Berlin Diary
The Journal of a
Foreign Correspondent
1934–1941
William L. Shirer
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
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
Endnotes
1 A right-wing organization of some eight hundred thousand members. France’s other four million war veterans were organized in the Fédération des Anciens Combattants.
2 The text: Law for the Re-Creation of the National Defence Forces.
The Reich government has decreed the following law, which is herewith proclaimed:
1. Service in the defence forces is based on universal military service.
2. The German peace army, inclusive of police units incorporated therein, comprises twelve corps commands and thirty-six divisions.
3. Supplementary laws for regulating universal military service will be drafted and presented to the Reich Cabinet by the Reich Minister of Defence.
3 Sir Nevile Henderson in Failure of a Mission has told us since that during the first talk after Chamberlain had outlined his plan of complete surrender to Hitler, the Führer looked at him and said: “Es tut mir furchtbar leid, aber das geht nicht mehr (I’m awfully sorry, but that won’t do any more).” Chamberlain, says Henderson, expressed his “surprise and indignation.”
4 In the next days it furnished the only means of communication between Prague and the outside world.
5 Panton was arrested in Copenhagen in April 1940, when the Germans marched in, and interned on a Danish island. The French Minister in Copenhagen insisted on taking out all French and Polish correspondents caught there by the Germans. The British Minister made no effort to and the four English journalists there were all arrested and interned.
6 Only on the night of August 31, nine hours before the war started, did we learn that the reply contained a demand that Poland send a representative invested with plenipotentiary powers on Wednesday, August 30—that is, within twenty-four hours. Henderson remarked to Hitler: “That sounds like an ultimatum,” but the Great Man denied it. Throughout this period the correspondents were kept largely in the dark about the negotiations, with the Wilhelmstrasse tipping us (falsely) to take “an optimistic line.”
7 Even this was not true. Henderson revealed later that Ribbentrop—in a most insolent mood—read the sixteen points to him so rapidly that he could not grasp them. When he asked for a copy of them, the German Foreign Minister refused!
8 Actually Bonnet boasted after the Franco-German armistice that he had refused the plea of Halifax for a simultaneous declaration of war. He played for peace at any price until the very end.
9 Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft—the German State Broadcasting Company.
10 Many months later I learned from an unimpeachable source that Fritsch did seek death and that three letters he wrote shortly before the action proved it. It is said in German army circles that his wound, though serious, would in all probability not have caused his death had he not refused the pleas of his adjutant to let himself be carried to the rear. He would not listen to it. He bled to death.
11 About 3.3 by 1.5 yards.
12 Later the British Admiralty confirmed his version of both the Royal Sceptre episode and the saucy message to Mr. Churchill, including the fact that Schultze had not been captured.
13 For months we were to ask at nearly every Nazi press conference when the trial of Elser would take place. At first we were told he would be tried before the Supreme Court at Leipzig as were the “perpetrators” of the Reichstag fire, which seemed appropriate enough, since both events cast suspicion on the Nazis themselves. After a few weeks our daily question: “When will Elser be tried?” provoked scarcely restrained laughter from the correspondents and increasing embarrassment for Dr. Boehmer, foreign press chief of the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Schmidt, press chief of the Foreign Office, and the latter’s deputy, Baron von Stumm. Finally we were given to understand that the question wasn’t funny any more, and after some months, having squeezed all we could out of our joke, we dropped it. So far as is known, Elser was never tried. Whether he was executed also is not known.
14 His moving Christmas broadcast from the Finnish front was to Inspire Robert Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night.
15 To which Stalin replied: “The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm”!
16 The official German decree read: “All Jew s from fourteen to sixty years of age are subject to forced labour. The length of forced labour is two years, but it will be prolonged if its educational purpose is not considered fulfilled. Jews called up for forced labour must report promptly, and must bring food for two days and their bedding. Skilled Jewish workers must report with their tools. Those who don’t are subject to sentences running to ten years in the penitentiary.”
17 See Berlin September, 30 and Berlin December, 21.
18 Within or without wedlock. On October 28, 1939 Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police and leader of the S.S., decreed: “Beyond the borders of perhaps necessary bourgeois laws, customs, and views, it will now be the great task, even outside the marriage bond, for German women and girls of good blood, not in frivolity but in deep moral earnestness, to become mothers of the children of soldiers going off to war…. On the men and women whose place remains at home by order of the state, these times likewise impose more than ever the sacred obligation to become again fathers and mothers of children.” (Italics mine.) Himmler promised that the S.S. would take over the guardianship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of Aryan blood whose fathers met death at the front.
19 This was a lie, as later entries will show.
20 The destroyer, we would learn later, was the Glow-worm, the only craft in the whole British navy to encounter any of the scores of German war vessels and transports which stole up the Norwegian coast before April 9. It sighted the German 10,000-ton cruiser Admiral Hipper off the Norwegian coast on April 8, but was blown to bits before it could get away. Had just a small British naval force, such as later went into Narvik, been within striking distance of the Norwegian coast on April 8, Hitler’s Norwegian venture would have failed. One can only conclude that the British navy was caught napping.
21 German for anti-aircraft gun.
22 There was no sniping in 1940.
23 A fair example of Göring’s exaggerations. When I visited the beach of Dunkirk two and a half months later, I found the wrecks of only two freighters, two destroyers, and one torpedo boat.
24 Later named by Marshal Pétain French Ambassador in Washington.
25 Within less than four months he was killed in a British bomber returning from a raid on the Italian lines in Albania.
26 It is only fair to state that the officials of the German State Broadcasting Company, who treated me with the greatest courtesy throughout the war, never objected to my listening to what the enemy had to say on the BBC. They usually put a radio set at my disposal for this purpose. Foreign correspondents were exempted from the decree prohibiting listening to foreign radio stations as long as they did not pass on what they heard to Germans. Radio provided the only means we in Berlin had of learning what was going on in the outside world. Sale of foreign newspapers except those from Italy or the occupied cities was forbidden. Occasionally a few American newspapers and periodicals got through in the mails, but they were from two to six months old by the time they arrived.
27 Most of them were turned back at the Spanish frontier.
28 See entry for September 21.
29 On December 6, 1940 the Vatican condemned the “mercy killings.” Responding to the question whether it is illicit for authorities to order the killing of those who, although they have committed no crime worthy of death, nevertheless are considered no longer useful to society or the state because of physical or mental deficiencies, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office held that “such killings are contrary to both natural and divine law.” It is doubtful if the mass of German Catholics, even if they learned of this statement from Rome, which is improbable, understood what it referred to. Only a minority in Germany know of the “mercy deaths.”
30 Amann is also president of the Reich Press Chamber, in which capacity he rules the newspapers of Germany. Through the Eher Verlag and subsidiary holding companies, Amann has also gained financial control of most of the large newspapers in the country.
31 He publicly admitted it in a speech on December 10, 1940. Contrasting the totalitarian and democratic worlds, he said: “We can never be reconciled with this world…. One of these worlds must break asunder…. These are two worlds, and I believe one of these worlds must crack up.”
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 1930s. 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
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 Allens, Russell and Pat Strauss, and Luis Quintanilla, 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 anæmic.
It has been a good year.
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, Édouard 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 nearby 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-Élysées 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.
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.
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 nearby 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.
The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. 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.
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 Dollfuss 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.
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.
My sister is here, and the three of us celebrated Bastille Day a little tonight. We took her around to the cafés to watch the people dance. Later we ended up at Café Flore where I introduced her to some of the Latin Quarterites. Alex Small was in great form. When Alex started to fight the Battle of Verdun again, I dragged the family away, having heard it many times over the years.
It now develops that Hitler’s purge was more drastic than first reported. Röhm did not kill himself, but was shot on the orders of Hitler. Other dead: Heines, notorious Nazi boss of Silesia, Dr. Erich Klausner, leader of the “Catholic Action” in Germany, Fritz von Bose and Edgar Jung, two of Papen’s secretaries (Papen himself narrowly escaped with his life), Gregor Strasser, who used to be second in importance to Hitler in the Nazi Party, and General von Schleicher and his wife, the latter two murdered in cold blood. I see von Kahr is on the list, the man who balked Hitler’s Beer House Putsch in 1923. Hitler has thus taken his personal revenge. Yesterday, on Friday the 13th, Hitler got away with his explanation in the Reichstag. When he screamed: “The supreme court of the German people during these twenty-four hours consisted of myself!” the deputies rose and cheered. One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.
Dollfuss is dead, murdered by the Nazis, who today seized control of the Chancellery and the radio station in Vienna. Apparently their coup has failed and Miklas and Dr. Schuschnigg are in control. I do not like murder, and Nazi murder least of all. But I cannot weep for Dollfuss after his cold-blooded slaughter of the Social Democrats last February. Fey seems to have played a curious role, according to the dispatches. He was in the Chancellery with Dollfuss and kept coming to the balcony to ask for Rintelen, whom the Nazis had named as their first Chancellor. Apparently he thought the Nazi coup had succeeded and was ready to join. A bad hatchet-face, this Fey.
Hindenburg died this morning. Who can be president now? What will Hitler do?
Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal’s body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.
Dosch-Fleurot rang me at the office this afternoon from Berlin and offered me a job with Universal Service there. I said yes at once, we agreed on a salary, and he said he would let me know after talking with New York.
Larry Hills, editor and manager of the Herald, whined a bit this evening about my going, but finally overcame his ill temper and we went over to the bar of the Hotel California and had a drink. Must brush up my German.
Our introduction to Hitler’s Third Reich this evening was probably typical. Taking the day train from Paris so as to see a little of the country, we arrived at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten this evening. The first persons to greet us on the platform were two agents of the secret police. I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon. Two plain-clothes men grabbed me as I stepped off the train, led me a little away, and asked me if I were Herr So-and-So—I could not for the life of me catch the name. I said no. One of them asked again and again and finally I showed him my passport. He scanned it for several minutes, finally looked at me suspiciously, and said: “So…. You are not Herr So-and-So, then. You are Herr Shirer.” “None other,” I replied, “as you can see by the passport.” He gave me one more suspicious glance, winked at his fellow dick, saluted stiffly, and made off. Tess and I walked over to the Hotel Continental and engaged an enormous room. Tomorrow begins a new chapter for me. I thought of a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.”
Knickerbocker tells me Dorothy Thompson departed from the Friedrichstrasse station shortly before we arrived yesterday. She had been given twenty-four hours to get out—apparently the work of Putzi Hanfstängl, who could not forgive her for her book I Saw Hitler, which, at that, badly underestimated the man. Knick’s own position here is precarious apparently because of some of his past and present writings. Goebbels, who used to like him, has fallen afoul of him. He’s going down to see Hearst at Bad Nauheim about it in a day or two.
In the throes of a severe case of depression. I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion. The constant Heil Hitler’s, clicking of heels, and brown-shirted storm troopers or black-coated S.S. guards marching up and down the street grate me, though the old-timers say there are not nearly so many brown-shirts about since the purge. Gillie, former Morning Post correspondent here and now stationed in Paris, is, perversely, spending part of his vacation here. We’ve had some walks and twice have had to duck into stores to keep from either having to salute the standard of some passing S.A. or S.S. battalion or facing the probability of getting beaten up for not doing so. Day before yesterday Gillie took me to lunch at a pub in the lower part of the Friedrichstrasse. Coming back he pointed out a building where a year ago for days on end, he said, you could hear the yells of the Jews being tortured. I noticed a sign. It was still the headquarters of some S.A. Standarte. Tess tried to cheer me up by taking me to the Zoo yesterday. It was a lovely, hot day and after watching the monkeys and elephants we lunched on the shaded terrace of the restaurant there. Called on the Ambassador, Professor William E. Dodd. He struck me as a blunt, honest, liberal man with the kind of integrity an American ambassador needs here. He seemed a little displeased at my saying I did not mourn the death of Dollfuss and may have interpreted it as meaning I liked the Nazis, though I hope not. Also called on the counsellor of Embassy, J. C. White, who appears to be the more formal type of State Department career diplomat. He promptly sent cards, nicely creased, to the hotel, but since I do not understand the creased-card business of diplomacy I shall do nothing about it. Am going to cover the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg day after tomorrow. It should provide a thorough introduction to Nazi Germany.
Like a Roman emperor Hitler rode into this mediæval town at sundown today past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis who packed the narrow streets that once saw Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger. Tens of thousands of Swastika flags blot out the Gothic beauties of the place, the façades of the old houses, the gabled roofs. The streets, hardly wider than alleys, are a sea of brown and black uniforms. I got my first glimpse of Hitler as he drove by our hotel, the Württemberger Hof, to his headquarters down the street at the Deutscher Hof, a favourite old hotel of his, which has been remodelled for him. He fumbled his cap with his left hand as he stood in his car acknowledging the delirious welcome with somewhat feeble Nazi salutes from his right arm. He was clad in a rather worn gaberdine trench-coat, his face had no particular expression at all—I expected it to be stronger—and for the life of me I could not quite comprehend what hidden springs he undoubtedly unloosed in the hysterical mob which was greeting him so wildly. He does not stand before the crowd with that theatrical imperiousness which I have seen Mussolini use. I was glad to see that he did not poke out his chin and throw his head back as does the Duce nor make his eyes glassy—though there is something glassy in his eyes, the strongest thing in his face. He almost seemed to be affecting a modesty in his bearing. I doubt if it’s genuine.
This evening at the beautiful old Rathaus Hitler formally opened this, the fourth party rally. He spoke for only three minutes, probably thinking to save his voice for the six big speeches he is scheduled to make during the next five days. Putzi Hanfstängl, an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown who does not often fail to remind us that he is part American and graduated from Harvard, made the main speech of the day in his capacity of foreign press chief of the party. Obviously trying to please his boss, he had the crust to ask us to “report on affairs in Germany without attempting to interpret them.” “History alone,” Putzi shouted, “can evaluate the events now taking place under Hitler.” What he meant, and what Goebbels and Rosenberg mean, is that we should jump on the band-wagon of Nazi propaganda. I fear Putzi’s words fell on deaf, if good-humoured, ears among the American and British correspondents, who rather like him despite his clownish stupidity.
About ten o’clock tonight I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.
Later I pushed my way into the lobby of the Deutscher Hof. I recognized Julius Streicher, whom they call here the Uncrowned Czar of Franconia. In Berlin he is known more as the number-one Jew-baiter and editor of the vulgar and pornographic anti-Semitic sheet the Stürmer. His head was shaved, and this seemed to augment the sadism of his face. As he walked about, he brandished a short whip.
Knick arrived today. He will cover for INS and I for Universal.
I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans. This morning’s opening meeting in the Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral. The hall was a sea of brightly coloured flags. Even Hitler’s arrival was made dramatic. The band stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty thousand people packed in the hall. Then the band struck up the Badenweiler March, a very catchy tune, and used only, I’m told, when Hitler makes his big entries. Hitler appeared in the back of the auditorium, and followed by his aides, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, and the others, he strode slowly down the long centre aisle while thirty thousand hands were raised in salute. It is a ritual, the old-timers say, which is always followed. Then an immense symphony orchestra played Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Great Klieg lights played on the stage, where Hitler sat surrounded by a hundred party officials and officers of the army and navy. Behind them the “blood flag,” the one carried down the streets of Munich in the ill-fated putsch. Behind this, four or five hundred S.A. standards. When the music was over, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s closest confidant, rose and slowly read the names of the Nazi “martyrs”—brown-shirts who had been killed in the struggle for power—a roll-call of the dead, and the thirty thousand seemed very moved.
In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high. Man’s—or at least the German’s—critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself. It was while the crowd—all Nazi officials—was in this mood that the Führer’s proclamation was sprung on them. He did not read it himself. It was read by Gauleiter Wagner of Bavaria, who, curiously, has a voice and manner of speaking so like Hitler’s that some of the correspondents who were listening back at the hotel on the radio thought it was Hitler.
As to the proclamation, it contained such statements as these, all wildly applauded as if they were new truths: “The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years. For us, the nervous nineteenth century has finally ended. There will be no revolution in Germany for the next one thousand years!”
Or: “Germany has done everything possible to assure world peace. If war comes to Europe it will come only because of Communist chaos.” Later before a “Kultur” meeting he added: “Only brainless dwarfs cannot realize that Germany has been the breakwater against Communist floods which would have drowned Europe and its culture.”
Hitler also referred to the fight now going on against his attempt to Nazify the Protestant church. “I am striving to unify it. I am convinced that Luther would have done the same and would have thought of unified Germany first and last.”
Hitler sprang his Arbeitsdienst, his Labour Service Corps, on the public for the first time today and it turned out to be a highly trained, semi-military group of fanatical Nazi youths. Standing there in the early morning sunlight which sparkled on their shiny spades, fifty thousand of them, with the first thousand bared above the waist, suddenly made the German spectators go mad with joy when, without warning, they broke into a perfect goose-step. Now, the goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state, but I felt for the first time this morning what an inner chord it strikes in the strange soul of the German people. Spontaneously they jumped up and shouted their applause. There was a ritual even for the Labour Service boys. They formed an immense Sprechchor—a chanting chorus—and with one voice intoned such words as these: “We want one Leader! Nothing for us! Everything for Germany! Heil Hitler!”
Curious that none of the relatives or friends of the S.A. leaders or, say, of General von Schleicher have tried to get Hitler or Göring or Himmler this week. Though Hitler is certainly closely guarded by the S.S., it is nonsense to hold that he cannot be killed. Yesterday we speculated on the matter, Pat Murphy of the Daily Express, a burly but very funny and amusing Irishman, Christopher Holmes of Reuter’s, who looks like a poet and perhaps is, Knick, and I. We were in Pat’s room, overlooking the moat. Hitler drove by, returning from some meeting. And we all agreed how easy it would be for someone in a room like this to toss a bomb on his car, rush down to the street, and escape in the crowd. But there has been no sign of an attempt yet, though some of the Nazis are slightly worried about Sunday, when he reviews the S.A.
Another great pageant tonight. Two hundred thousand party officials packed in the Zeppelin Wiese with their twenty-one thousand flags unfurled in the searchlights like a forest of weird trees. “We are strong and will get stronger,” Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loud-speakers. And there, in the flood-lit night, jammed together like sardines, in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd. Later they recovered enough—fifteen thousand of them—to stage a torchlight parade through Nuremberg’s ancient streets, Hitler taking the salute in front of the station across from our hotel. Von Papen arrived today and stood alone in a car behind Hitler tonight, the first public appearance he has made, I think, since he narrowly escaped being murdered by Göring on June 30. He did not look happy.
Hitler faced his S.A. storm troopers today for the first time since the bloody purge. In a harangue to fifty thousand of them he “absolved” them from blame for the Röhm “revolt.” There was considerable tension in the stadium and I noticed that Hitler’s own S.S. bodyguard was drawn up in force in front of him, separating him from the mass of the brown-shirts. We wondered if just one of those fifty thousand brown-shirts wouldn’t pull a revolver, but not one did. Viktor Lutze, Röhm’s successor as chief of the S.A., also spoke. He has a shrill, unpleasant voice, and the S.A. boys received him coolly, I thought. Hitler had in a few of the foreign correspondents for breakfast this morning, but I was not invited.
Today the army had its day, fighting a very realistic sham battle in the Zeppelin Meadow. It is difficult to exaggerate the frenzy of the three hundred thousand German spectators when they saw their soldiers go into action, heard the thunder of the guns, and smelt the powder. I feel that all those Americans and English (among others) who thought that German militarism was merely a product of the Hohenzollerns—from Frederick the Great to Kaiser Wilhelm II—made a mistake. It is rather something deeply ingrained in all Germans. They acted today like children playing with tin soldiers. The Reichswehr “fought” today only with the “defensive” weapons allowed them by Versailles, but everybody knows they’ve got the rest—tanks, heavy artillery, and probably airplanes.
LATER.—After seven days of almost ceaseless goose-stepping, speech-making, and pageantry, the party rally came to an end tonight. And though dead tired and rapidly developing a bad case of crowd-phobia, I’m glad I came. You have to go through one of these to understand Hitler’s hold on the people, to feel the dynamic in the movement he’s unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess. And now—as Hitler told the correspondents yesterday in explaining his technique—the half-million men who’ve been here during the week will go back to their towns and villages and preach the new gospel with new fanaticism. Shall sleep late tomorrow and take the night train back to Berlin.
We’ve taken a comfortable studio flat in the Tauenzienstrasse. The owner, a Jewish sculptor, says he is getting off for England while the getting is good—probably a wise man. He left us a fine German library, which I hope I will get time to use. We get a little tired of living in flats or houses that other people have furnished, but the migrant life we lead makes it impossible to have our own things. We were lucky to get this place, which is furnished modernly and with good taste. Most of the middle-class homes we’ve seen in Berlin are furnished in atrocious style, littered with junk and knick-knacks.
LATER.—On my eight o’clock call to the Paris office tonight, they told me that the King of Yugoslavia had been assassinated at Marseille this afternoon and that Louis Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, had been badly wounded. Berlin will not be greatly disappointed, as King Alexander seemed disposed to work more closely with the French bloc against Germany, and Barthou had been doing some good work in strengthening French alliances in eastern Europe and in attempting to bring Russia in on an Eastern Locarno.
Not much news these days. Have been covering the fight in the Protestant church. A section of the Protestants seem to be showing more guts in the face of Gleichschaltung (co-ordination) than the Socialists or Communists did. But I think Hitler will get them in the end and gradually force on the country a brand of early German paganism which the “intellectuals” like Rosenberg are hatching up. Went tonight to one of Rosenberg’s Bierabends which he gives for the diplomats and the foreign correspondents once a month. Rosenberg was one of Hitler’s “spiritual” and “intellectual” mentors, though like most Balts I have met he strikes me as extremely incoherent and his book Mythus of the Twentieth Century, which sells second only to Mein Kampf in this country, impresses me as a hodge-podge of historical nonsense. Some of his enemies, like Hanfstängl, say he narrowly missed being a good Russian Bolshevist, having been in Moscow as a student during the revolution, but that he ran out on it because the Bolshies mistrusted him and wouldn’t give him a big job. He speaks with a strong Baltic accent which makes his German difficult for me to understand. He had Ambassador Dodd at his table of honour tonight, and the professor looked most unhappy. Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Minister of Education, was the speaker, but my mind wandered during his speech. Rust is not without ability and is completely Nazifying the schools. This includes new Nazi textbooks falsifying history—sometimes ludicrously.
Much talk here that Germany is secretly arming, though it is difficult to get definite dope, and if you did get it and sent it, you’d probably be expelled. Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador, whom I used to see occasionally in Vienna when he was Minister there (he looks like a Hungarian dandy, with a perfect poker face), but whom I have not seen here yet, returned from London yesterday and is reported to have asked the Wilhelmstrasse about it. Went out to a cheap store in the Tauenzienstrasse today and bought a comical-looking ready-made suit of “tails” for our foreign press ball at the Adlon Saturday night. A dinner jacket, I was told, was not enough.