Berlin Diary

by William L. Shirer

  Our officers and officials have been careful to see that we do not talk with any returning German pilots. But I talked to a number of navy and army men in charge of the coastal guns yesterday and this morning and was surprised that they all thought the war would be over in a few weeks. One naval captain in charge of a big gun at Cap Blanc-Nez, half-way between Calais and Cap Gris-Nez, took me this morning into his little dug-out, scooped out of the side of the slope, to show me how he had fixed it up. It was very cozy. He had slung a hammock between the two walls and had a little table crowded with German books and magazines. He was a straw-blond, clean-cut young man from near Hamburg, and extremely intelligent. I had taken a liking to him the day before.

  “You’ve got a nice little place here,” I said. “Only—”

  “Only what?” he laughed.

  “Well, I know Normandy in winter, and from the end of October until April it’s damned cold here and it rains every day. Your dug-out is all right now, captain, but it won’t be so comfortable over the winter.” He looked at me in complete amazement. “Why, I haven’t the slightest intention of spending the winter here,” he said, deadly serious now.” Why, the war will be over long before then. You were kidding, I think, isn’t it?”

  “No, I wasn’t kidding,” I said, a little taken back by his dead certainty. “Do you mean you think the invasion will be completed and England conquered before Christmas, captain?”

  “I shall be home with my family this Christmas,” he said.

  We have lunch here at Boulogne, the food fair, a bottle of Château Margaux, 1929, excellent. After lunch our party goes out to loot a little more with the marks. In a perfume shop I pick up a conversation with an engaging little French sales-girl after I’ve convinced her by my accent that I’m an American. She says the Germans have cleaned out the town of silk stockings, underwear, soap, perfume, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and cognac. But she is mainly interested in food. “How will we find enough to eat this winter?” she asks.

  About four p.m. we start back for Brussels, driving some distance inland through Saint-Omer, Lille, Tournai.

  BRUSSELS, August 16

  In a couple of fields along the way this afternoon, we saw what looked under the camouflage like barges and pontoons loaded with artillery and tanks. But there was certainly not enough to begin an invasion of England with. However, two or three German officers in our party keep emphasizing what we saw and hinting that there is much more that we didn’t see. Maybe. But I’m suspicious. I think the Germans want us to launch a scare story about an imminent invasion of Britain.

  LATER. 2 a.m.—To bed now, and the German anti-aircraft guns still pounding away at the British bombers. The noise started shortly after midnight. Can’t hear or feel any bombs. Suspect the British are after the airport.

  BRUSSELS, August 17

  A little annoyed at not getting back to Berlin today. I feel depressed in these occupied cities. And the Germans won’t let me broadcast from here.

  I went out to call on Mme X, a Russian-born Belgian woman, whom I’ve known for twelve years. She has just been through a frightful ordeal, but you would never have suspected it from her talk. She was as charming and vivacious and beautiful as ever. When the Germans approached Brussels, she set off in her car with her two young children. Somewhere near Dunkirk she got caught between the Allied and German armies. She took refuge in a peasant’s house and for several days lived through the nightmare of incessant artillery bombardment and bombing. Fortunately there was enough food in the house so that they did not starve. The children, she said, behaved beautifully. When it was over, she related simply, she found enough gasoline in the barn to get back to Brussels. The banks were closed and she had no money, but the German army, seizing her car, paid her a few thousand francs in cash, so that she could buy food.

  Her chief worry, she said, was about Pierre, her husband, but even that had turned out better than she had expected. Though a veteran of the last war and a member of Parliament, he had volunteered the first day of the war and gone off to fight. She had heard nothing from him until last week when word had come that he had been captured.

  “He’s alive,” she said softly. “I’ve been lucky. We both might easily have been killed. But we’re both alive. And the children. I have been fortunate.”

  Pierre, she had heard, had been put to work on a potato farm near Hamburg.

  “But Hitler announced a month ago he was releasing all Belgian prisoners,” I said.

  “One must be patient,” she said. “He is alive. He is on a farm. He cannot be starving. I can wait.”

  From my talks with Belgians and French in the last few days it is encouraging that they both place their last desperate hopes on the British holding out. For they now realize that if Hitler wins they are doomed to become a slave people. Despite the stiff prison sentences being meted out by the Nazis to anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station, they all keep their sets tuned in to London, their hopes ebbing and flowing with the news they get from the BBC. They have all asked me desperately: “Will the British hold out? Have they a chance? Will America help?” The fact that all the newspapers in occupied territory are forced to publish only German propaganda often throws them into fits of depression, for Goebbels feeds them daily with the most fantastic lies.

  On the Channel the Germans would not let us talk with the German pilots, but this afternoon Boyer and I, sitting lazily on the terrace of a café, struck up a conversation with a young German air officer.

  He says he’s a Messerschmitt pilot who took part in the big attack on London yesterday and the day before. (The planes we saw going over from Calais then were London-bound.) He does not appear to be a boastful young man, like some pilots I’ve met.

  He says quietly: “It’s a matter of another couple of weeks, you know, until we finish with the RAF. In a fortnight the British won’t have any more planes. At first, about ten days ago, they gave us plenty of trouble. But this week their resistance has been growing less and less. Yesterday, for example, I saw practically no British fighters in the air. Perhaps ten in all, which we promptly shot down. For the most part we cruised to our objectives and back again without hindrance. The British, gentlemen, are through. I am already making plans to go to South America and get into the airplane business. It has been a pleasant war.”

  We ask him about the British planes.

  “The Spitfires are as good as our Messerschmitts,” he says. “The Hurricanes are not so good and the Défiants are terrible.”

  He gets up, explaining he must see a comrade in the hospital who was wounded yesterday and rushed here for an operation. Dick Boyer and I are impressed and depressed. Dick has just arrived over here and does not know the Germans very well.

  “I shall write a story about what he said,” Dick remarks. “He seemed absolutely sincere.”

  “That he did. But let’s wait. Flyers, you know, have large horizons.”

  LATER.—Dick and Fred Oechsner and I are having a night-cap in the bar of the Atlantis about midnight when there is a dull thud outside.

  “A bomb, close,” the Belgian waiter thinks.

  We go outside, but do not see anything. When Dick comes in later, he reports it pulverized a house in the next block and killed everyone in it. Out towards the airfield we can hear the flak pounding.

  ABOARD A GERMAN ARMY TRANSPORT PLANE, BRUSSELS TO BERLIN, August 18

  The morning papers of Brussels interesting. The Belgian paper has this headline over the story of the bomb we heard last night: “L’IGNOBLE CRIME ANGLAIS CONTRE BRUXELLES!” The Germans make the Belgians print such headlines. But I’m more interested in the High Command communiqué in the German-language paper, the Brüsseler Zeitung. It reports that in Friday’s air battles over Britain the English lost 83 planes and the Germans 31. What was that our sincere little Messerschmitt pilot told us about seeing practically no British planes on Friday and that there was no opposition from the RAF?

  At the Brussels air
port I note that we have been taken to the field in a roundabout way, so that we approach it some distance from the main hangars. But our plane is not yet ready and there are a dozen German army officers scrapping as to which two of them shall be taken on our plane back to Berlin, and I take advantage of the commotion to stroll over towards the hangars. Two of them have been freshly bombed, and behind them are large piles of wrecked German planes. The British attacks, then, were not so harmless.

  To note down the contents of a poster I saw placarded all over Brussels yesterday: “In the village of Savanthem near Brussels, an act of sabotage has been committed. I have taken fifty hostages. In addition, until further notice there will be a curfew at eight p.m. Also all cinemas and all other kinds of pleasure centres will be closed until further notice.”

  It is signed by the German commandant. It is good news. It shows the Belgians are resisting. Noon now and coming into Berlin.

  BERLIN, August 20

  An air-raid alarm last night, the second in a week, though we have not had a half-dozen since the war began a year ago, and the Berlin population, unlike that of northern and western Germany, has been utterly spared the slightest inconvenience from the war.

  The sirens sounded forty-five seconds before I was due to broadcast. I was sitting in the studio with a German announcer (who I notice lately follows a copy of my script to see that I don’t cheat). We heard the alarm, but saw no reason for not going on with our work. A frightened English lad, one Clark, seventeen-year-old son of a former BBC official, who with his mother has turned traitor and is working for the Nazis, pounded on the studio window and shouted: “Flieger Alarm!” The German with me fortunately was not frightened and motioned him away. Our broadcast then began. Afterwards I was a little surprised at the excitement in the control room, since the people in Belgium and France take a nightly pounding without thinking much about it. Part of the excitement, it developed, was due to the fact that the broadcaster of the news in Spanish had made for the air-raid shelter at the first sound of the sirens and missed his broadcast, which was to have begun as soon as I finished mine. When I returned to the radio offices from the studios, one of the office boys, who at night becomes an all important air-raid warden, tried to hustle me down to the cellar, but I refused. We listened to the anti-aircraft guns from a balcony and watched the searchlights, but they couldn’t pick up the British planes which kept over the factory districts to the north.

  BERLIN, August 24

  The Germans now admit serious sabotage in Holland. General Christiansen, the German military commander there, warns that if it continues, fines will be assessed against Dutch communities and hostages taken. The nature of the sabotage may be judged by the general’s admonition to the Dutch about “failing to report the landing of enemy flyers on Dutch soil.” He adds: “People in Holland who give shelter to enemy soldiers will be severely punished, even by death.” This seems to confirm some private reports I’ve had that the British are landing agents by parachute at night.

  The Germans deny they’re taking food from the occupied countries, but I see in a Dutch paper an official statement by the German authorities to the effect that between May 15 and July 31, 150,000,000 pounds of foodstuffs and fresh vegetables have been sent from Holland to the Reich.

  New clothing cards here this week. They give 150 points instead of 100, as last year, but it’s a typical Nazi swindle. You get more total points, but you also have to give more points for each item of clothing. For something you could formerly buy for 60 points, this year you must pay 80 points, and so on. An overcoat takes 120 of the 150 points. One point actually entitles you to sixteen grams’ worth of clothing material, the card to about five pounds a year.

  The Foreign Office has turned down America’s request for safe conduct for American ships to evacuate children under sixteen from the war zones.

  BERLIN, August 26

  We had our first big air-raid of the war last night. The sirens sounded at twelve twenty a.m. and the all-clear came at three twenty-three a.m. For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. The concentration of anti-aircraft fire was the greatest I’ve ever witnessed. It provided a magnificent, a terrible sight. And it was strangely ineffective. Not a plane was brought down; not one was even picked up by the searchlights, which flashed back and forth frantically across the skies throughout the night.

  The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Göring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital’s anti-aircraft defence. The Berliners are a naïve and simple people. They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it. Göring made matters worse by informing the population only three days ago that they need not go to their cellars when the sirens sounded, but only when they heard the flak going off near by. The implication was that it would never go off. That made people sure that the British bombers, though they might penetrate to the suburbs, would never be able to get over the city proper. And then last night the guns all over the city suddenly began pounding and you could hear the British motors humming directly overhead, and from all reports there was a pell-mell, frightened rush to the cellars by the five million people who live in this town.

  I was at the Rundfunk writing my broadcast when the sirens sounded, and almost immediately the bark of the flak began. Oddly enough, a few minutes before, I had had an argument with the censor from the Propaganda Ministry as to whether it was possible to bomb Berlin. London had just been bombed. It was natural, I said, that the British should try to retaliate. He laughed. It was impossible, he said. There were too many anti-aircraft guns around Berlin.

  I found it hard to concentrate on my script. The gunfire near the Rundfunk was particularly heavy and the window of my room rattled each time a battery fired or a bomb exploded. To add to the confusion, the air-wardens, in their fire-fighting overalls, kept racing through the building ordering everyone to the shelters. The wardens at the German radio are mostly porters and office boys and it was soon evident that they were making the most of their temporary authority. Most of the Germans on duty, however, appeared to lose little time in getting to the cellar.

  I was scheduled to speak at one A.M. As I’ve explained before in these notes, to get to the studio to broadcast we have to leave the building where we write our scripts and have them censored, and dash some two hundred yards through a blacked-out vacant lot to the sheds where the microphones are. As I stepped out of the building at five minutes to one, the light guns protecting the radio station began to fire away wildly. At this moment I heard a softer but much more ominous sound. It was like hail falling on a tin roof. You could hear it dropping through the trees and on the roofs of the sheds. It was shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. For the first time in my life I wished I had a steel helmet. There had always been something repellent to me about a German helmet, something symbolic of brute Germanic force. At the front I had refused to put one on. Now I rather thought I could overcome my prejudice. I hesitated in the shelter of the doorway. In two or three minutes now my broadcast would begin. I made a dash for it, running blindly, frightenedly down the path, stumbling down the wooden stairway where the terrace was. Sigrid had lent me her flashlight. I switched it on. A guard in the doorway yelled to put it out. As he shouted, I crashed into the corner of a shed and sprawled into the sand. The sound of the shrapnel falling all around egged me on. One last dash and I made the studio door.

  “You’re crazy,” snapped the S.S. guard who had taken shelter from the splinters in the doorway. “Where’s your pass?”

  “I’ve got a broadcast in just one minute,” I panted.

  “I don’t care. Where’s your pass?”

  I finally found it. In the studio cell the engineer requested me to speak very close to the microphone. He did not say why, but the reason was obvious. The closer to the mike I sp
oke, the less “outside” noise would be picked up. But I wanted the guns to be heard in America. The censors had allowed me to pronounce only one sentence about the raid, merely stating that one was on.

  Actually when I spoke there seemed to be a most unfortunate lull in the firing. Only in the distance, through the studio doors, could I hear a faint rumble. Apparently the guns were more audible in America than in my studio, because a few minutes later I picked up the rest of our program by shortwave to hear Elmer Davis remark in New York that the sound of guns or bombs during my broadcast was most realistic. This pleased me greatly, but I noticed deep frowns on the faces of the German officials who also caught Mr. Davis’s comment.

  Sigrid, who spoke for Mutual a half-hour later, pluckily braved the shrapnel which seemed to be falling even thicker than before, though several of us tried to dissuade her from going to the studio. As it was, in trying to dodge one hail of splinters, she stumbled and fell, receiving an ugly gash in the leg. She went on with her broadcast, though in great pain. But luck was not with her. The same transmitter which had functioned perfectly for CBS and NBC only a few minutes before suddenly broke down and her talk did not get through to America.

  Until almost dawn we watched the spectacle from a balcony. There was a low ceiling of clouds, and the German searchlight batteries tried vainly to pick up the British bombers. The beams of light would flash on for a few seconds, search the skies wildly, and then go off. The British were cruising as they wished over the heart of the city and flying quite low, judging by the sound of their motors. The German flak was firing wildly, completely by sound. It was easy, from the firing, to follow a plane across the city as one battery after another picked up the sound of the motors and fired blindly into the sky. Most of the noise came from the north, where the armament factories are.