Some Americans still refused to accept that verdict. In particular, James D. Mooney, the president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, had hopes that a wider war could be averted. In October 1939, Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, asked AP bureau chief Lochner to help set up a meeting with Mooney, who oversaw GM’s plants in Germany and all around the globe. The purpose, he said, was to see if the United States could help defuse the conflict between Germany and England and France. Clearly, the other aim was to keep the Americans out of the war. Lochner, who had been a peace activist during World War I, agreed to do so—although he expressed surprise that Dietrich had turned to him since he was familiar with “my uncompromising anti-Nazi views.”
On October 19, Mooney met with Goering, who dangled the vision of an accord between his country and the United States, Britain and France. In Paris, Mooney reported his conversation to American Ambassador William Bullitt, who was dismissive of the whole idea that Mooney should be involved in any search for a negotiated solution. Roosevelt met Mooney in the White House on December 22 and the businessman took his willingness to hear him out as a signal that he could continue his quest on an unofficial basis.
On March 4, 1940, two days after Hitler met Welles, Mooney was ushered into the Chancellery for his own face-to-face meeting with Hitler. Evidently, the Nazis still believed that he might play the mediation role they had suggested to him. Treating him with the utmost seriousness, Hitler told Mooney that Germany was willing to respect England’s world power status so long as Germany was respected in a similar way. He claimed that this could be the basis for a peace agreement with Roosevelt, which could then lead to arms reductions and new international trade. After more meetings with German officials, Mooney sent five messages to Roosevelt about his talks. In a letter dated April 2, the president thanked him for them, writing that they had been of “real value” to him.
But Mooney failed to get in to see Roosevelt personally to follow up. He was convinced that presidential aide Harry Hopkins and others, who saw him as trying to push a policy of appeasement, blocked him at every turn. Recognizing that he wasn’t going to influence the course of events, Mooney wrote Roosevelt a letter tinged with frustration, expressing his regret that he hadn’t had “the opportunity to present to you some of the arguments for getting back on the course that you and I believed in last winter.” He added, “I still hope before general hostilities break out again against England—and it is beginning to look as though this may happen very soon… that I may be able to interest you in taking a position for peace.”
Interestingly, Lochner, who had tried to help Mooney at every turn, apparently had hoped the same thing. The AP bureau chief was indeed anti-Nazi, but he remained a peace activist at heart—even after the invasion of Poland.
Welles had been exactly right: the decisions were already made. Hitler’s armies attacked Denmark and Norway in April and then invaded Holland, Belgium and France in May, rolling up victories at a pace that startled even the American correspondents and diplomats in Berlin who had been the most prescient about Germany’s intentions. After listening to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop proclaim on April 9 that it was Britain that was guilty of “the most flagrant violation of a neutral country” and Germany’s forces were merely protecting their latest victims, Shirer confessed: “I was stunned. I shouldn’t have been—after so many years in Hitlerland—but I was.”
Denmark surrendered on the same day as the German troops appeared. Harsch flew to Copenhagen in a German transport plane and reported at the end of the day: “I never dreamed that I should ever see such heartache in a people.” He found the Danes “crushed, physically and mentally.” Broadcasting from Berlin, Shirer reported that the Germans had expected the Norwegians to fold just as quickly—but they were wrong on that count. The Norwegians fought back on land and sea, aided by Britain’s Royal Navy and troops from both Britain and France. On April 14, Shirer wrote a thought in his diary that he could never get past the censor for his broadcast: “Hitler is sowing something in Europe that one day will destroy not only him but his nation.”
After Hitler launched the invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, not waiting for an end to the fighting in Norway, “the German steamroller,” as Shirer called it, looked to be unstoppable. And the German authorities were confident enough to permit American correspondents to join German troops on the march in Belgium on May 20. “It’s been dream of every newsman in Berlin ever since 5/10 when Reich’s gigantic offensive via Holland, Belgium began to see Hitler’s amazing, awe inspiring armed forces in action,” Lochner, one of the first three correspondents to do so, reported to New York that day.
Excited by his access, Lochner marveled how German air power had “revolutionized” the way wars were fought. Luftwaffe scouter planes first assessed the strength of enemy forces, he explained to his readers, then unleashed their “terrorizing” Stukas and bombers, which “dash madly down upon enemy.” Once the planes had done their damage, the infantry followed up with “death disdaining courage,” leaving the enemy in complete confusion.
As for the human toll, Lochner was inclined to take much of what he saw at face value. While he informed his readers that he saw “human drama of misery, terrifying first glimpse of horrors wrought by modernist warfare, and strange contrasts of German kindness and German inexorability,” he emphasized the former. There were “dejected civilians” on the road, he reported, but German soldiers “seemed anxiousest [sic] to be nice to children, to deal courteously with grownups.” The average German soldier, he continued, “is bitter, unyielding, determined even terrible fighter but he also has [a] vast sentimental strain in him.”
If Lochner appeared to be unduly credulous about what he was seeing in the presence of his German minders, Shirer—who entered Belgium at the same time—was more cautious. In his radio broadcast, he reported that Belgians he encountered in Brussels, the capital that emerged unscathed, said that “the behavior of German troops had been correct.” But he stressed that the Belgians he saw on the roads looked “dazed and bitter and sad.” And the housing blocks in the university city of Louvain, where British troops had set up a headquarters, were “a terrible sight to behold” after the battles there. As he waded through the debris in the streets of Saint-Trond, another Belgian town, he jotted quick notes: “houses smashed… shambles… bitter Belgium civilians… women sobbing… their menfolk?… where?… here houses destroyed at random… Stukas careless?… on purpose?”
In his diary, Shirer also noted that he and his colleagues had expected the inhabitants of Louvain to tell them about German responsibility for the destruction. “But eyeing the German officers with us, they grow sly, act shy, and tell us nothing,” he wrote. A German nun recounted how she huddled with fifty-six children in the cellar of a convent after the bombs started falling without warning on May 10. She emphasized that Belgium had not been at war and not done anything to provoke such an attack. Then, she noticed the German officers watching her speak to the Americans.
“You’re German, aren’t you?” one of them asked her.
She confirmed her nationality and hastened to add in a frightened voice: “Of course, as a German, I was glad when it was all over and the German troops arrived.”
Lochner never alluded to the intimidating effect of the German officers who served as their escorts and how this may have colored what he heard. He and two other reporters—Guido Enderis of the New York Times and Pierre Huss of the International News Service—were given special treatment by Karl Boehmer, a German army officer assigned to the Propaganda Ministry. During their tours of newly conquered territory, Boehmer often took them in his own car, which was inevitably first to arrive in most places, while other American reporters followed in cars that were ordered to observe an official speed limit of about 25 miles per hour. The latter reporters complained that the privileged threesome was too chummy with Boehmer and the Nazis in general, although the three responded that they were simply doing their
jobs. “Some of the correspondents accused Lochner and Huss of being pro-Nazi because they gained more privileges in trips and tips than some of the other men,” wrote Henry Flannery of CBS, who arrived in Berlin that fall to prepare to succeed Shirer, “but I had no reason to feel that this was true.”
When it came to describing Hitler’s aims, Lochner didn’t hesitate to be blunt. After driving through Muenster, the town where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, he reported that the German leader planned, “when he has forced England, France on knees,” to make their representatives submit to his dictates there. “In other words, Hitler isn’t content now with wiping out last vestiges Versailles Treaty,” he transmitted to New York. “His mind goes back to 1648 when Holy Roman Empire of German nation was broken up into principalities and powerless miniature states.” His intent was “to rectify that mistake.”
General Walther von Reichenau, the commander of the 6th Army, which had rapidly subdued Belgium and would continue to another victory in France, exuded confidence when he met with Lochner and the other correspondents following his forces. “Every German soldier knows why he is fighting,” he declared. “It’s to be or not to be for Germany. I have talked to many French, English prisoners in their own language. They don’t know what it is all about. Our men have supreme confidence in our military leadership. Others don’t in theirs. There can be no doubt about the outcome.”
Since the U.S. Embassy in Berlin had taken over the interests of France and Britain once the war broke out, its diplomats were able, under the terms of the Hague Convention, to inspect camps with prisoners from those countries. Some British flyers had been shot down even before the German military machine turned west, and the Germans had also seized some early French prisoners in raids across the border. Of course, the number of prisoners grew rapidly as soon as the fighting started in earnest. All of which meant that Americans from the Berlin embassy were able to take their own measure of the morale of the captured pilots and soldiers.
“A most discouraging difference between the French and the British became manifest,” Jacob Beam wrote. “The French officers for instance cared very little for their men, and a spirit of defeatism was universal… Among the British on the other hand, discipline and high morale prevailed.”
By June 14, the German Army had entered Paris, and, on June 22, a French delegation signed the armistice in the same railway carriage in Compiègne that had been used for the signing of the armistice of 1918. The spirit of defeatism was such that, as Shirer recorded in his diary after returning from newly occupied Paris, with few exceptions “France did not fight. If she did, there is little evidence of it.” Although Hitler had decided to hold the ceremony in Compiègne, not Muenster as Lochner had predicted, the AP reporter had been right that he was intent on demonstrating that Germany was settling its historical scores.
As other Americans living in Germany could attest from personal observation, no vision was too grandiose for Hitler at that moment of his successive military victories. Pierre Huss was one of a small group of Berlin correspondents who were invited to Les Invalides in Paris when Hitler paid a visit to Napoleon’s tomb soon after the French surrender. As the reporters watched, the Nazi leader was lost in his thoughts. “He folded his arms and murmured something we could not hear; his lips moved, as if he were talking to himself, and once or twice he shook his head,” Huss recalled.
Hitler snapped back into focus as he leaned forward on the balustrade to stare down at Napoleon’s tomb. “Napoleon, mein lieber, they have made a bad mistake,” he said in a suddenly audible voice. Huss confessed, “It startled me, standing there across from a live war lord and above a dead emperor.” The correspondent also couldn’t figure out what Hitler meant.
The German ruler pointed down and repeated that this was “a big mistake,” explaining to everyone around him: “They have put him down into a hole. People must look down at a coffin far below them… They should look up at Napoleon, feeling small by the very size of the monument or sarcophagus above their heads.” Then, exhibiting the kind of understanding of basic psychology that had helped him orchestrate his rallies for maximum impact, he added: “You do not impress people if you walk in a street and they are on top of a building. They must look at something above them; you must be the stage and the center of attraction above the level of all eyes.”
If his listeners had any doubts about who he was really talking about, he quickly dispelled them. “I shall never make such a mistake,” he declared. “I know how to keep my hold on people after I have passed on. I shall be the Führer they look up at and go home to talk of and remember. My life shall not end in the mere form of death. It will, on the contrary, begin then.”
Standing at the rostrum of the Reichstag on July 19, Hitler was practically preening—not just for his Nazi followers but also for the diplomatic corps and foreign press in attendance. “It was Hitler triumphant, at the peak of his career, savoring to the full his victories,” Harsch wrote, calling it a scene that “no one present could ever forget.” The Nazi leader dispensed promotions and decorations for his generals, and theatrically picked up a small box he had placed on the corner of the Speaker’s desk occupied by Goering as the president of the Reichstag. Opening it to display a diamond-studded Grand Cross of the Order of the Iron Cross, he awarded it to his loyal follower, whom he also elevated to the rank of Reich marshal, a special rank above all field marshals.
Hitler then directed his words across the English Channel. He denounced Winston Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister at the same time as the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries, as a warmonger. But he also claimed that a peace deal was still possible. “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason,” he declared. “I see no reason why this war must go on.”
The Reichstag erupted with applause. Harsch was standing beside Alexander Kirk, who, the reporter noted, displayed “a languid air.” A German Foreign Ministry official rushed up to the American chargé d’affaires. “Oh, Mr. Ambassador, isn’t it wonderful, now we can have peace,” he proclaimed. Kirk had no intention of falling into a diplomatic trap. He ostentatiously stifled a yawn with his hand, offering a nonreply. “I am hungry,” he said. “Where might I find food?”
By most accounts of the Americans in Berlin, ordinary Germans weren’t nearly as exultant as their leaders might have expected. On the day Paris fell, loudspeakers on Wilhelmplatz, flanked by Hitler’s Chancellery, the Propaganda Ministry and, close by, Goering’s Air Ministry, blared party songs. Harsch, who watched the scene, counted no more than a hundred or so people on the big square. An excited announcer declared that German troops were marching on the Place de la Concorde, followed by the playing of “Deutschland über Alles.” “The little groups of people put up their right arms in perfunctory Nazi salutes,” Harsch recalled. “The loud-speakers went silent. And everyone walked away. Not a sound of cheering. Not an exclamation of pleasure.”
But Harsch understood that the lack of jubilation didn’t signal the kind of breakdown in morale that many in the West had hoped for. “The loot of war of every description which poured into Germany from midsummer 1940 through the autumn months seemed a convincing argument to many Germans that war can be profitable and that a final victory would burden their bare tables and empty cupboards with the good things of the earth,” he wrote. This made the Nazis’ case better than the official propaganda. “Dr. Goebbels let Dutch cheese, Belgian laces and Parisian silks do his talking for him.”
To be sure, the sudden appearance of women in stockings in Berlin without multiple runs, along with the infusion of new supplies of food and clothing, didn’t last long. Rationing remained in place, and so did a stricter work regimen. Still, Harsch, Shirer and others pointed out that most ordinary Germans wanted peace—but, in the sense that their leaders did, which meant on Hitler’s terms. They wanted to avoid more fighting i
f possible, but they wanted victory in any case. Many Germans were elevated to much more senior positions in the occupied lands than they could have ever aspired to hold at home—and quickly became accustomed to their new status. “These Germans have not only acquired the actual means to wealth beyond their wildest dreams but have established themselves as privileged permanent residents in every sense,” Harsch explained.
Then, too, the successive German victories turned even some early skeptics into true believers. Schultz, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, told the story of the wife of a professor she knew who had been “a violent anti-Nazi.” After her son became a member of the Hitlerjugend, the Gestapo arrested him for homosexuality. The parents frantically appealed to Schultz for help, and the American suggested they get a good Nazi lawyer and prepare to offer big donations to the party. Schultz also arranged for one of her Nazi contacts to take a high party official to a lavish dinner to soften him up. Eventually, “by dint of perjury and bribes,” Schultz wrote, the boy was released, avoiding what the high party official described as the “inferno” of a concentration camp. The father also had to join the party to demonstrate his loyalty.
Nonetheless, when Germany invaded Norway, the mother came to Schultz all excited. “Maybe it was meant for us to go through Nazism—it has made us strong,” she told the American, who was startled by her transformation. “It has brought us great military victories, and it will bring us more.” Based on such experiences, Schultz concluded, “The lust for conquest is there, deep in the heart of the German woman.” In her 1944 book Germany Will Try It Again, she predicted that, once Germany lost the war, many of those women would be disillusioned “but not with Nazism—only with its failure.”
As one of the few women correspondents in Berlin, Schultz was particularly interested in Nazi policies about women and the family. While Nazis were undermining the security of the country and its people, she pointed out, they shrewdly won many women over by appealing to their emotions and insecurities.
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