The important thing is that Britain will not win the war, say, in the next two or three years by starving the German people. And Hitler, who is never sentimental about non-Germans, will see to it that every one of the hundred million people in the occupied lands dies of hunger before one German does. Of that the world may be sure.
BERLIN, September 26
We had the longest air-raid of the war last night, from eleven p.m. to four o’clock this morning. If you had a job to get to at seven or eight a.m., as hundreds of thousands of people had, you got very little sleep. The British ought to do this every night. No matter if not much is destroyed. The damage last night was not great. But the psychological effect was tremendous.
No one expected the British so early, and thousands were caught in subways, on the Stadtbahn, in buses and street-cars. They hastily made for the nearest public shelter and spent most of the night there. The first result of the early arrival of the British last night—theoretically they can arrive at ten p.m., two hours after dark—is that all the theatres today announce a new opening hour: six p.m., instead of seven thirty or eight p.m. And the Ministry of Education sends out word that in case of air-raids lasting after midnight, grade schools will remain closed the following morning in order to allow the children to catch up on their sleep.
It burns me up that I cannot mention a raid that is going on during my broadcast. Last night the anti-aircraft guns protecting the Rundfunk made such a roar while I was broadcasting that I couldn’t hear my own words. The lip microphone we are now forced to use at night prevented the sound of the guns from accompanying my words to America, which is a pity. Noticed last night too that instead of having someone talk to New York from the studio below to keep our transmitter modulated for the five minutes before I began to talk, the RRG substituted loud band music. This was done to drown out the sound of the guns.
The B.Z. am Mittag begins its account of last night’s attack: “The greatest war-monger of all times, Winston Churchill, dispatched his murderers to Berlin again last night….”
As soon as I had finished my broadcast at one a.m., the Nazi air-wardens forced me into the air-raid cellar. I tried to read Carl Crow’s excellent book Four Hundred Million Customers, but the light was poor. I became awfully bored. Finally Lord Haw-Haw and his wife suggested we steal out. We dodged past the guards and found an unfrequented underground tunnel, where we proceeded to dispose of a litre of schnaps which “Lady” Haw-Haw had brought. Haw-Haw can drink as straight as any man, and if you can get over your initial revulsion at his being a traitor, you find him an amusing and even intelligent fellow. When the bottle was finished we felt too free to go back to the cellar.
Haw-Haw found a secret stairway and we went up to his room, opened the blinds, and watched the fireworks. To the south of the city the guns were hammering away, lighting up the sky.
Sitting there in the black of the room, I had a long talk with the man. Haw-Haw, whose real name is William Joyce, but who in Germany goes by the name of Froehlich (which in German means “Joyful”), denies that he is a traitor. He argues that he has renounced his British nationality and become a German citizen, and that he is no more a traitor than thousands of British and Americans who renounced their citizenship to become comrades in the Soviet Union, or than those Germans who gave up their nationality after 1848 and fled to the United States. This doesn’t satisfy me, but it does him. He kept talking about “we” and “us” and I asked him which people he meant.
“We Germans, of course,” he snapped.
He’s a heavily built man of about five feet nine inches, with Irish eyes that twinkle and a face scarred not by duelling in a German university but in Fascist brawls on the pavements of English towns. He speaks a fair German. I should say he has two complexes which have landed him in his present notorious position. He has a titanic hatred for Jews and an equally titanic one for capitalists. These two hatreds have been the mainsprings of his adult life. Had it not been for his hysteria about Jews, he might easily have become a successful Communist agitator. Strange as it may seem, he thinks the Nazi movement is a proletarian one which will free the world from the bonds of the “plutocratic capitalists.” He sees himself primarily as a liberator of the working class.
(Haw-Haw’s colleague, Jack Trevor, an English actor, who also does anti-British broadcasts for Dr. Goebbels, has no interest in the proletariat. His one burning passion is hatred of the Jews. Last winter it used to be a common sight to see him stand in the snow, with a mighty blizzard blowing, and rave to an S.S. guard outside the studio door about the urgent necessity of liquidating all Jews everywhere. The guard, who undoubtedly had no special love for the Jews, but whose only thought was how much longer he must stand guard on an unholy wintry night, would stamp his freezing feet in the snow, turn his head from the biting wind, and mutter: “Ja. Ja. Ja. Ja,” probably wondering what freaks Englishmen are.)
Haw-Haw’s story, as I’ve pieced it together from our conversations and from his little booklet, Twilight over England, just published in Berlin (and which he gave me after I had presented him with an English book I had smuggled in entitled The Life and Death of Lord Haw-Haw), is this:
He was born in New York in 1906 of Irish parents who, he says, lost what money they had in Ireland “by reason of their devotion to the British crown.” He studied literature, history, and psychology at the University of London and in 1923, the year of Hitler’s ill-fated Munich Putsch, joined the British Fascists. He says he earned his living thereafter as a tutor. In 1933 he entered Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and became one of its chief speakers and writers. For three years he was Mosley’s propaganda chief. He claims he left Mosley’s movement in 1937 “owing to differences on matters pertaining to organization.” He teamed up with John Beckett, a former Socialist M.P., and started the National Socialist League, but within a few months Beckett left it because he thought Joyce’s methods “too extreme.”
Of these days Joyce writes: “We lived National Socialism … We were all poor enough to know the horrors of freedom in democracy. One of our members was driven mad by eighteen months of unemployment and starvation. I lived for months with real friends who loved England and could not get enough to eat from her.”
Twice during the year that preceded the war he was arrested on charges of assault and disturbing the peace. Then came the war clouds.
“For me,” he writes, “the decision was easy to make. To me it was clear on the morning of August 25 that the greatest struggle in history was doomed to take place. It might have been a very worthy course to stay in England and incessantly work for peace. But I had one traditionally acquired or inherited prejudice…. England was going to war. I felt that if, for perfect reasons of conscience, I could not fight for her, I must give her up for ever.”
He did. On August 25 he and his wife, “who had to leave without even being able to say farewell to her parents,” set out for Germany to take part in what he calls the “sacred struggle to free the world.”
Any mind which sees Hitler’s cold-blooded tramping down of the free peoples of Europe as a sacred struggle to free the world speaks for itself. Haw-Haw’s book is a hodge-podge of Nazi nonsense about England, studded with obvious truths about its blacker and meaner side which the whole world knows.
Haw-Haw’s extremely nasal voice was at first considered by Propaganda Ministry officials as wholly unfit for broadcasting. A Nazi radio engineer who had studied in England first saw its possibilities and he was given a trial. On the radio this hard-fisted, scar-faced young Fascist rabble-rouser sounds like a decadent old English blue-blood aristocrat of the type familiar on our stage. Ed Murrow told me last winter that checkups showed that Haw-Haw commanded at least half of the English radio audience when he was on the air. But that was when the English were bored by the “phony” war and found the war and Joyce amusing. I think he himself realizes that he has lost most of his hold on the English people. Of late he has also begun to chafe at the inane t
hings which Goebbels makes him say.
There is a third English traitor to note here. He is Baillie Stewart, a former captain of the Seaforth Highlanders, who a few years ago was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower for betraying military secrets to a foreign power. The girl who led him to this was a German siren, and after his release he followed her here. He did some broadcasts at first, but his Scottish nature was too unbending for the Nazi officials of the Propaganda Ministry and the German Broadcasting Company. He is now off the air and working as a translator in the Foreign Office.
While on the subject, I might as well note down the three Americans who are doing Nazi propaganda for the German radio.
Fred Kaltenbach of Waterloo, Iowa, is probably the best of the lot, actually believing in National Socialism with a sincere fanaticism and continually fighting the Nazi Party hacks when they don’t agree with him. He is not a bad radio speaker. I avoid all three and have seen Kaltenbach only once. That was at Compiègne when he was having one of his periodic feuds with the Nazi radio authorities. They gave orders that he was not to be taken from Paris to Compiègne, but he stole a ride with some army officers and “gate-crashed” the ceremony. He was continually being arrested by the military and ejected from the grounds, but he came back each time. Most Nazis find him a bit “too American” for their taste, but Kaltenbach would die for Nazism.
The second American speaker is one Edward Leopold Delaney, who goes here by the name of E. D. Ward. He’s a disappointed actor who used to have occasional employment with road companies in the United States. He has a diseased hatred for Jews, but otherwise is a mild fellow and broadcasts the cruder type of Nazi propaganda without questioning.
The third person is Miss Constance Drexel, who many years ago wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. The Nazis hire her, so far as I can find out, principally because she’s the only woman in town who will sell her American accent to them. Bizarre: she constantly pesters me for a job. One American network hired her at the beginning of the war, but dropped her almost at once.
For their other foreign-language broadcasts the Nazis have a strange assortment of hired Balkanites, Dutch, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Arabs, and Hindus. Once in a great while one of these speakers turns out to be “unreliable.” Such a one was the Yugoslav speaker who began his broadcast the other night: “Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to hear from Berlin tonight is a lot of nonsense, a pack of lies, and if you have any sense, you will turn your dials.” He got no further, for there are “checkers” sitting listening at the Propaganda Ministry at the other end of town. The last seen of the fellow was when the S.S. guards carted him off to jail.
The Norwegian people were brusquely informed last night in a broadcast by the Nazi Commissar in Oslo, Gauleiter Terboven, of the hard row that lies ahead of them. Announced the Gauleiter: (1) The Norwegian Royal House has no more political importance and will never return to Norway. (2) The same goes for the Nygaardsvold government which emigrated. (3) Therefore any activity in favour of the Royal House or the government which fled is prohibited. (4) In accordance with a decree of Hitler, a commissarial council is named to take over the business of the government. (5) The old political parties are dissolved immediately. (6) Any combinations for the purpose of political activity of any kind will not be tolerated.
Thus is Norway, all that is decent and democratic in Norway, destroyed—for the time being. And Germany shows so plainly how unfit she is to rule over anybody else. There was a short time, when the Reich first took over Norway—the same is true of Holland—when Germany might have succeeded in winning over the goodwill of the people there, who saw it was hopeless to struggle against the overwhelming military power of Hitler. But the Germans did everything possible to forfeit goodwill, and in a few weeks the sentiment changed. Now in all the occupied countries the German rulers are bitterly hated. No decent Norwegian or Dutchman will have anything to do with them.
The Gauleiter’s broadcast was a fine example of German tactlessness. He told the Norwegian people that he had tried in vain to negotiate with the old political parties, but they had held out for power and had not “heeded” his warnings; so he had had to liquidate them. In conclusion, he told the Norwegians that it had now become clear that the way of the Quisling movement had always been the only possible one for Norway, and that this party would be the only one tolerated by the Germans in the future. Thus, in effect, he told the Norwegians that a miserable little traitor, detested by ninety-nine and a half per cent of the population, was not only right, but henceforth would have the only say—so far as any Norwegian will have any say, which is little enough—about the future of their country.
You don’t have to be profound to conclude that the rule of brute force now exercised by the Germans over the occupied territories can never last very long. For despite complete military and police power, which the Germans admittedly have, you cannot for ever rule over foreign European peoples who hate and detest you. The success of Hitler’s “new order” in Europe is therefore doomed even before it is set up. The Nazis, of course, who have never troubled to study European history but are guided by a primitive Germanic tribal urge of conquest with no thought for the possible consequences, think that they are well on their way to installing a European “new order” which will be dominated by Germany for the greater good of Germany for all time. Their long-term plan is not only to keep the subjected European peoples permanently disarmed so that they cannot revolt against their German masters, but to make them so dependent on Germany economically that they cannot exist without Berlin’s benevolent will. Thus those heavy and highly technical industries which still function in the slave lands will be concentrated in Germany. The slave peoples will produce the raw materials to feed them, and the food to feed the German masters. They will be largely agricultural and mining communities—much as the Balkan lands fulfil that role for western Europe today. And they will be utterly dependent upon Germany.
The subjected peoples of Europe will be saved, of course, if Britain holds out and ultimately wins this war. But even if Germany should win the war it will lose its struggle to organize Europe. The German, I am profoundly convinced after mingling with him now for many years, is incapable of organizing Europe. His lack of balance, his bullying sadism when he is on top, his constitutional inability to grasp even faintly what is in the minds and hearts of other peoples, his instinctive feeling that relations between two peoples can only be on the basis of master and slave and never on the basis of let-live equality—these characteristics of the German make him and his nation unfit for the leadership in Europe they have always sought and make it certain that, however he may try, he will in the long run fail.
Ciano arrives here tomorrow from Rome. Most people think it is for the announcement that Spain is entering the war on the side of the Axis. Suñer is here for the ceremony, if it comes off.
BERLIN, September 27
Hitler and Mussolini have pulled another surprise.
At one p.m. today in the Chancellery, Japan, Germany, and Italy signed a military alliance directed against the United States. I was caught way off base thinking that Ciano had come to pipe Spain into the war. Suñer was not even present at the theatrical performance the fascists of Europe and Asia staged today.
I came to my senses this morning when I noticed the schoolchildren who had been marched to the Wilhelmstrasse to cheer—waving Japanese flags. As I had a broadcast at two p.m. and the correspondents were convoked at the Chancellery for “an important announcement” at one p.m., I asked Hartrich to cover the actual ceremony. At the Rundfunk I followed it by radio.
Core of the pact is Article III. It reads: “Germany, Italy, and Japan undertake to assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three contracting parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict.”
There are two great powers not yet involved in either of those wars: Russia and the United
States. But Article III does not refer to Russia; Article V refers to Russia. Article V says: “Germany, Italy, and Japan affirm that the aforesaid terms do not in any way affect the political status which exists at present between each of the three contracting parties and Soviet Russia.”
The Soviet Union is out. That leaves the U.S.A. in. There was no attempt to disguise this obvious fact in Nazi circles tonight, though, as expected, my censors tried to stop me from saying so and I had to use all my wits in getting the thing across in my broadcasts. Though it would have been more honest and accurate to say bluntly that Nazi circles did not disguise the fact that the alliance was directed against the United States, I had to water it down to this beautiful opening sentence: “There is no attempt in informed circles here tonight to disguise the fact that the military alliance signed in Berlin today… has one great country in mind. That country is the United States.” Then to clinch the argument I had to resort to a nebulous analysis of the text of the treaty and the German interpretation thereof, which the censors, after some sour remarks, finally passed.
Now, why did Hitler, instigator of this alliance, hurriedly rig it up just at this time? My theory is this: Ribbentrop journeyed suddenly to Rome a fortnight ago to break the news to Mussolini that the expected land invasion of Britain, which Hitler in a speech only a few days previously at the Sportpalast had promised the German people would certainly take place soon, could not be carried out as planned. Mussolini had already started an invasion of Egypt to coincide with the attack on Britain and to divide the Empire’s forces, but not to do much more than that this fall. We know that Ribbentrop stayed longer in Rome than he planned. The Duce, no doubt, was disturbed at Hitler’s abandoning the all-out attack on Britain which he was confident would end the war—and Italy had only entered the war when she did because she thought it was almost over. What was the Axis to do? The obvious thing seemed to devote the winter to attacking the heart of the British Empire in Egypt, conquer that country, take the Suez Canal, then grab Palestine, Iraq, where badly needed oil was at hand, and possibly continue down the Euphrates and take the Persian oil region, or at least its export base at the head of the Persian Gulf. Germany could supply thousands of airplanes and tanks and some complete Panzer divisions which had been assembled for the attack on Britain. If necessary, Yugoslavia and Greece could be occupied (Italy to get Dalmatia permanently), and southern Greece used as a starting-place for German planes against Egypt and the British Mediterranean fleet.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 Page 46
