Berlin Diary

by William L. Shirer

  BERLIN, September 21

  X came up to my room in the Adlon today, and after we had disconnected my telephone and made sure that no one was listening through the crack of the door to the next room, he told me a weird story. He says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them “mercy deaths.” He relates that Pastor Bodelschwingh, who runs a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children at Bethel, was ordered arrested a few days ago because he refused to deliver up some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police. Shortly after this, his hospital is bombed. By the “British.” Must look into this story.

  BERLIN, September 22

  We know that Himmler has hanged, without trial, at least one Pole for having had sexual relations with a German woman. We know too that at least half a dozen German women have been given long prison sentences for having bestowed favours upon Polish prisoners or farm labourers. Several Germans have told me of placards prominently displayed in the provincial towns warning Germans not to have anything to do with Polish labourers and to treat them rough. Last week every household in Berlin received a leaflet from the local office of the “Bund of Germans Abroad” warning the people not to fraternize with the Poles now working as labourers or prisoners in Germany. A few choice extracts from this document:

  “German people, never forget that the atrocities of the Poles compelled the Führer to protect our German people by armed force!… The servility of the Poles to their German employers merely hides their cunning; their friendly behaviour hides their deceit…. Remember, there is no community whatever between Germans and Poles! Be careful that no relationship shall result because of the common religious faith!…. Our farmers may think each Pole who greets them with a ‘Jesus Christ be praised!’ is a decent fellow and may answer: ‘For ever and ever, amen!’

  “Germans! The Pole must never be your comrade! He is inferior to each German comrade on his farm or in his factory. Be just, as Germans have always been, but never forget that you are a member of the master race!”

  I note that Poles working in Germany now have been forced to wear an arm-band or an emblem sewn on the front of their coat marked with a large “?” in purple on a yellow background. In German-occupied Poland, Jews wear a similar emblem marked with a “J.”

  LATER.—Ribbentrop is back from Rome, and the press hints that the “final phase” of the war has been decided upon. Rudolf Kircher, editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, writes from Rome that the military situation is so rosy for the Axis that Ribbentrop and the Duce actually spent most of their time planning the “new order” in Europe and Africa. This may make the German people feel a little better, but most Germans I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over before winter, which will be on us within a month. I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall—or should—receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter. Today when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Neither would they bet.

  German correspondents in Rome today reported that Italy is displeased with Greece and that the British are violating the neutrality of Greek waters as they once did those of Norway. This sounds bad. I suppose Greece will be next.

  BERLIN, September 23

  After a week’s absence the British bombers came over last night and kept the populace in their cellars for two hours and twenty minutes in the middle of the night. This was a little shock for most people, for they had been told all week that for several nights the British had been trying to get through but had always been turned back by the anti-aircraft defences. The local papers again rage against the “British criminals” for having bombed us last night. The Nachtausgabe bannerlines: “NEW NIGHT ACT OF THE PIRATES.” The same paper editorializes: “Winston Churchill again yesterday gave British airmen the order to drop their bombs on the German civilian population and thus continue their murder of German men, women, and children.” The Börsen Zeitung holds that “last night Churchill continued the series of his criminal blows against the German civil population. Frankly, Churchill belongs to that category of criminals who in their stupid brutality are unteachable.”

  While this line of nonsense is of course dictated to the German press by Goebbels, it does indicate, I think, that the Germans can’t take night bombing as the British are taking it. If London was only more on its toes it would realize this. RAF strategy, I gather, is to concentrate on Germany’s war industries and supply-depots. But while they’ve no doubt hit some interesting targets, like the Leuna works, where coal is made into oil (they’ve hit Leuna, but not knocked it out), it is certain that they have not succeeded in crippling Germany’s war industrial production to any appreciable extent, nor have they blown up many stores. What they must do is to keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping, and wear down their nerves. Those nerves already are very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization for Total War.

  Last night an old German acquaintance dropped in on me. He’s in the Luftwaffe now and for the last three weeks has been a member of the crew of a night bomber which has been working on London. He had some interesting details.

  1. He was impressed by the size of London. He said they’ve been pounding away on it for three weeks and he is amazed that so much of it is left! He said they were often told before taking off that they would find their target by a whole square mile of the city on fire. When they got there they could find no square mile on fire; only a fire here and there.

  2. He relates that they approach London at a height of from 15,000 to 16,000 feet, dive to about 10,000 feet, and release their bombs at this height—too high for accurate night bombing. They don’t dare to go below 7,000 feet, he says, on account of the barrage balloons. He describes the anti-aircraft fire over London as “pretty hot.”

  3. German night bomber crews, he says, are tired. They are being overworked. The Luftwaffe figured that they would destroy the RAF during daylight operations as they had destroyed the Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and French air forces and neglected to train enough men for night work. Present crews, he divulged, are flying four nights out of seven a week. Unlike Dr. Goebbels, whose propaganda machine drums it into the people that British airmen are cowards when they’re not brutes, my friend says quite frankly that the German pilots have the highest admiration for their British adversaries—for their skill and their bravery. They’re particularly fond of one British fighter-pilot, he relates, who roars into a fight with a cigarette stuck at a smart angle between his lips. If this man is ever shot down on the German side, the German airmen have sworn to hide him and not to hand him over as a prisoner of war.

  4. He confirms that the British bombers are pounding hell out of the French and Belgian coasts at night. And often they swoop down in the night and machinegun the German bomber bases just as the German planes are taking off or alighting.

  5. Göring did fly over London, he asserts. This news was given the foreign press here, but withheld from the German papers, which made us suspicious of it.

  6. He relates that the British have built a number of dummy airfields and littered them with wooden planes, but the Germans have most of them spotted by now.

  7. He confirms that the German bombers usually return from a flight over Britain to different bases, rarely to the one they have taken off from. He says the bombers start from widely scattered fields in France, Belgium, and Holland, but always on a strict time-table so as to avoid collisions in the darkness. The exact course back from London is always prescribed in advance, so that planes entering over the area will not crash into those leaving. He has an interesting explanation of the big beating the Germans took in a da
ylight attack on London a week ago Sunday when, according to the British, 185 German planes were shot down, mostly bombers. He says that the German time schedule went wrong, that the German fighters which were to protect the bombers arrived at a prearranged rendezvous off the English coast, but found no bombers there. After waiting twenty-five minutes they had to fly home because their gas was getting low. The bombers eventually arrived, coming over the North Sea, but there was no fighter escort for them, and the British chasers mowed them down.

  8. He said the German night bombers go over in squadrons of seven. He also insisted that each Luftwaffe base reports its correct losses and that any doctoring of figures is done either at headquarters or in Berlin.

  He confirms that the Luftwaffe has failed so far to gain air supremacy over Britain, though when I was on the Channel five weeks ago the Germans said this would be a matter of but a fortnight.

  It’s a fact that since about a fortnight the Germans have given up large-scale day attacks on England and have gone over largely to night bombing. This in itself is an admission of defeat.

  BERLIN, September 24

  The British really went to work on Berlin last night. They bombed heavily and with excellent aim for exactly four hours. They hit some important factories in the north of the city, one big gas works, and the railroad yards north of the Stettiner and Lehrter stations.

  But we couldn’t tell the story. The authorities said no damage of military importance was done and the Propaganda Ministry, suddenly very nervous over last night’s destruction, warned all of us correspondents that we could only report what the military said. Goebbels’s Ministry even cancelled its usual post-raid conducted tour of the city, giving as an excuse that there was so much to see and so little time to see it in.

  The German press and radio have never been made to lie quite so completely about a raid as today. Even the stolid Berliners, judging by their talk, appear to be stirred at the lies of their own newspapers. Said the official account: “In spite of violent anti-aircraft fire a few British bombers succeeded in reaching the northern and eastern suburbs of Berlin last night and dropped a number of bombs. The position of the bombs, far away from all military or industrial objectives, provides fresh evidence of the fact that the British airmen deliberately attack residential quarters. There was no damage of military importance.”

  Even the High Command, in whose veracity many Germans still believe, repeated the lie later in its daily war communiqué. The hundreds of thousands of commuters from the northern suburbs who had to get off their trains today three times and be conveyed by bus over three stretches of one main railway line where British bombs had blown up the tracks were somewhat surprised by what they read in their papers.

  The British just missed twice blowing up the elevated Stadtbahn railroad running east-west through the centre of Berlin. In both places the bomb missed the tracks by a few yards, damaging adjacent houses. This line not only carries the bulk of the suburban electric traffic, but a large number of passenger trains. It’s the most important line within the city limits. The debris from buildings which were hit held up traffic last night, but today the line was running.

  Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of Interior, returned from a visit to the western front just in time to experience his first British bombing attack. This may have been helpful. We correspondents kept imagining Suñer returning to Madrid, and Franco, who is under tremendous pressure from Berlin and Rome now to hop on the Axis band-wagon, asking him about those British attacks on Berlin, and Suñer replying: “What attacks? I saw no attacks. I was in Berlin ten days. The British couldn’t get over even once. The British are finished, generalissimo, and now is the time for Spain to get in on the Axis spoils.”

  Goebbels and most of the other luminaries of the Nazi Party were dining Suñer at the Adlon last night when the bombing began. The banquet was brought to an abrupt close before the dessert had been served and all present made for the Adlon’s spacious air-raid cellar next to the barber-shop. When I returned at four a.m. from the radio, they were just leaving.

  I learn Ciano is coming here Thursday. A deal is on between Berlin and Rome to finish the war in Africa this winter and divide up the Dark Continent. But they must be sure of Spain first and are insisting that Franco either take Gibraltar or let the Germans take it.

  Berlin pleased tonight that the French, who have practically turned over Indo-China to the Japs without a blow and daily make new concessions to the Axis without a murmur, today opened fire on de Gaulle and the British, who want to have Dakar.

  Last night’s bombing reminds me that the best airraid shelter in Berlin belongs to Adolf Hitler. Experts doubt that he could ever be killed in it. It is deep, protected by iron girders and an enormous amount of reinforced concrete, and is provided with its own ventilating and lighting plant, a private movie and an operating room. Were British bombs to blow the Chancellery to smithereens, cutting off all apparent escape from the cellar, the Führer and his associates could emerge safely by simply walking through one of the tunnels that run from his shelter to points several hundred yards away. Hitler’s cellar also is fitted out with spacious sleeping-quarters, an important consideration, but one utterly neglected in most shelters, since the loss of sleep is hurting the German people far more than British bombs.

  If Hitler has the best air-raid cellar in Berlin, the Jews have the worst. In many cases they have none at all. Where facilities permit, the Jews have their own special Luftschutzkeller, usually a small basement room next to the main part of the cellar, where the “Aryans” gather. But in many Berlin cellars there is only one room. It is for the “Aryans.” The Jews must take refuge on the ground floor, usually in the hall leading from the door of the flat to the elevator or stairs. This is fairly safe if a bomb hits the roof, since the chances are that it will not penetrate to the ground floor. But experience so far has shown that it is the most dangerous place to be in the entire building if a bomb lands in the street outside. Here where the Jews are hovering, the force of the explosion is felt most; here in the entry-way where the Jews are, you get most of the bomb splinters.

  BERLIN, September 25

  Dr. Boehmer, the Propaganda Ministry foreign-press chief, who is a typical Nazi except that he is intelligent and has travelled widely, especially in America, is peeved from time to time over our “lack of appreciation” of such Nazi favours as giving the correspondents extra food. If the way to a correspondent’s heart is through his stomach, then Dr. Goebbels certainly tries hard. In the first place he classifies us as “heavy labourers,” which means we get double rations of meat, bread, and butter. Every other Thursday, after our press conference, we line up for a fortnight’s extra food cards. Moreover, Dr. Goebbels not only permits us, but actually encourages us to import each week, against a liberal payment in dollar exchange, a food packet from Denmark. This latter is a life-saver. It enables me to have bacon and eggs at breakfast four or five times a week. Ordinarily I do not eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, but on the short war rations now available, I find it fortifies one for the entire day. I also got in enough coffee from Holland before the western campaign to provide me for the next six months. In a word, we correspondents are hardly affected by the war-time rationing. We have plenty to eat. And the Germans see to it that we do have enough, not because they like us, but because—quite rightly, I suppose—they think we’ll be more kindly disposed to them if we operate on full stomachs, we being human beings after all.

  Moreover, the Propaganda Ministry and the Foreign Office, which fight each other over many things, have set up a fierce rivalry to see which one can establish the best dining club for the foreign press. Ribbentrop’s establishment, the Ausland Presse Club, off the Kurfürstendamm, is at the moment more sumptuous than Goebbels’s Ausland Club on the Leipzigerplatz. But the Doktor, I hear, has just appropriated several million marks to modernize his club and make it more gaudy than Ribbentrop’s. I used to eat a couple of nights a week at the
Ausland Club, it being conveniently located for me, and the prospect of a real beefsteak and real coffee proving a great temptation. Moreover, it was a place to chew the rag with the Nazis and see what was in their minds, if anything. Since the wanton aggression against Holland and Belgium I have not gone there, being unable any more to stomach Nazi officials with my dinner.

  If we eat well, that is not to say that the German people do. But reports abroad about the people here starving are greatly exaggerated. They are not starving. After a year of the blockade they are getting enough bread, potatoes, and cabbage to keep them going for a long time. Adults get a pound of meat a week and a quarter of a pound of butter. Americans could hardly subsist on this diet. But Germans, whose bodies have become accustomed for a century to large amounts of potatoes, cabbage, and bread, seem to do very well on it. The meat and fat ration, though considerably under what they are used to, is enough to keep them tolerably fit.

  The shortage of fruit is acute and last winter’s severe cold has ruined the German fruit crop. We saw no oranges or bananas last winter and are not likely to see any this winter. The occupation of Denmark and Holland helped temporarily to augment the stocks of vegetables and dairy products, but Germany’s inability to furnish fodder to these countries will shortly make them liabilities in the matter of food. There’s no doubt that the Germans looted all the available food in Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and France, though it’s true they paid for it—in paper marks which cost them nothing. Only Mr. Herbert Hoover’s representative here doubts that.

  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.