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 most 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.
Two of the correspondents who had returned to the United States a few months earlier were already getting their books rushed into print. In June 1941, Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 hit the bookstores. In one of his final diary entries from Berlin, he conceded that his observations were hardly dispassionate. “We who have been so close to the German scene, who have seen with our own eyes the tramping Nazi boots over Europe and heard with our own ears Hitler’s hysterical tirades of hate, have found it difficult to keep a sense of historical perspective,” he wrote. And like almost all the reporters who had lived in Berlin in that era, he found himself constantly returning to the question of “the strange contradictory character of the German people”—and how Hitler had managed to take such complete control of them.
Shirer rejected the notion, which he ascribed to many American liberals, “that Nazism is a form of rule and life unnatural to the German people and forced upon them against their wish by a few fanatic derelicts of the last war.” He conceded that the Nazis had never won a majority of the votes in a free election, only a plurality. “But for the last three or four years the Nazi regime has expressed something very deep in the German nature and in that respect it has been representative of the people it rules.” Unlike other nationalities, the Germans lacked “balance,” he maintained, and their inner contradictions and frustrations made them lurch from one extreme to another. The Weimar era was an extreme form of liberal democracy, he argued, “and now they have turned to the extremes of tyranny” because in the chaos of the twentieth century it was too difficult for them “to think and make decisions as free men.”
This led Shirer to his theory about the “two characters” of Germans. “As an individual he will give his rationed bread to feed the squirrels in the Tiergarten on a Sunday morning. He can be a kind and considerate person. But, as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in a concentration camp, massacre women and children by bombing and bombardment, overrun without the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest, and enslave them.”
Then, Shirer addressed the burning question of the moment in his country: was Hitler contemplating war with the United States? “I am firmly convinced that he does contemplate it and that if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless we are prepared to give up our way of life and adapt ourselves to a subservient place in his totalitarian scheme of things.” The contest between tyranny and democracy, he added, “is as inevitable as that of two planets hurtling inexorably through the heavens towards each other.” Addressing the America First movement and other isolationists, he concluded: “The Lindberghs and their friends laugh at the idea of Germany ever being able to attack the United States. The Germans we
lcome their laughter and hope more Americans will laugh . . .”
Upon his return to the United States, Harsch had written a twelve-part series for the Christian Science Monitor that he turned into a book, delivering his completed manuscript to the printer on June 22, 1941, the day Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Called Pattern of Conquest, it echoed many of Shirer’s themes—and specifically its immediate message. “The question before the American people is a clear one,” he wrote. In a world where a titanic struggle for dominance was taking place, “America can either belong to that dominant force or submit to it.” If the United States permitted Germany to win “by default,” it would soon become a satellite of Hitlerland. “The alternative for America is to take its stand with Britain,” he concluded. “The two together can unquestionably defeat Germany.”
Huss stayed in Berlin for the International News Service until November 1941, and he, too, wrote a book about his experiences when he returned home. Entitled The Foe We Face, it was published in 1942 when the United States was already in the war. Shortly before his departure from Berlin—only a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would prompt Hitler to declare war on the United States—Huss interviewed Hitler for the last time.
Their meeting took place at Wolf’s Lair, the headquarters for the Eastern Front. As Huss followed Hitler’s erratic steps on a path in the woods, the Nazi leader eerily enacted the scene that Shirer had conjured up earlier in his characterization of the German people. Spotting a squirrel, Hitler pulled out a bag of hazelnuts from his coat pocket. “Quietly, and with a half-smile on his pinkish face,” Huss wrote, he approached it, holding out some nuts. Unafraid, the squirrel jumped up into his hand—to Hitler’s delight. Once it had gathered the nuts and scampered off, he said: “Ja, if the world would only mind its own business like this little squirrel.”
While Hitler boasted to Huss that he would outlast “your President Roosevelt” and “this crazy man Churchill,” and that Stalin’s Red Army was already “practically smashed,” Huss detected more than contempt in Hitler’s repeated mentions of “Herr Roosevelt—and his Jews.” He complained bitterly that the American president “wants to run the world and rob us all of a place in the sun . . . Every time I reached forth my hand he slapped it down.” He blamed Roosevelt for conspiring to keep Britain in the war and, as he became more incensed about his alleged misdeeds, Huss felt “that just for that second an icy chill had crept between us.”
It was then that Huss claimed he understood what triggered Hitler’s denunciations. “Mighty Hitler of the Nazi Reich and the New Order Europe basically and by instinct fears President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States of America,” he wrote. Which was why, Huss added, “like a tiger at bay, he wants to spring and land the knockout blow to paralyze the power of the man and the land he fears more than anything else in the world.”
While Huss’s account may have been colored by his desire to bolster the morale of his countrymen at this early stage of their involvement in the war, he was correct in his analysis about Hitler’s primary motive. As he did when he invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler was gambling that another escalation was the only path left to victory.
12
The Last Act
During the late months of 1941, George Kennan monitored the progress of Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union on a large map of that country in his office, comparing what was happening then to Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812. “The similarities in timing and geography were often striking,” he observed. Despite the signs that the German drive to take Moscow was faltering, he wasn’t yet sure about the outcome. But he noted the parallel steady deterioration of relations between Germany and the United States, and his sense “that things were now out of control—not only out of our control (we, after all, in our poor overworked embassy, had never at any time had any influence on the course of events) but out of everyone’s control.”
Kennan and other Westerners did not know yet that the battle for Moscow would result in the first defeat of Hitler’s army. It was a titanic struggle, the biggest battle of World War II and of all time, involving 7 million troops. The combined losses of both sides—those killed, taken prisoner or severely wounded—were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. German troops had reached the outskirts of Moscow, a direct result of Stalin’s grievous miscalculations, starting with his refusal to believe that Germany would invade his country.
But the Soviet capital was ultimately saved because Hitler committed even bigger mistakes, refusing to listen to his generals who wanted him to push directly to the Soviet capital. He ordered a diversion south to take Kiev, insisting that it was vital to seize control of the agricultural riches and raw materials of the Ukraine first. By the time his troops resumed their drive on Moscow, they were caught in heavy autumn rains that turned Russian dirt roads into swamps, and then by swiftly plummeting temperatures. Since Hitler had firmly believed that Moscow would be quickly overrun, most of the German troops had not even been issued winter uniforms. All of which meant that, as the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman wrote, “General Mud and General Cold” dramatically slowed and weakened the invaders.
Taking full advantage of his good fortune, Stalin rushed in troop reinforcements from the Soviet Far East. On December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor, his forces launched their first major counteroffensive, pushing back those German troops who had made it closest to the capital.
Like other foreigners, American diplomats and journalists based in Moscow had been evacuated to the Volga city of Kuibyshev back in October when it looked like the city would fall to the Germans. Without direct reporting from those observers, most of the world was slow to recognize that the Soviet counteroffensive was the beginning of a huge turnabout on the Eastern Front. But Hitler—who had only recently been confidently expounding on his vision of how the conquered Soviet territories would make Germany an economic powerhouse—had come to recognize that his troops would not be able to take the Soviet capital that winter. Still, he continued to hope that they would do so later, and his propagandists insisted that this change of plans only reflected a temporary setback.
On Sunday evening, December 7, Kennan picked up a weak but audible shortwave news broadcast from the United States about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called Leland Morris, the chargé d’affaires, who was already asleep, and several other embassy officers, and arranged to meet them for a late night meeting at the embassy. While Pearl Harbor did not automatically trigger a state of war with the United States, and Hitler would in fact wait until he addressed the Reichstag four days later to issue his declaration of war, the American diplomats in Berlin had to assume their mission was coming to an end.
There was no evidence that Hitler remembered Putzi Hanfstaengl’s warnings that it would be fatal to end up on the opposing side of the Americans in another global conflict. Instead, the Nazi leader immediately convinced himself that Japan’s attack was the best news possible since it would mean that the United States would be completely preoccupied by the war in the Pacific, with little energy or resources left to aid Britain and the Soviet Union. The day after Pearl Harbor, he declared: “We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”
The leader who was most genuinely pleased by the consequences of Pearl Harbor was Churchill. In a transatlantic phone call on that fateful day, Roosevelt uttered the words that the British prime minister had wanted to hear: “We are all in the same boat now.” As Churchill would tell Congress on December 26, “To me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”
Kennan noted that during the four days of “excruciating uncertainty” as he and his colleagues waited for Hitler to address the Reichstag, the embassy was methodically cut off from the outside world. The telegraph office no longer accepted its telegrams, and, by Tuesday, the embassy’s phones stopped functioni
ng. “We were now on our own,” he pointed out. Figuring they had to prepare for the worst, the diplomats began burning their codes and classified correspondence on Tuesday night. The sudden rash of small fires, which spewed ashes over nearby buildings, prompted a German building inspector to warn the embassy that it was endangering the neighborhood.
Of course, the neighborhood—in both the narrow and broader sense—was endangered by much more than swirling ashes. Kennan clearly understood that much better than Hitler did.
The remaining American journalists in Berlin—only fifteen, less than a third of their earlier number—realized that their assignments were likely to be ending as well. On the night that the diplomats were burning their documents, word spread among the correspondents that the FBI had arrested German newsmen in the United States. They knew no details of those arrests, which were carried out as part of a sweep against “enemy aliens,” but they had little doubt what would happen next. Louis Lochner of the AP met with a German Foreign Ministry official early on Wednesday, December 10, who assured him any reprisals “will be done in the noblest manner.” If any confirmation was needed, this was it: the reprisals were coming.
Along with his young reporter Angus Thuermer, Lochner went next to the daily news conference, conducted by Paul Schmidt, the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s press department. By then, most of the press corps knew what was happening. “Many a European correspondent with whom I had worked shoulder to shoulder for years, came to say goodbye and to express the hope that America would bring freedom to a sorely tried European continent,” Lochner recalled. Schmidt arrived and announced the arrest of the German newsmen in the United States. “I must therefore ask the American correspondents here present to leave the conference and proceed forthwith to their homes,” he added.
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