Belgian gendarmerie would fire without warning into any lighted windows. Another notice from the German Feldkommandantur had to do with stopping any monkey business with carrier pigeons. Another signed by the chief army physician ordered all local doctors to report. Anyone unjustifiably absent, said the order, would be punished. “No excuses will be accepted,” it added.

  Maubeuge itself has been terribly destroyed. The main part of the town is reduced to broken stone, twisted girders, and ashes. One of the German officers tells us what happened. German tanks tried to get through the town. French anti-tank guns concealed in houses got the first five or six. The Germans had to retreat. Word was sent back to the Stukas. They came over and did their job with their usual deadly efficiency. Underneath the church, the commandant tells us, was the town’s biggest air-raid shelter. One of the bombs hit it square on. Result: five hundred civilians lie buried under the debris. Buried air-tight, though, because on this warm, starlit summer evening there is no smell.

  One of the soldiers from South Germany later whispers to me: “Yeah, it was the Prussians who destroyed the town.” He, a common German soldier, is disgusted with the destruction. “Always the poor people who get it,” he says.

  The local commandant, a German businessman called up from the reserve, receives us in one of the few houses in town still standing. A few facts from him: Ten thousand out of twenty-four thousand residents of Maubeuge either have returned or rode out the bombing and bombardment. The German army, and, since a few days, German relief workers, help to keep them from starving. They bring bread from Germany. But yesterday, the old boy says, he uncovered some wheat and is getting it ground into flour. “One business,” he says, “apparently didn’t close up shop at any time, during the battle or since. The local bordel. I finally closed it, but the Madame came in to see me and was very put out. ‘Business as usual, why not?’ she said.” Yesterday, he reveals, the High Command ordered the opening of all houses of prostitution in the part of France occupied by German troops. “I must send for the Madame. She will be pleased to hear it,” he chuckles.

  We consume several bottles of pretty fair vin rouge and nibble biscuits, and the commandant talks on enthusiastically about his problem. Obviously he enjoys his job, and he is certainly not the old sadistic Prussian master of the story-books. On the whole, a very human fellow. Homesick, I gather. Hoping the war won’t last much longer. Somehow it’s worse, he thinks, than what he went through the four years of the World War in this very district. But perhaps that is because it’s so recent, and the old memories blurred. Anyway, he talks of his dog and his wife and family.

  We finally take our leave. An orderly shows us our quarters, in an abandoned house with atrocious pseudo-Oriental furnishings, which, we soon establish from the wall-hangings and papers lying around, was occupied by one of the leading local bankers. French bourgeois taste at its very lowest. I take to myself one of the family bedrooms. The mattress is still on the old-fashioned double bed. The banker’s clothes hang neatly in the armoire. Even the long-tailed black coat—you can see him, fat and important, strolling through the streets to church on Sundays in it—is there. Obviously he has left in a great hurry. No time to pack his wardrobe. Downstairs we noticed the breakfast dishes on the dining-room table. A meal never finished.

  What a break in his comfortable bourgeois life this must have been, this hasty flight before the town was blown up! Here in this house—until last month—solidity, a certain comfort, respectability; the odds and ends collected for a house during a lifetime. This house one’s life, such as it is. Then boom! The Stukas. The shells. And that life, like the houses all around, blown to bits; the solidity, the respectability, the hopes, gone in a jiffy. And you and your wife and maybe your children along the roads now, hungry, craving for a drink of water—like an animal, or at best—and who would have dreamed it a month ago!—like a caveman.

  Three soldiers take us for a stroll through the debris of the town as dusk falls. Just inside the town gates a frowsy-looking woman is digging in a pile of bricks. The soldiers shout for her to beat it. It is after the curfew hour. She continues digging. One of the men, grasping his rifle, steps over to chase her away. We hear her shout: “Coucher?” She asks him to go to bed with her. By God, all is not destroyed here. The soldier laughs and sort of pushes her on her way. Apparently she is living in a cellar near by—like a rat. We continue through the town and pretty soon we see her over the shambles of what was once an alley. She shouts: “Coucher?” and then runs. We walk through the town, pausing before what is left of the church. It is hard to grasp that under those charred bricks and rubble five hundred women and children lie buried. There is so much debris that their grave has been perfectly sealed. There is not a whiff of the familiar, nauseating, sweet smell.

  Back to our banker’s house as darkness comes. Outside, the army trucks roll by all night long. Once during the night I hear some anti-aircraft going into action down the road. Up at dawn, feeling not too bad, and off towards
Paris.

  PARIS, June 17

  It was no fun for me. When we drove into Paris, down the familiar streets, I had an ache in the pit of my stomach and I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits at the sight of the city.

  We came in about noon, and it was one of those lovely June days which Paris always has in this month and which, if there had been peace, would have been spent by the people going to the races at Longchamp or the tennis at Roland Garros, or idling along the boulevards under the trees, or on the cool terraces of a café.

  First shock: the streets are utterly deserted, the stores closed, the shutters down tight over all the windows. It was the emptiness that got you. Coming from Le Bourget (remembering, sentimentally, that night I raced afoot all the way into town from there to write the story of Lindbergh’s landing), we drove down the rue Lafayette. German army cars and motorcycles speeding, screaming down the street. But on the sidewalks not a human being. The various corner cafés along the street which I knew so well. They had taken in the tables and drawn the shutters. And had fled—the patrons, the garçons, the customers. Our two cars roared down the rue Lafayette, honking at every street we crossed, until I asked our driver to desist.

  There, on the corner, the Petit Journal building in which I had worked for the Chicago Tribune when I first came to Paris in 1925. Across from it, the Trois Portes café—how many pleasant hours idled there when Paris, to me, was beautiful and gorgeous; and my home!

  We turned left down the rue Pelletier to the Grand Boulevard. I noticed the Petit Riehe was closed. The boulevard too was deserted except for a few German soldiers, staring into the windows of the few shops that did not have their shutters down. The Place de I’Opéra now. For the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone garçon was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them. Then we turned at the Madeleine, its façade also covered with sandbags, and raced down the rue Royale. Larue’s and Weber’s, I noted, were closed. Now before us, the familiar view. The Place de la Concorde, the Seine, the Chambre des Députés, over which a giant Swastika flag flies, and in the distance the golden dome of the Invalides. Past the Ministry of the Marine, guarded by a big German tank, into the Concorde. We drew up in front of the Hôtel Crillon, now German Headquarters. Our officer went in to inquire about quarters. I, to the displeasure of the German officials with us, stepped over to pay a call at the American Embassy next door. Bullitt, Murphy—everyone I knew—were out to lunch. I left a note for Bullitt.