Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

by William L. Shirer

  LATER.—When I mentioned the above story in my broadcast I commented: “I have seen no map of how Europe will look if Germany wins the war.” My censors held this was unfair and cut it out.

  BERLIN, December 21

  A curious communiqué from the German navy today: “The High Command of the Navy announces: The commander of the Graf Spee, Captain Hans Langsdorff, did not want to survive the sinking of his ship. True to old traditions and in the spirit of the training of the Officers Corps of which he was a member for thirty years, he made this decision. Having brought his crew to safety he considered his duty fulfilled, and followed his ship. The navy understands and praises this step. Captain Langsdorff has in this way fulfilled like a fighter and a hero the expectations of his Führer, the German people, and the navy.”

  The wretched German people, deprived of all truth from outside, will not be told that Captain Langsdorff did not follow his ship to the bottom, but committed suicide by putting a revolver-shot through his head in a lonely hotel room in Buenos Aires. They will not be told—though the navy did its best to hint at it in this communiqué—that Hitler, in a burst of fury over the defeat, ordered the Captain to end his life.

  Hitler and Ribbentrop have wired their Christmas greetings to Comrade Josef Stalin. How ludicrous. Wires Hitler: “Best wishes for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.”15 The Russians are not going so fast in Finland after a month of fighting. I recall what the counsellor of the Soviet Embassy told me here a few days before the fighting began. “It will be all over in three days,” he boasted.

  Eleven admitted executions here in the last two days. About half for espionage and the rest for “damaging the interests of the people in war-time”—the sentences in all but one case being passed by the “People’s Court” whose proceedings are never published. One of the eleven was sentenced by the court to fifteen years’ imprisonment for “damaging the people’s interests,” but Himmler wasn’t satisfied with the sentence, so he simply had the poor fellow shot. “Shot while offering resistance to state authority,” Himmler says. And Heinrich Himmler is such a mild little fellow when you talk to him, reminding you of a country school-teacher, which he once was—pince-nez and all. Freud, I believe, has told us why the mild little fellows or those with a trace of effeminacy in them, like Hitler, can be so cruel at times. I guess I would prefer my cruelty from great thundering hulks like Göring.

  Many long prison sentences being meted out to Germans who listen to foreign radio stations, and yet many continue to listen to them. So many, in fact, that an official warning was issued today. It concluded: “No mercy will be shown the idiotic criminals who listen to the lies of the enemy.” I passed an afternoon with a German family the other day, mother, two daughters, one son. They were a little apprehensive when they turned on the six p.m. BBC news. The mother said that besides the porter, who is the official Nazi spy for the apartment house, they had just learned that a Jewish tenant in return for receiving clothing ration cards (Jews get food cards, but no clothing cards) had turned informer for the house, and they had to be very careful. They played the radio so low I could hardly catch the news, and one of the daughters kept watch by the front door.

  BERLIN, December 24–5, three a.m.

  Christmas Eve. Raining out, but it will turn to snow. The first war Christmas somehow has brought the war home to the people more than anything else. It was always the high point of the year for Germans but this year it’s a bleak Christmas, with few presents, Spartan food, the men folk away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight in accordance with police regulations. On many a beautiful night I have walked through the streets of Berlin on Christmas Eve. There was not a home in the poorest quarter that did not have its candlelit Christmas tree sparkling cheerfully through the uncurtained, unshaded window. The Germans feel the difference tonight. They are glum, depressed, sad. Hitler has gone to the western front, though we have not been allowed to say so. He pulled out on the 21st in a huff, skipping his traditional Christmas party for the Chancellery staff and his old party cronies, though it had been all planned. Myself, I went to the Oechsners’ for Christmas dinner this evening, and a right good one it was. There a good portion of what remains of the shrinking American colony gathered and I’m afraid we all were just a little too desperate in our effort to forget the war and the Germans and enjoy for the fleeting moment Christmas in “the good old American way.” Dead, they are, for us all—the “good old ways.” But there was turkey and trimmin’s and Dorothy had done an artist’s job with pumpkin pie and whipped cream and real coffee, and there was much good red wine, which has been very scarce here of late, alas, and champagne and a giant Christmas tree and a lovely creature with straw-blond hair and innocent blue eyes who danced like a swish of the wind and who tomorrow is setting off with her husband for the Finnish front to work amidst the blood of men’s wounds.

  I had to leave at midnight for my broadcast. At the Rundfunk they had set up a big Christmas tree in one of the offices and when I arrived the people were dancing and making merry with champagne. My broadcast, I fear, was inexcusably sentimental. I kept thinking of the way Schumann-Heink used to sing Stille Nacht in my childhood days in Chicago before the World War. Lord Haw-Haw, the British traitor who goes here by the name of Froehlich, but whose real name is William Joyce and whose voice millions of English listen to on the radio every night, and his English wife were at the party, but I avoided them. Later Jack Trevor, an English actor, who has also turned traitor and broadcasts German propaganda to England, came in, much in his cups. I cannot stomach him either.

  In two hours—at five a.m.—must start out by car for Hamburg and Kiel, where I will do a Christmas broadcast tomorrow night from the German fleet. Since I cannot be in Geneva for Christmas, I’m glad to have a distraction like this. No foreigner has yet seen the German fleet since the war began. The Nazis had promised me a broadcast from the Westwall to balance a broadcast our Paris staff arranged from the Maginot Line, but someone double-crossed me and gave it to the opposition. I stopped our evening broadcasts for a week as protest.

  BERLIN, December 27

  This has been quite a Christmas holiday. Two days with the German fleet, the first foreigner given the opportunity.

  Up hours before dawn on Christmas morning, but my army chauffeur got lost in the black-out and heavy fog over Berlin and it took us two hours to find my guide, Oberleutnant X from the High Command. A typical World War type of officer, monocle and all, he was so angry he could hardly speak. He fumed that he had been standing on a darkened corner for two hours in the pouring rain and that we had passed him several times.

  At Hamburg the rain was still coming down in sheets when we arrived. The city reminded me very much of Liverpool. We finally found the docks and waded through foot-deep puddles to where the warships were. I spent an hour going through the new 10,000-ton cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was tied up at a dock. Much debris on its decks and beneath its decks, but the officers explained it was merely undergoing the usual overhaul which every new vessel needs. They swore the ship had not been damaged by enemy action. For some reason I get along all right with German naval people, and when over our port wine and sandwiches I reminded them that the British Admiralty had recently reported the torpedoing of a cruiser by a British U-boat the commander winked and beckoned me to follow him. We climbed and climbed up a narrow ladder-way until I was sweating and out of breath, my overcoat torn in five places. Finally we emerged on the battle tower.

  “Look over there,” he said slyly. A hundred yards away a somewhat smaller cruiser was propped up in dry-dock, a huge hole that must have been fifty feet in diameter torn in its side exactly amidships, or whatever the sailors call the middle. It was the cruiser Leipzig and the officer said they had been lucky to get it back into port afloat after a British torpedo had hit it squarely. The BBC, he said, had claimed the ship had been sunk. But there it was, and
though it was Christmas Day, a swarm of workers were labouring on it. A little way down the river, returning to our car, I noticed the 35,000-ton battleship Bismarch. It looked very near completion. Great secrecy surrounded this and its sister ship—the only two 35,000-ton battleships laid down by the German navy.

  As we sped towards Kiel in the late afternoon, it grew colder, the rain turned to snow, and the car had difficulty getting over the hills because of the ice. At Kiel some official representing, I suppose, the Propaganda Ministry welcomed me with a little speech.

  “I have just heard,” he said, “that you have stopped at Hamburg and seen all our warships there. Did you see the cruiser Leipzig, Herr Shirer?”

  “Yes, sir, and…”

  “Those British liars, they say they have sunk the Leipzig, Herr Shirer.”

  “It didn’t look sunk to me, I must admit, and I’ll be glad to broadcast that I’ve seen it, that it wasn’t sunk, but that…”

  He cut me off with a mighty roar. “Herr Shirer, that is fine. You will answer this dastardly English lie, isn’t it? You will tell the truth to the great American people. Tell them that you have seen the Leipzig with your own eyes, isn’t it?—and that the ship has not been scratched.”

  Before I could interrupt he was pushing me down a gangplank towards a naval launch. I turned to my Oberleutnant to protest. His monocle dropped out of his eye and a look of such distress came over him that I desisted. After all, what could he say in this company, which now included several naval officers who were waiting in the launch?

  Out in Kiel harbour I was surprised to see that almost the entire German fleet was concentrated here for Christmas. I noticed the pocket-battleship Deutschland, two cruisers of the Cologne class (for days in Berlin I had boned up on types of German naval vessels so that I could recognize them and felt proud when an officer confirmed that they were of the Cologne class), both 26,000-ton battleships, and about fifteen submarines, not including three in dry-dock. If the British only knew, I could not help thinking, they could come over this night, which will see almost a full moon, and wipe out the whole German fleet. Just one real big bombing attack. Kiel harbour looked beautiful in the greying light of the late Christmas afternoon. The hills around the bay were white with snow.

  Our launch finally stopped next to an immense dry-dock. One of the 26,000-ton battleships was in it, the Gneisenau. My hosts decided to show me over it. They were quick to explain that it, too, was in for a general overhauling, and I must admit that on the one side of the hull that I could see, there were no holes. We spent an hour going through the immense craft. I was surprised at the spirit of camaraderie between officers and men on the ship and so was—I soon noticed—my monocled Oberleutnant from the World War. Four or five senior officers accompanied me through the ship, and when we entered one of the crew’s quarters there was no jumping up, no snapping to attention as I had expected. The captain must have noticed our surprise.

  “That’s the new spirit in our navy,” he said proudly. He also explained that in this war the men on all German men-of-war get exactly the same kind and the same amount of food as the officers. This had not been true in the last war and he quoted some naval proverb to the effect that the same food for officers and men puts an end to discontent and helps win the war. I remembered—as no doubt did he—that the German revolution in 1918 started here in Kiel among the discontented sailors.

  When we returned to shore in the launch, a magnificent full moon was rising behind the snow-banked hills, spreading a silvery light over the water and making the ships stand out in outline. Back at the hotel we discussed our broadcast which was to take place from a submarine tender, where the crew of a U-boat just returned would be celebrating Christmas. The naval officers agreed to meet me at nine p.m. We would drive to the ship. The broadcast was scheduled for ten fifteen. Nine o’clock came. No officers. Nine fifteen. Nine thirty. I had not the slightest idea where our ship was docked. Even if I had had, I doubted whether a taxi-driver could find it in the black-out. At five minutes to ten my naval officers finally arrived. We reached the ship just in time to begin the broadcast, though I had planned a rehearsal or two and certainly needed at least one. Wolf Mittler, a big, genial chap from the RRG who had come up to help me, snapped in and got the crew, who were seated around a table in the bowels of the ship, to sing Christmas songs. The moon over the harbour was now well up and it was so superb I decided to start the broadcast on the top deck, describing the scene even though the head naval officer warned me that I must not—for God’s sake—tell the British that the whole German fleet was there, which was reasonable enough under the circumstances. I would start up on deck under the moonlight and then slide down a hatch with my microphone to the crew’s quarters below for the main part of the show. The first part went off all right, and after exhausting my adjectives I started to slide down the hatch, grasping my portable microphone. Alas, I am not a sailor. Before I had reached bottom, or whatever the sailors call it, I had ripped a sleeve and smashed the face of the stopwatch strapped to my wrist. Only I didn’t notice it at once. I barged into the crew’s quarters, got the boys to singing, described how the men just back from the U-boat killings celebrate Christmas, called for volunteers to say a few words in English, and the show was going all right. I glanced at my watch to see how our timing was. No face left to it. I made motions to the captain for his watch, but he didn’t get my sign language. Finally I closed the show. Later Berlin told us we were only ten seconds off. In the rush we had forgotten the censor. And I had ad-libbed a line about the Leipzig being badly damaged but not sunk. Apparently none of the officers understood English, for nothing was said.

  Surprising with what ingenuity these tough little sailors had fixed up their dark hole—for that it was—for Christmas. In one corner a large Christmas tree shone with electric candles, and along one side of the room the sailors had rigged up a number of fantastic Christmas exhibits. One was a miniature ice-skating rink in the midst of a snowy mountain resort on which couples did fancy figure-skating. A magnetic contraption set the fancy skaters in motion. Another showed the coastline of England and another electrical contraption set a very realistic naval battle in action. After the broadcast we sat around a long table, officers and men intermingled in a manner that shocked my Oberleutnant, singing and talking. The commandant served rum and tea, and then case after case of Munich beer was brought out. The Oberleutnant and I had a bit of trouble downing the beer from the bottle, there being no glasses. Towards midnight everyone became a bit sentimental.

  “The English, why do they fight us?” the men kept putting it to me, but it was obviously not the time nor place for me to speak out my own sentiments. Impressive, though, the splendid morale of these submarine crews, and more impressive still the absolute lack of Prussian caste discipline. Around our table the officers and men seemed to be on an equal footing and to like it.

  We walked back to the hotel through the moonlight, and after a final round of drinks to bed at three.

  BERLIN, December 28

  I must record Dr. Ley’s Christmas proclamation. “The Führer is always right. Obey the Führer. The mother is the highest expression of womanhood. The soldier is the highest expression of manhood. God is not punishing us by this war, he is giving us the opportunity to prove whether we are worthy of our freedom.”

  Himmler has suddenly decided to revoke the permission for cafés and bars to stay open all night on New Year’s Eve and warns the public against excessive drinking on that night. Is he afraid the people of this land may go out on a binge, get drunk (which Germans rarely do, normally), and express their feelings about this war? At any rate, everyone must shut up shop at one a.m. on New Year’s.

  BERLIN, December 31

  A flood of New Year’s proclamations from all and sundry—Hitler, Göring, Himmler, etc. Hitler holds out hope of victory to the people in 1940. Say she: “United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest degree, we enter t
his most decisive year in German history…. May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory.” He goes to extreme lengths to justify his war, and if the German people were not so poisoned by propaganda and suppression of the slightest factual news from abroad, they would laugh. He says the “Jewish reactionary warmongers in the capitalistic democracies” started the war! Words have no more meaning for the man nor, I fear, for his people. He says: “The German people did not want this war.” (True.) “I tried up to the last minute to keep peace with England.” (False.) “But the Jewish and reactionary warmongers waited for this minute to carry out their plans to destroy Germany.” (False.)

  Curious how the Germans, who should know better by this time, try to scare the English by blustering threats. Göring has a piece in tomorrow’s V.B.: “Until now German airplanes have been content to keep a sharp eye on England’s war measures. But it needs only the word of the Führer to carry over there, instead of the present light load of cameras, the destructive load of bombs. No country in the world is so open to air attack as the British Isles…. When the German air force really gets started, it will make an attack such as world history has never seen.”

  Cold, and a coal shortage. The office boy said tonight we were out of coal at the office and that there was no more coal to be had.