Weller's War

by George Weller

  A three-day search by American authorities failed to discover any trace of her or her son.3* Her last statement was that she “was going to visit her father's grave.” George Cram Cook, a poet and novelist of Davenport, Iowa, who staged Eugene O'Neill's early plays, is buried at Delphi. It is presumed, therefore, that Miss Cook has taken refuge in the wild fastnesses of Parnassus, above Delphi, where she spent several years of her girlhood. At least a regiment of Austrian Alpine troops would be needed to find her among the hundreds of caves of the enormous mountain block.

  In Berlin the press bureau spokesman, Dr. Emil Rasche, handed the few newspapermen a verbal expression of regret that the Foreign Office order, intended to be carried out by the military and boundary authorities, had nevertheless put the correspondents, without charges being preferred, under confinement by the secret state police, who specialize in dangerous political and military crimes.

  The German ban against these American correspondents on traveling through and residing, visiting, or working in any Balkan country must nevertheless remain in effect, said the spokesman. Although the ban did not specifically affect American newspapermen, it was stated in Berlin that the ban would make it impossible for Balkan correspondents to enter Hungary, Rumania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania, Greece or Turkey. The ban was also said to have been in effect since before the German-Russian conflict. The fact that Gallagher and the writer had just been issued valid Bulgarian visas and been promised Rumanian visas would not reopen access to the independent countries closed by the German authorities.

  A renewed request to be allowed to go to neutral Turkey, which had been named as the exit destination on an original note by the American minister to the German legation in Athens, was once again denied by the foreign office. The single facility available to American newspapermen working in the Balkans, the spokesman stated, was to leave Germany, Germanophile and German-conquered countries as promptly as possible and proceed homeward.

  This interview with Dr. Rasche in the Berlin Foreign Office, courteous throughout, was the conclusion to nine weeks of uninterrupted efforts on the writer's part to leave Greece in a correct and authorized manner. In the course of repeated visits to German military and diplomatic officials, he was given assurances every time that he could leave as soon as the military situation was clarified.

  On June 23, Major Kliemann of the boundary administration assured him flatly and without qualification that when the Cretan mopup was over, he could go anywhere the Chicago Daily News might designate, in the Balkans, or Near East; to Turkey, or Syria, “Even to Egypt, if you wish.”

  Satisfied on the honor of a German officer at this promise, the writer chose to remain in Greece instead of taking several means of clandestine departure. The refusal of permission to go to neutral Turkey, and the subsequent expulsion via Berlin through Switzerland, became even more groundless, for reasons of military secrecy, when both American military attachés in Athens were given permission by the Germans to go to Turkey only ten days prior to the invasion of Russia [June 22].

  Since transportation to Turkey was available, it seems impossible to interpret the German order other than as a blanket shutout of American correspondents from even nominally free Balkan countries. The only correspondent now there is Leigh White, CBS and New York Post writer, who is convalescing from a German bullet wound received in Athens and could not be expelled for medical reasons.

  We three expelled American correspondents passed from military hands to the Gestapo in Belgrade, where the Lufthansa plane was grounded due to Russian operations. In a small, single-motored Junkers reconnaissance plane we were flown to Vienna and landed at a military field, where a Gestapo car took us to Gestapo headquarters at the old Hotel Metropole beside the Danube Canal. Being completely bewildered as to why we were in Gestapo hands, we were questioned by the Gestapo chief commissioner, a burly man with pince-nez spectacles.

  The writer, who studied a year in Vienna as a good-will fellowship holder of the Institute of International Education, and who never expected to come back as a police prisoner, acted as interpreter.

  “What were you three carrying on in Greece?” the commissioner inquired.

  When we replied that we had simply received a German order to quit Greece immediately by way of Switzerland, and asked to be allowed to take the next train for the Swiss border, the commissioner asked what guarantee we could offer that we would not alight from the train and evade the expulsion order.

  When we suggested that—having already taken tickets from Vienna to Switzerland at German orders—the Gestapo might take us to the frontier, the commissioner said he must hold us in Vienna overnight. Before leaving Gestapo headquarters we asked the commissioner, who refused to reveal his name: “Do you accept the responsibility for not allowing us to telephone the American consul? And do you accept the responsibility for not allowing us to go to Switzerland according to Foreign Office orders?”

  “I assume both of those responsibilities,” the commissioner replied gravely.

  We were led to the Hotel Dianabad, where a number of Russians were held in rooms adjacent to us, and given strict instructions by our guard—those men in plus fours—not to attempt to leave the building, to write any letters or to telephone.

  The next morning we were taken to the city police headquarters and ordered to fill out applications for residence. After registering, we were handed formal orders of expulsion on the so-called Aufenthaltsverbot form, effective immediately.

  We were then asked to sign the expulsion orders in acknowledgment but, inasmuch as they provided for penalties and cited by number unfamiliar articles of the Nazi legal code, the writer suggested our signatures should be withheld until our plea to get in touch with the American authorities was granted. This decision was communicated to the police, with unsettling effect. We were returned again to the police hotel, to be taken again that afternoon to the Gestapo.

  The Vienna police in the meantime made our refusal to sign our own expulsion orders the subject of a letter to the Gestapo. The Gestapo commissioner disclosed that he had received orders from the Berlin Foreign Office that we were to be sent that night to Berlin rather than expelled through Switzerland.

  No other accommodation being available, we spent the night with one of our Gestapo guards on the wooden benches of a 3rd class railway coach, sleeping upright. Before leaving Vienna we were permitted to summon the American consul and make a report to him—21 hours 25 minutes after our arrival—of our situation, which he then conveyed to the American embassy in Berlin by telephone.

  The next morning in Berlin the Foreign Office dismissed the Gestapo guard after explaining that the Viennese commissioner had mistaken their use of the word Schutz, which in German means either protection or guard. Though not technically arrested, we had been held under military or Gestapo surveillance constantly since leaving Athens two days before.

  In Belgrade, the militant adjutant of the air force had instructed us that we were expected to remain in full view at all times, and particularly not to attempt to visit the bombed city, which, he said, was closed even to German citizens.

  These expulsions took place June 23. The details have been withheld until now by agreement with American correspondents in Berlin. It was feared that, were the facts announced earlier, the high feeling in America against Nazi methods would be reflected in retaliations on German correspondents in America. Such steps would be swiftly followed by aggravated steps against American correspondents in Berlin, whose position is already difficult but who have received verbal assurances that they will be allowed to leave in the event of a break in relations.

  The single exception to this promise is Richard Hottelet, imprisoned United Press correspondent, who was at first accused of communicating with invisible ink to his fiancée, employed in the British Foreign Office, but who is lately said to be charged with Russian espionage.

  The three expelled correspondents do not desire to start a cycle of retaliation with persona
l tragedies to innocent correspondents in both Berlin and Washington.

  The writer's expulsion, though groundless, simply carries out a German intention expressed in January, one week after his arrival in Europe, by the Sudost Echo, German weekly of Balkan economics. In a front-page editorial two columns long entitled “Weller in Belgrade,” the Sudost Echo suggested that a Chicago Daily News article about the food situation in Spain was “cannibalistic” and displayed “a bestial joy” in human suffering, and demanded that the Yugoslav government “give the creature his walking papers” before he could similarly abuse Yugoslav hospitality.

  Prospering military circumstances in the Balkans have made it possible for the German government to carry out, themselves, the suggestion made six months ago to the Yugoslavs. In this example of German foresight and planning, the Lufthansa, Army, Luftwaffe and Gestapo have united to carry out the original inspiration of the propaganda ministry.

  Few of his fellow newspapermen, the writer may say without false modesty, have been kicked out of the Reich itself in such a magnificent and complicated fashion as he has been expelled from the Lebensraum [“living space”]. Until now the correspondent had been able to keep his professional record completely free of expulsions. Now he finds himself overnight excluded by Germany from no fewer than eight countries. This must be the jackpot of being undesirable.

  GREEK PEOPLE, UNCONQUERABLE, JEER INVADERS

  Heroic Little Nation Proves More Glorious in Defeat than in Victory

  Athens, Greece—July 25, 1941

  Under the slow-motion, repeat performance of mechanized war that laid the entire country waste, Greece lies defenseless today, submitting to the immediate mutilation and continuous exploitation that Hitler and Mussolini have decided shall be the lot of tiny powers daring to defend themselves.

  But Greece is unconquerable. In this lean summer when the German Army has picked the country so clean of food that even Italians have been moved to send milk to Greek babies, the Greek is as undefeated, as saucy, as defiant as six months ago when, with fingers freezing upon the trigger, he fought in mountain cold until his ragbound feet and legs had to be amputated from a half-starved frame. Hungry, unemployed soldiers, wandering the streets in grotesque costumes, often burst into uncontrollable tears when they speak of their comrades lying in unmarked ravines in what are now greater Bulgaria and greater Albania. But the next minute a crust of bread and a handful of olives will set them singing openly anti-Mussolini marching songs under the noses of Italian gendarmes patrolling the streets.

  Since the Germans entered Athens twelve weeks ago, the Greeks have been fighting the same lonely battle as prisoner nations all over Europe. The Axis has locked Greece into solitary confinement, where only the thin voice of forbidden broadcasts and hopeful rumors, mostly exaggerated, support the war-shocked spirits. The Greeks have been left alone with what the world calls their defeat, with nothing but memories of Tepeleni, Argyrocastro, Pogradetz, and the bloody defense of Ruppel Pass against the Germans to sustain them. Heroes of war are obliged to remain unhonored and heroes of occupation unknown. Greece is held beneath the black tent of Berlin-controlled Europe where nothing comes up but the harmonious tidings of newborn states, plus the occasional interruption of firing squads.

  Cretans were executed by the scores when, after being disarmed by the government of the late General John Metaxas for liberal sympathies, they used hammers, sickles and kitchen knives, the only weapons they had, to meet German bombing planes and parachutists armed with tommy guns.

  To write the following account of the occupation, your correspondent made over two months' observation of history clamoring for expression but only part of which can be described even now because of the danger of retaliatory measures.

  The Greeks have been far more glorious in defeat even than they were in victory. It was miracle enough that they fought their first war united, without party schism; it is incredible that they have been able to endure defeat without any break in ranks or recrimination. Perhaps because the government that fled to Crete, headed by King George, was largely composed of remnants of the Metaxas dictatorship—which attained popular tolerance only through defending the country against its Axis friends—the people show no signs that leadership's absence worries them.

  Because the war against Italy and later Germany was the people's war from the beginning it is still continuing in the form of pinpricks of civilian resistance to the military administration. The Metaxas dictatorship left Greece as well prepared for occupation as for war. German and Italian field staffs have invented no trick for shackling the population that could surpass those tested during the four years when Greek brains were turned against Greek, and parliamentary liberties nonexistent.

  Against German Stukas dive-bombing Greek hospital ships—all five were sunk—the Greeks had no protection. Nor have they been able to prevent systematic carpetbagging by the German military machine, which is specifically organized for that purpose. But when the Germans began, a day after arriving in Athens, to issue Verordnungen—ordinances, regulations and laws—on arm-length handbills repetitiously pasted upon the walls, the Greeks knew exactly what to do. They read them, snickered and, when the blackout came, quietly tore them down.

  And they talked. They are still talking, not so much about the Italians because everybody, even in Greece, has begun to be sorry for the Italians, but about the Germans. The Gestapo chief, according to the Greeks, was the biggest victim of a whispering campaign that turned the Stadtkommandantur into a bundle of nerves. As the story runs, he resigned, saying: “There are two countries where I cannot work—Japan, where nobody dares talk, and Greece, where everybody talks.”

  Although neither democratic power did much to deserve the blind loyalty of the Greek man-in-the-street—the British campaign having been a retreat from the beginning and the Americans failing to deliver a single promised airplane, cannon or equipment—the Greek continues to hang on to the belief that rescue will come.

  A minority echoes the view that if Great Britain could send no better than 60,000 men and 250 airplanes, mostly of outmoded design, to face an army known to number 500,000 men with about 2000 aircraft, she would have done better to send nothing whatever and let Greece make peace on her own terms. But a 90 per cent majority rejects this thesis. They say that when Greece decided to fight Italy she embarked on a road without any return. With Metaxas dead, there was no leader in Greece capable of inducing the army that had defeated the Italian generalissimos, including Mussolini himself, to sell out its victory before Hitler's threats.

  Only the knowledge that Greece defeated Italy makes it possible for the Greeks to endure the humiliation of German occupation. The Nazi rationale that Greece was invaded only to attack the British is laughed at. The Greeks know that it would have been necessary for Hitler to come through Turkey or Greece in order to attack the Middle East. And Italy's flounderings in Albania had to be aided by Hitler or else fascism's falling wingtip would have pulled the plane into a tailspin.

  What comforts Greece is that her slender strength caused sufficient delay so that the Nazi drive to the Suez met blistering summer heat and had to turn northeast against Russia. But the Greeks are proudest of all that they were the first to teach the British the weakness of Italian arms—that their rout of the Italians along the Albanian frontier was the green light for the Ethiopian and Libyan campaigns.

  Their attitude toward the democracies may be summarized thus: “We have fought for your rights; now what are you going to do to recover ours?”

  GREEKS HUNGRY AS NAZI ARMY GRABS THE FOOD

  Athens, Greece—July 26, 1941

  Much has been said of German concentrated foods, powders and juices that turn sawdust into nectar and make every Nazi soldier self-sufficient for eight days upon the hoof. But when the Greeks—who know plenty about food—discuss how the blitzkrieg can be stopped they answer, “Close up the restaurants.” For when German meets German here the first thing he does is to enter a
restaurant and eat.

  From the experience of the Balkan campaign, the Greeks believe that the Nazi advance toward Moscow has been slowed down because there is not a lunch cart, tea room or nut sundae spot in Russia.

  The secret of the lightning Nazi advances, according to the Greeks, is that every moment spared from strafing is used in diligent, continuous eating. It took some time for the Greeks to understand that the first thing the German Army does after bombing a city is to eat everything in it. When they grasped this epicurean feature of the blitzkrieg it was already too late to close the restaurants. Instead they raised the prices. As a result the proprietors of Athens' most aristocratic and expensive eating places, Kostis and Maxims, both have been in jail. They are now forced to keep their doors open, accepting Axis funny money for wines and foodstuffs that cost thousands of gold-backed drachmas when bought.

  To some people the most disillusioning feature about the Greek campaign was that British officers, suffering continuous unprotected bombing and machine-gunning by Nazi planes on exposed roads, stubbornly continued to travel country-club style in American-built station wagons that have no overhead visibility and whose doors invariably jam at the moment when only a quick dive into a ditch is protection against death. But the German occupation revealed an even more prosaic fact, that the deadliest weapons in the Nazi arsenal are not bombs, flame throwers and machine guns but knives, forks and spoons.

  While the British conscientiously imported almost all their foods from Egypt, the Germans brought almost nothing but enough ersatz to tide them over between towns. The Agoranomia, or food control section, was captured everywhere. In Athens the Germans asked where the food administration was even before they demanded the surrender of hidden arms.