Joining Shirer and other American colleagues, he soon switched over to the more elegant Adlon Hotel, getting a room in the back wing overlooking the garden of Joseph Goebbels, whose Propaganda Ministry was a block away. Harsch often saw his children playing there. Everything about Harsch’s arrival seemed deceptively easy. The spying that Schultz and other veterans noticed wasn’t all that apparent to a newcomer like him, but he was quick to see that the Germans were intent on making him feel comfortable. He was issued a ration card of a “heavy worker,” and he was free to import extra food—eggs, bacon, butter, cheese—from Denmark. “As an American correspondent at a time when German policy was keyed to keeping the United States out of the war as long as possible, I settled into a privileged life,” he wrote.
Harsch wore a small American flag pin on his lapel, which he felt avoided any misunderstandings about who he was when he talked with Germans. He was pleased to see that most people still spoke freely to American reporters, and he could travel almost anywhere he wanted and file stories. Official Germans didn’t seem particularly secretive either, even when it came to subjects like concentration camps for political prisoners and Jews. Looking back at that period in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, Harsch observed: “The label concentration camp had not then acquired the sinister connotation it has today . . . There was nothing sufficiently unusual about the internment camps in Germany to attract the special attention of American correspondents in Berlin in 1939 and 1940.”
Harsch encountered difficulties with the authorities only when he began doing occasional radio broadcasts for CBS, subbing for Shirer when he was out of town. The rules for broadcasters were far tougher than anything print journalists faced. As Harsch noted, all scripts had to be approved by a group of censors, with one representative each from the Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry and the Military High Command. A censor also carefully monitored the reading of the approved scripts on air and could cut the correspondent off instantly if he deviated from it.
Oddly, there was often less of a sense of danger than when other American correspondents, like Edgar Mowrer, had reported on the Nazis coming to power. Richard Hottelet, a recent Brooklyn College graduate who was an aggressive United Press reporter in Berlin, didn’t hesitate to board a train full of Polish Jews who were being expelled from Germany. While he found the conditions in the third-class cars “pretty awful, pretty depressing,” they were still mild compared to the cattle car deportations that would soon follow. And Hottelet wasn’t worried about his personal safety as he pursued such stories. “I was an American, I was working for an American organization, I didn’t feel threatened,” he declared. “I knew the situation was odd but not menacing.” In fact, Hottelet would later experience the inside of a German prison, but he still vividly recalled that sense of invulnerability during an interview seventy years later.
The conflict Hitler had unleashed quickly lapsed into its “phony war” stage, with the Germans biding their time for their spring 1940 new offensives and the French sitting quietly behind their Maginot Line. On October 10, 1939, Shirer traveled to Geneva, and as his train ran along the Rhine, he could see French and German soldiers building up fortifications on their respective sides. “The troops seemed to be observing an armistice,” he wrote in his diary. “They went about their business in full sight and range of each other . . . Queer kind of war.”
The Royal Air Force attacked German naval targets, only to suffer serious losses and inflict little damage. On October 2, the RAF made its first night raid on Berlin, dropping only propaganda leaflets “in the vain hope that people reading them would be incited to revolt,” consular clerk Russell scoffed. “They might as well have saved their gasoline.” During this early stage of the conflict, there was no air war to speak of, and the blackout in Berlin felt more like a precaution than a necessity. Britain and France rejected Hitler’s “peace proposals” after his victory over Poland, and the British naval blockade meant that rationing was tightened further. But many Germans still held out “the hope of an early victory and peace,” as Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, wrote. Whatever sacrifices they had to make were justified, he added, by the regime’s slogan: “It is better to live safely than to live well.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Polish campaign, Americans in Berlin could see one indication of the early cost of the war: the death notices that appeared in local newspapers. “One Breslau daily, especially, is just filled every day with casualty notices—old, established names where the young man, the hope of the family, fell,” the AP’s Lochner wrote to his children in Chicago on October 8. “Right among our own friends and in one case even relatives . . .” He added that social life was disappearing “because everyone lives on bread cards, meat cards, fat cards, etc., hence has no accumulated reserves with which to entertain guests.”
Lochner noted that people were reluctant to go to unfamiliar places in the evening because of the blackout, and accidents were frequent. As the nights grew longer, the young diplomat Russell observed that this was at least to one group’s advantage. “In the darkness, certain girls made easy pickups,” he pointed out. While prostitution was technically illegal in Nazi Germany, the blackouts made it a lot easier. “Even the old girls, the wrinkled ones, stood on corners with their ugly features safely hidden in the darkness and shone their flashlights on their legs in invitation.”
George Kennan, a Russian specialist who had volunteered to go to Berlin to help chargé d’affaires Alexander Kirk with his administrative duties, arrived in the German capital shortly after the war began. One of his strongest memories of that period was of returning home after work in the evenings: “the groping in pitch blackness from column to column of the Brandenburg gate, feeling my way by hand after this fashion to the bus stop . . . the wonder as to how the driver ever found his way over the vast expanse of unmarked, often snow-covered asphalt . . . the eerie walk home at the other end, again with much groping and feeling for curbstones.”
Despite all those daily inconveniences, it was still relatively easy to overlook the fact that the war was on since the fighting was taking place elsewhere. On a visit to Hamburg about a month into the war, Kennan was making his way back to his lodgings one evening when a woman emerged from a street corner and said cheerfully: “Shan’t we go somewhere?” Kennan indicated he wasn’t interested in her services but he’d buy her a drink—and pay her what she normally charged for more than that. At her favorite bar, she told him her story: that she had a daytime job packing parcels, where the pay was bad but it was her way of avoiding the roundups of street girls who were sent to labor camps; that she was engaged to an army flyer who was on duty in Poland, “a complete egoist” who treated her badly; and that she made her real money on the streets at night—of course, unbeknownst to him.
There was nothing all that extraordinary in her story, and nothing all that unusual that Kennan would find it intriguing to talk to a fairly sophisticated streetwalker. He may have been destined for a distinguished career as a diplomat and scholar, but he was still a young man at the time. The most memorable part of his encounter, though, was what was left unsaid. “It was only after I got home it occurred to me that neither of us had mentioned the war,” he wrote.
Among top Nazi leaders, the mood was one of growing confidence that events were moving their way. At the Soviet Embassy’s November 7 reception to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of American correspondents chatted with Goering as he stood at the buffet drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. Shirer, who was part of this group, had thought the Luftwaffe commander might be upset with America’s increasingly open support for Britain and growing talk of supplying that country with large numbers of airplanes.
But Goering was in an expansive, jovial mood. “If we could only make planes at your rate of production we should be very weak,” he declared. “I mean that seriously. Your planes are good, but you don’t make enough of t
hem fast enough.” He added that “one day you’ll see who has been building the best and the most planes.”
When the Americans asked why German planes had only attacked British warships, he replied that they were important targets and “give us good practice.”
“Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?” the Americans persisted.
“We’re humane,” Goering responded. Shirer and the others couldn’t help laughing. “You shouldn’t laugh,” he admonished them. “I’m serious. I am humane.”
In less official settings, Americans in Berlin were surprised to discover occasional flashes of genuine wartime humor. Harsch, the newcomer from the Christian Science Monitor, heard one story that was making the rounds of a working-class neighborhood. According to the joke, a disguised Hitler goes to a beer hall and asks the proprietor what people really think of Der Führer. The proprietor leans forward and whispers to him: “I couldn’t afford to have any of my customers hear me say it, but I, personally, don’t think he’s so bad.”
As the American reporters and diplomats learned, many Germans were also listening to foreign radio stations, despite the fact that this was strictly forbidden. Russell estimated that 60 to 70 percent did so in secret, and he noticed that the stores sold out all their old-fashioned radio headphones during the first week of the war. While his estimate was probably high, he encountered enough Germans who signaled their reservations about Hitler and the war, however obliquely, that he was hesitant to make sweeping judgments about the national mood.
“If the United States goes into this war, there is one thing I do not want to forget,” he wrote. “There are millions of people in Germany who do not agree with the policies of their leaders. And there are other millions, simple people, who believe exactly what their leaders tell them—especially when they tell them the same thing day after day. I do not want to go blind with hatred and forget that.” Kennan echoed those sentiments. “It was hard to associate oneself with much of the American press and of Washington officialdom in picturing the German people as a mass of inhuman monsters, solidly behind Hitler and consumed with a demonic enthusiasm for the ruin and enslavement of the rest of Europe,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Even Shirer, who was far less forgiving, was encouraged by the occasional encounter with a German who represented the kind of free thinking that had until recently flourished in that country. In January 1940, he met with a woman in Berlin to give her some provisions he had brought for her from her relatives abroad. He described her as “the most intelligent German female I have met in ages.” She bemoaned her countrymen’s slavish obedience to authority, and their willingness to follow its Nazi leaders, who represented the barbarian impulses that always lurked below the surface. She saw those rulers as intent on destroying Western civilization and its values, despite the contribution of so many Germans to the development of that civilization.
It was a recipe for self-destruction, she explained to Shirer, the result of an unwillingness or inability of her countrymen to think and act for themselves. “A German will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”
The American diplomats and correspondents continued to live, as the consular clerk Russell put it, “isolated on our island in the middle of Berlin.” He attributed the gas rationing for embassy employees less to wartime shortages than to the desire of the Nazis to limit the mobility of the Americans in their midst. The authorities also tapped their phones and didn’t mind that the Americans realized it, since this was meant to make them cautious in contacts with Germans.
Rationing for the general population kept getting stricter, with everything from toilet paper to shoelaces disappearing, and stores began putting up small signs proclaiming GOODS DISPLAYED IN THE WINDOWS ARE NOT FOR SALE. But most Americans lived in a parallel universe. On Thanksgiving Day 1939, when the war was into its third month, Kirk, the embassy’s senior diplomat, invited a contingent of his countrymen in Berlin for the customary afternoon meal. “A hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table,” Shirer noted in his diary.
The CBS correspondent then went on to a dinner at the home of Dorothy and Fred Oechsner, the United Press manager in Berlin, where Shirer tucked into another turkey. He was so thrilled by the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie that he talked Dorothy into going to the broadcast studio at midnight to explain to listeners back home how she had used “a new-fangled machine” to extract the cream from butter.
Despite their unique circumstances, the Americans did get around, and the diplomats in particular were constantly contacted by those seeking their help. As Christmas approached, Russell reported, “embarrassingly large baskets of food, wine, champagne and delicacies of all sorts in Berlin were delivered to our residences.” Those who still had the means to put together those kinds of packages never included a card identifying themselves, but usually in a short time they would send a letter to the recipient asking for help. At the end of the letter, the supplicant would inquire whether the Christmas present had arrived safely—and then would sign with his or her full name and address. Other visa applicants offered bribes of money to the Americans right in the consulate, although trying to do so secretly and using “veiled language.”
In January 1940, as a bitter cold winter set in, the Americans flooded the tennis court in the back of the embassy, turning it into an ice-skating rink. But for all their amenities, including shipments of warm winter clothes from Denmark, they were in close enough contact with life around them to dismiss reports back home about the desperate conditions of most Germans and the possibility that this could bring down the Nazi regime.
To be sure, the privations of the war were making themselves felt, and Kennan was struck by the “unmistakable inner detachment of the people from the pretentious purposes of the regime.” But he also remarked on “the way life went on, as best it could, under the growing difficulties of wartime discipline.” Russell reported a similar lack of enthusiasm for the war, adding: “But here Germany was, right before my eyes, working and living and going strong.” In other words, the speculation back in the United States that the Germans were prepared to rise up in revolt was nothing more than wishful thinking.
As the embassy staffers arranged the paperwork for numerous Americans who had surfaced to make arrangements to return home in those first months of the war, their island felt lonelier than before. And they weren’t completely immune to the deteriorating living conditions. By January, hot water was usually no longer available in their apartments, prompting the embassy to put in two tin bathtubs on the building’s upper floor, one for women and one for men.
Late in January, Russell was invited to lunch at the apartment of Consul Richard Stratton, where he met Jane Dyer, whose brother was also working at the embassy. She was up for a visit from Rome, where she was studying music, but her real home was Alabama. “I never expected to be so far away from home in my life,” she proclaimed in a husky voice with a thick southern accent that instantly charmed Russell, who had grown up in neighboring Mississippi. After lunch, they played records, and Russell danced with her. All of which made for a lovely afternoon. Toward the end of it, Dyer asked: “Is Germany really at war? I mean, I haven’t seen anything to remind me of war. Everything is the same as it always was.”
It was Stratton who replied. “You don’t feel anything yet. Just like those children playing out in the street. They don’t feel the war either—yet. But the time will come when war will come home to all of us—to Americans, Russians, Africans, children and unborn babies. I think so, anyway.”
The party was over, and Dyer and Russell pondered his words in silence.
11
Feeding the Squirrels
William Russell had announced his plans to leave Berlin during that first winter of the war. His supervisors in the c
onsular section offered to try to get him a raise and a new title, but he knew that he was at a disadvantage because he had been hired directly by the embassy after he had studied German at the University of Berlin. The foreign service liked to reward those who rose through the normal channels, starting in Washington and then going to their first assignments abroad. Besides, he wanted to try his luck as a writer, and he already had penned much of the manuscript of the book that he would publish in 1941 with the title Berlin Embassy. It was a vivid account of his experiences there, providing Americans with the kind of personal insights that were often missing from news reports.
On April 10, 1940, three days before his scheduled departure, Russell was sitting in his parked car in the back of the embassy with a German girlfriend. “We had not gone there to spoon, but to listen to the automobile radio,” the young clerk recalled somewhat defensively. The morning newspapers had been filled with what he called the “sickening news” that German troops had moved into Denmark and Norway. On the radio, Goebbels was reading the ultimatums that were delivered to the Nazis’ next victims, claiming that Germany had “no territorial ambitions” against them and that “neither of these two countries will be used as a base for operations against the enemy.”
Russell started to make a sarcastic comment, but then he saw that his girlfriend had tears in her eyes. “That hateful damn liar!” she exclaimed. “That hateful damn liar!”
For Russell, this was one of the final reminders that not all Germans were marching in lockstep behind Hitler. Before driving off three days later, he said good-bye to a long list of acquaintances from his three-year sojourn in Berlin—“Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums,” as he put it. Reaching Innsbruck, he was summoned to Gestapo headquarters ostensibly for questioning about his car’s papers. They also searched his car, leaving his manuscript strewn about—but still intact.
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