Just as Russell was approaching the embassy, a small man with a shaved head, holding a gray hat in his trembling hand, touched his arm. “I must talk to you,” he said in a whisper.
The man quickly confirmed that Russell, whom he had seen in the immigration section, indeed worked there. Hans Neuman was a Jew who hadn’t been able to push his way through the crowd to the door of the embassy that morning, and he was frantic. Russell instructed him to keep walking as he explained more. Neuman said he had been released a week earlier from Dachau, and now he was desperate for an American visa. “The Gestapo ordered me out of the country ten days ago,” he pleaded. “I’ve got to get out today, or never.”
Russell asked him if he was telling the truth, since a lot of applicants were willing to say anything that would get them a visa. “My God, look at my head if you don’t believe me,” Neuman replied. The American noted the red gashes under the bit of hair that had grown back since his head was recently shaved—the telltale sign of a prisoner.
And Neuman offered a concrete reason why he had to get out that day. “War is going to start tonight. I have friends who know,” he told Russell. “If I don’t get across the border, I’ll lose my last chance to escape. God knows what they’ll . . .”
Although the young American had heard many similar pleas, he believed Neuman and promised to help him. Entering the embassy, Russell was confronted by “a madhouse” overflowing with others clamoring for a prized American visa to get out. He found Neuman’s paperwork and appealed to Vice-Consul Paul Coates to let him jump the long queue, but Coates chastised him for allowing his personal sympathy for Neuman to sway him. “It’s not fair to all the others,” he said.
Russell wouldn’t give up. “I know it’s not fair,” he replied. “Nothing’s fair, if you want to be strictly truthful. It’s not fair of the German police to order this man to get out of his homeland when he has violated no law and has no place to go to. It isn’t fair to push a man around until he’s half crazy. I’m not concerned about fairness.”
Russell overheard a woman nearby imploring another colleague to do something for her husband, who was imprisoned in Dachau. “I’m sorry,” the American told her. “There are thousands of applicants registered before your husband. He has at least eight years to wait.”
“But you will just have to do something,” the woman pleaded. “He will die there. If war comes, they will never let him out of that place.”
The consular official shook his head, signaling an end to their conversation. As she gathered her paperwork and left, the woman broke into tears. American quota laws hadn’t changed to accommodate the mostly Jewish applicants who, according to Russell, “were to be found in every nook and cranny” of every American consulate in Germany.
Still, Russell worked all day to get Neuman his visa. Seeing his determination, another consular officer finally relented near closing time, finding him a quota number to assign to Neuman. He even suggested that Russell drive him to the airport to make sure he was allowed to get on a plane to Rotterdam, since it was too late at that point for him to get a Dutch visa. At Tempelhof Airport, two storm troopers, dressed in black uniforms, and two other officials examined Neuman’s passport. They also asked Russell what he was doing there. The American explained that he was from the embassy and wanted to make sure that Neuman got on the plane to Rotterdam, since he had an American visa and was due to sail from the Dutch port to the United States.
“Herr Neuman has a visa to the United States,” one of the storm troopers said sarcastically, pointing out that he didn’t have a Dutch visa. “Well, isn’t that nice?”
But then one of the other officials intervened. “Let him go,” he said. “We’d have one Jew less. Let the Dutch worry about what to do with him.”
A customs officer took a final look at Neuman’s passport and stamped it. “See that you don’t come back to Germany,” he told him. “If you do, you’ll be sent back to a certain place.”
Neuman’s story would prove to be one of the few with a happy ending on that last day before the war broke out. Later, he sent Russell a postcard confirming that he had sailed from Rotterdam.
Another story with a happy ending involved Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Germany. His British counterpart, Sir Nevile Henderson, had called Lipski to inform him about his stormy meeting with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, which had left little doubt that the Germans were about to attack Poland. That conversation had taken place at 2 A.M. on August 31. Around noon the same day, Jacob Beam spotted Lipski sitting in his car at a Shell station, waiting for his tank to be filled. After the war, Beam met Lipski and told him he had seen him then. Lipski explained that he had stayed with his car, fearing that the Germans might seize it. Early that evening, only a few hours before the Germans invaded, Lipski escaped back to his homeland.
If many American diplomats and journalists in Berlin had a better sense of the enormity of the storm that Hitler was unleashing than others looking from afar, most of them still hadn’t recognized how quickly Hitler’s forces would be able to overwhelm Poland and later most of continental Europe.
In his address to the Reichstag on September 1, Hitler wore an army jacket. “I have once more put on that coat which was most sacred and dear to me,” he declared. “I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I shall not survive the outcome.” Hitler claimed he had made “endless attempts” to keep the peace, but that Polish troops had attacked German territory, leaving him no choice but to act. Beam, who was in the Reichstag to hear him, found the speech impressive, aimed at convincing Britain and France not to enter the fray. He called his language “less belligerent and intimidating” than in earlier speeches.
Shirer, who listened to the speech from the radio studio since he had to immediately transmit its contents, had a different impression. He detected “a curious strain, as though Hitler himself were dazed at the fix he had gotten himself into and felt a little desperate about it.” Hitler explained that Goering would be his successor if anything happened to him, and that Hess would be next in line. Shirer agreed with a colleague that the speech sounded like the dictator’s swan song.
At 7 P.M. while Shirer was still at the radio station, the air raid sirens sounded and the German employees took their gas masks down to the bomb shelter. The American didn’t have a mask and no one offered him one, but he was instructed to follow. He did, but then in the darkness slipped away, returning to a studio where a candle was burning so he could jot down his notes. “No planes came over,” he recorded later that night in his diary. Expecting Britain and France to make good on their promises to defend Poland right away, he added: “But with the English and French in, it may be different tomorrow. I shall then be in the by no means pleasant predicament of hoping they bomb the hell out of this town without getting me.” In fact, the British and French didn’t declare war on Germany until September 3.
That first evening of the war Shirer found it “curious” that the restaurants, cafés and beer halls were still full of people. And writing in his diary at two-thirty in the morning, he added: “Curious that not a single Polish bomber got through tonight. But will it be the same with the British and the French?” The next day, he noted further: “No air-raid tonight. Where are the Poles?”
In his radio broadcast on September 2, Shirer reported that Berliners, who were nervous during the first night of the blackout, were beginning to sense that life didn’t have to change much. “After, say, about 1 A.M. this morning, when it became fairly evident that if the Poles were going to send over any planes they would have come by that time, most people went to sleep. Taxis, creeping along with little slits of light to identify them, did a big business all through the night.”
After Hitler’s declaration of war, Russell, the young embassy clerk, recalled in a similar vein: “One expected something terrific to happen immediately. Nothing did.” But like Shirer and other Americans in Berlin, Russell noticed that the mood was quite different fro
m the jubilation that had accompanied the outbreak of the previous war. “The people I have met seem calm and sad and resigned. They stand around in little groups in front of our Embassy building, staring at us through the windows. I think this is nothing like the beginning of the World War in 1914.” Russell added: “Today, I think they have been led into something which may turn out to be too big for them.”
How correct he would prove to be, but only much later. The string of initial German victories in Poland, the Americans in Berlin reported, produced increasing confidence among the German people and the military in the wisdom of Hitler’s actions. On September 6, Shirer noted in his diary, “It begins to look like a rout for the Poles.” In the following days, he added that the U.S. military attachés were stunned by the speed of the German advance, and many correspondents were depressed. Britain and France were formally at war, but “not a shot yet—so the Germans say—on the western front!” On September 13, Russell despaired in his diary: “The war is raging in Poland. What can England and France be thinking of? we ask each other. Why don’t they attack Germany now, so she will have to fight on two fronts?”
When the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east on September 17, the Americans in Berlin knew that country’s fate was sealed. For the correspondents, another sign was the sudden willingness of the German authorities to allow them to go to the front. Arriving in Sopot on the Baltic coast, Shirer wrote in his diary on September 18: “Drove all day long from Berlin through Pomerania and the Corridor to here. The roads full of motorized columns of German troops returning from Poland. In the woods in the Corridor the sickening sweet smell of dead horses and the sweeter smell of dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against hundreds of German tanks and was annihilated.”
Reaching Gdynia the next day, Shirer witnessed the Germans mercilessly bombarding one of the last Polish units still resisting them in that area—from the sea, and from three sides on land. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein was anchored in Danzig’s harbor, firing shells at the Polish position, while the artillery was opening up from positions surrounding it. Tanks and airplanes were also attacking the Poles, who desperately fought back with nothing more than rifles, machine guns and two antiaircraft guns. “It was a hopeless position for the Poles. And yet they fought on,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “The German officers with us kept praising their courage.”
Joseph Grigg, a Berlin correspondent for United Press, was among the first group of foreign newsmen to reach Warsaw, arriving on October 5. They were brought there to see Hitler come to the Polish capital for his victory parade. Grigg was struck by the sight of the heavily bombed city after holding out for one month against the German onslaught. “Such devastation would be difficult to imagine. The whole center of the city had been laid in ruins,” he recalled. “The Polish population looked bewildered and stunned.” He concluded that the Poles never had a chance against the German invaders, who had knocked out most of the Polish Air Force on the first day of the invasion. “The advance of the German mechanized forces across the flat plains of Poland was unleashed with a precision and swing never before seen in history.”
Later, Grigg met General Alexander Loehr, the former chief of the Austrian Federal Air Force who had become the commander of Hitler’s Air Fleet Southeast, which was responsible for the air campaign against Poland. The correspondent asked him how he could justify this “blitzkrieg without warning.” Loehr calmly explained that this was really a more humane type of warfare. “It is our new philosophy of war,” he declared. “It is the most merciful type of warfare. It surprises your enemy, paralyzes him at one blow and shortens a war by weeks, maybe months. In the long run it saves casualties on both sides.”
The AP’s Lochner had witnessed what this “humane” type of warfare had consisted of. He was permitted to cross the border from Gleiwitz during the fighting in Poland, and in the small town of Graszyn saw that all the buildings along the main road had been razed—not simply hit by bombs and shells as in other places. The army colonel who was his guide explained that this was done in retaliation for sniping by Polish civilians.
Lochner also heard a story from an informant in the German Army who described how his detachment had occupied another small Polish town, bringing along their wounded. The local pharmacist and his wife, who were Jews, “worked like Trojans to help us dress the wounds,” the informant told Lochner. “We all respected the couple.” The grateful soldiers assured the couple they would be protected by the German Army. Then the detachment was ordered to move on. “Even before we had time to depart, the SS were there,” he added. “A few minutes later the Jewish couple was found by one of our men with their throats slashed. The SS had killed them.”
The message Hitler delivered to the foreign correspondents who were brought to Warsaw on October 5 was one of pure menace. His face pallid but acting like “a triumphant conqueror,” Grigg reported, Hitler briefly met the reporters at Warsaw’s airport before boarding his flight back to Berlin. “Gentlemen, you have seen the ruins of Warsaw,” he told them. “Let that be a warning to those statesmen in London and Paris who still think of continuing this war.”
By this point, according to Russell in Berlin, many Germans had become convinced by the lack of a military response from Britain and France “that Germany is invincible.” But the young American also met Germans who had come to the opposite conclusion. “I hope they [the British and the French] hurry up and break through the Westwall,” one of them told him, referring to Germany’s defensive line built opposite France’s Maginot Line. “When our army is defeated, that will be the end of Hitler. If we lose we will not be free; but then we are not free now.”
Although Russell claimed that this was far from an isolated voice, Hitler’s latest victory—combined with Nazi terror and propaganda—ensured that most Germans, as the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz put it, were increasingly willing to obey their leader’s demand to “follow me blindly.” The veteran Berlin correspondent added, “And the masses did believe.” She cited the example of her maid, who appeared one morning shortly after the invasion of Poland, her eyes red from crying. Her husband had been assigned as a stretcher-bearer at a hospital near Berlin, and he had described to her in vivid detail how the Poles had supposedly burned off the skin of Germans on their side of the border right before Hitler’s armies attacked, turning their limbs into charred stumps.
Schultz asked her if her husband had seen any such cases, and the maid acted offended that she would doubt her. But later she admitted that her husband had only viewed slides presented by Nazi propagandists. Still, the maid’s conviction grew that her American employer wasn’t properly sympathetic to Nazi Germany. “It wasn’t long before my maid was one more servant in the Gestapo system keeping tabs on the activities of the correspondents,” Schultz reported. “Our mail, our telephone conversations, our visitors, were all regularly reported to the police.”
The Propaganda Ministry had invited Schultz and other correspondents to a preview of the first newsreels of the war. As scenes of German troops rounding up anguished Polish prisoners flashed on the screen, Schultz recalled, there were “squeals and shouts of delight from leading German officials.” Once the newsreels were in the theaters, Schultz went to see how the public reacted. Images of Polish Jews in caftans or rags who were visibly terrified by their captors triggered “loud guffaws and shrieks of laughter,” she wrote.
After the first reports of mass murders in Poland filtered back to Germany, Schultz was at a reception full of Nazi officials. “I don’t see why you Anglo-Saxons get so excited about what happens to a few Poles,” a high-ranking SS officer told her. “Your reaction shows you and your countrymen do not have the scientific approach to the problem.”
Schultz asked what the scientific approach was. Three men, including Roland Freisler, the Justice Ministry official who would later become the notorious president of the People’s Court, offered an impromptu lecture on ra
cial theory. The Slavs were only white on “an inferior level,” they explained, and they outnumbered the pure white Germans; their birth rate was much higher as well, which would mean a doubling of their populations by 1960. “We indulge in no sentimentality,” Freisler continued. “We shall not allow any of our neighbors to have a higher birth rate than ours, and we shall take measures to prevent it.” Slavs and Jews would only be permitted to survive “if they work for us,” he added. “If they don’t they can starve.”
Schultz observed that if one of her “leg men” had brought her such a story, she probably would have been disbelieving. But she heard this in person, and Freisler clearly “didn’t realize, or care, how horrifying his remarks appeared to an American.”
Joseph Harsch, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was in Rome in October 1939 when he received a terse cable from his foreign editor in Boston: “Now go to Berlin.” It was still remarkably easy to do so. Harsch went to the German Embassy to apply for a visa and received it three days later, and the concierge at his hotel picked up a ticket for the sleeper to Berlin. He boarded the train in the evening and arrived there the next morning. He had reached the capital of the country that had plunged the continent into a new war, but the only “abnormality,” as Harsch sardonically recalled, was that when he got off the train at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof there were no porters to help him with his luggage. He got around that problem by leaving his belongings at the station, then checking into the nearby Continental Hotel and sending a hotel porter back to pick them up.
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