Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41

by William L. Shirer

The man is truly a superb orator and in the atmosphere of the hand-picked Reichstag, with its six hundred or so sausage-necked, shaved-headed, brown-clad yes-men, who rise and shout almost every time Hitler pauses for breath, I suppose he is convincing to Germans who listen to him.

The quality of Hitler’s sincerity may be measured by his proposal to demilitarize both sides of the frontiers, thus forcing France to scrap her Maginot Line, now her last protection against a German attack.

we had much good talk—about American writing and why most American writers—Lewis and Dreiser and Anderson, for example—either stopped writing or fell off from their best work just at the prime of their lives—a time when the Europeans usually produce their greatest novels and plays.

Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted. But Spengler included Germany in the decline of the West, and indeed the Nazi reversion to the ancient, primitive, Germanic myths is a sign of her retrogression, as is her burning of books and suppression of liberty and learning. But Germany is stronger than her enemies realize. True, it is a poor country in raw materials and agriculture; but it is making up for this poverty in aggressiveness of spirit, ruthless state planning, concentrated direction of effort, and the building up of a mighty military machine with which it can back up its aggressive spirit. True, too, that this past winter we have seen long lines of sullen people before the food shops, that there is a shortage of meat and butter and fruit and fats, that whipped cream is verboten, that men’s suits and women’s dresses are increasingly being made out of wood pulp, gasoline out of coal, rubber out of coal and lime; that there is no gold...

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, July 7 Delegates from thirty-two states here, on Roosevelt’s initiative, to discuss doing something about refugees from the Third Reich. Myron C. Taylor, heading the American delegation, elected permanent president of the committee today. I doubt if much will be done. The British, French, and Americans seem too anxious not to do anything to offend Hitler. It’s an absurd situation. They want to appease the man who is responsible for their problem. The Nazis of course will welcome the democracies’ taking the Jews off their hands at the democracies’ expense.

Some time after dinner a newsboy rushed into the lobby of the Ambassador with extra editions of a German-language paper, the only one I can read since I do not know Czech. The headlines said: Chamberlain to fly to Berchtesgaden tomorrow to see Hitler! The Czechs are dumbfounded. They suspect a sell-out and I’m afraid they’re right. On the way to broadcast tonight, Hindus, who was with me and understands Czech, stopped to listen to what the newsboys were shouting. They were yelling, he said: “Extra! Extra! Read all about how the mighty head of the British Empire goes begging to Hitler!” I have not heard a better comment this evening.

We agree on these things: that war is now more probable than ever, that it is likely to come after the next harvest, that Poland is obviously next on Hitler’s list (the blind stupidity of the Poles in this crisis, helping to carve up Czechoslovakia!), that we must get Warsaw to rig up a more powerful short-wave transmitter if they want the world to hear their side, and that we ought to build up a staff of American radio reporters.

The Poles a delightful, utterly romantic people, and I have had much good food and drink and music with them. But they are horribly unrealistic.

How shoddy Paris has become in the last ten years! Some Frenchmen point to the neon signs, the gaudy movie palaces, the automobile sales windows, the cheap bars which now dominate the once beautiful Champs-Élysées, and say: “That is what America has done to us.” Perhaps so, but I think it is what France has done to herself. France has lost something she had when I arrived here fourteen years ago: her taste, part of her soul, the sense of her historical mission. Corruption everywhere, class selfishness partout and political confusion complete. My decent friends have about given up. They say: “Je m’en fous (To hell with it).” This leads to the sort of defeatist, anarchistic je m’en fousism which a writer like Céline is spreading.

WARSAW, April 2 Attended a pitiful air-show this Sunday afternoon, my Polish friends apologizing for the cumbersome slow bombers and the double-decker fighters—all obsolete. They showed a half-dozen modern fighters that looked fast enough, but that was all. How can Poland fight Germany with such an air force?

Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to.

Tonight the press talks openly of peace. Says the Frankfurter Zeitung: “Why should England and France waste their blood against our Westwall? Since the Polish state has ceased to exist, the treaties of alliance with it have no more sense.”

Germany, now that it has destroyed Poland, would like peace with the West. Big peace offensive started today. Newspapers, radio full of it. The line: Why do France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants nothing in the West.

We discussed the German conception of ethics, honour, conduct. Said he: “For Germans a thing is right, ethical, honourable, if it squares with the tradition of what a German thinks a German should do; or if it advances the interests of Germanism or Germany. But the Germans have no abstract idea of ethics, or honour, or right conduct.” He gave a pretty illustration. A German friend said to him: “Isn’t it terrible what the Finns are doing, taking on Russia? It’s utterly wrong.” When Mr. W. remonstrated that, after all, the Finns were only doing what you would expect all decent Germans to do if they got in the same fix—namely, defending their liberty and independence against wanton aggression—his friend retorted: “But Russia is Germany’s friend.” In other words, for a German to defend his country’s liberty and independence is right. For a Finn to do the same is wrong, because it disturbs Germany’s relations with Russia. The abstract idea there is missing in the German mentality. That probably explains the Germans’ complete lack of regard or sympathy for the plight of the Poles or Czechs. What the Germans are doing to these people—murdering them, for one thing—is right because the Germans are doing it, and the victims, in the German view, are an inferior race who must think right whatever the Germans please to do to them. As Dr. Ley puts it: “Right is what the Führer does.” All this confirms an idea I got years ago: that the German conception of “honour,” about which Germans n...

The non-European, anti-Western civilization element, as she put it, now has the upper hand in Germany and she thought the only way the west-European nature of the German could be saved would be by another defeat, even another Peace of Westphalia (which split up Germany in 1648 into three hundred separate states).

A phony war. Today’s dispatches from the front deal exclusively with an account of how German machine-guns fought French loud-speakers! It seems that along the Rhine front the French broadcast some recordings which the Germans say constituted a personal insult to the Führer. “The French did not realize,” says the DNB with that complete lack of humour which makes the Germans so funny, “that an attack on the Führer would be immediately rejected by the German troops.” So the Germans opened fire on the French loud-speakers at Altenheim and Breisach. Actually the army people tell me that the French broadcast recordings of Hitler’s former speeches denouncing Bolshevism and the Soviets.

Finland now is at the mercy of Russia. On any fake pretext the Soviets can henceforth overrun the country, since the Finns must now give up their fortifications, as the Czechs had to do after Munich. (Czecho lasted five and a half months after that.) Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.

The feat of the German army in advancing more than two hundred miles north up the Osterdal and Gudbrandsdal valleys from Oslo to Trondheim, and at the same time easily holding Trondheim with a small force against Allied attacks from both the north and the south, is certainly a formidable one. The whole seizure of Norway, though aided by the basest treachery, has undoubtedly been a brilliant military performance. After three weeks the British, with all their sea power, have not even been able to take Narvik.

Narvik

Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, in a broadcast to schoolchildren today, sums up pretty well the German mentality in this year of 1940. He says: “God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn’t understand the laws of life’s battles will be counted out, as in the boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them…. The German people under Hitler did not take to arms to break into foreign lands and make other people serve them. They were forced to take arms by states which blocked their way to bread and union.”

the Germans are winning this campaign largely through effective use of a superior airforce),

(An example of the German army’s terrific attention to detail: For three hundred miles along the Autobahn from Berlin to Cologne, broken-down farm implements made to look like anti-aircraft guns from any altitude at all were placed every two hundred yards. Ploughs with the shaft pointed to the sky to look like a gun; rakes, harrows, wheelbarrows, sewing-machines—every conceivable old implement had been carefully arranged to look like a piece of flak,21 so that an Allied pilot flying along the road would get the idea that it was suicide to swoop down on that road. Noticed on the map found in the British plane near Hannover that strong concentrations of German anti-aircraft were marked in red ink. Another purpose of the farm machines of course was to impede the landing of Allied planes on the highway. Telephone posts driven into the narrow strip of ground between the double lanes also served this purpose.)

Footnote to May 20.—Returning from Brussels to Aachen, we ran across a batch of British prisoners. It was somewhere in the Dutch province of Limburg, a suburb, I think, of Maastricht. They were herded together in the brick-paved yard of a disused factory. We stopped and went over and talked to them. They were a sad sight. Prisoners always are, especially right after a battle. Some obviously shell-shocked, some wounded, all dead tired. But what impressed me most about them was their physique. They were hollow-chested and skinny and round-shouldered. About a third of them had bad eyes and wore glasses. Typical, I concluded, of the youth that England neglected so criminally in the twenty-two post-war years when Germany, despite its defeat and the inflation and six million unemployed, was raising its youth in the open air and the sun. I asked the boys where they were from and what they did at home. About half of them were from offices in Liverpool; the rest from London offices. Their military training had begun nine months before, they said, when the war started. But it had not, as you could see, made up for the bad diet, the lack of fresh air and sun and physical training, of the post-war years. Thirty yards away German infantry were marching up the road towards the front. I could not help comparing them with these British lads. The Germans, bronzed, clean-cut physically, healthy-looking as lions, chests developed and all. It was part of the unequal fight. The English youngst...

The German Ambassador to Belgium gave us a harangue at the press conference today on how he was mistreated by the French on his way out to Switzerland. As a German told me afterwards, the Germans seem incapable of apprehending that the hate against them in France and Belgium is due to the fact that Germany invaded these countries—Belgium without the slightest excuse or justification—and laid waste their towns and cities, and killed thousands of civilians with their bombings and bombardments. Just another example of that supreme German characteristic of being unable to see for a second the other fellow’s point of view. Same with the wrath here at the way their airmen are treated. The other side is tough with airmen coming down in parachutes because it knows Hitler has conquered Holland by landing parachutists behind the lines. But the Germans think that the other side should not defend itself against these men dropping from the skies. If it does, if it shoots them, then Germany will massacre prisoners already in her hands.

Despite the lack of popular enthusiasm for this colossal German victory in Flanders, I gather quite a few Germans are beginning to feel that the deprivations which Hitler has forced on them for five years have not been without reason. Said my room waiter this morning: “Perhaps the English and French now wish they had had less butter and more cannon.”

The Wilhelmstrasse keeps making the point that American aid will come too late. A man just back from seeing Hitler tells me the Führer is sure that France will be finished by June 15—that is, in four days—and Great Britain by August 15 at the latest! He says Hitler is acting as if he had the world at his feet, but that some of the generals, although highly pleased with the military successes, are a little apprehensive of the future under such a wild and fanatical man.

(In 1914, two army corps were hurriedly withdrawn from France to stop the Russians in the east. How Paris and London are now paying for their short-sighted anti-Russian policy! Before Munich, even after Munich, even a year ago this June, they could have lined up the Russians against Germany.)

Poor Paris! I weep for her. For so many years it was my home—and I loved it as you love a woman. Said the Völkische Beobachter this morning: “Paris was a city of frivolity and corruption, of democracy and capitalism, where Jews had entry to the court, and niggers to the salons. That Paris will never rise again.”

At ten p.m. in the restaurant of the road-house we heard the news. Verdun taken! The Verdun that cost the Germans six hundred thousand dead the last time they tried to take it. And this time they take it in one day. Granted that the French army is in a fix; that the fall of Paris has demoralized it still further. Still you ask: What has happened to the French? Germans also claim Maginot Line broken through.

Demaree says the panic in Paris was indescribable. Everyone lost his head. The government gave no lead. People were told to scoot, and at least three million out of the five million in the city ran, ran without baggage, literally ran on their feet towards the south. It seems the Parisians actually believed the Germans would rape the women and do worse to the men. They had heard fantastic tales of what happened when the Germans occupied a city. The ones who stayed are all the more amazed at the very correct behaviour of the troops—so far.

keep asking myself: If the French were making a serious defence, why are the main roads never blown up? Why so many strategic bridges left untouched? Here and there along the roads, a tank barrier, that is, a few logs or stones or debris—but nothing really serious for the tanks. No real tank-traps, such as the Swiss built by the thousands. This has been a war of machines down the main highways, and the French do not appear to have been ready for it, to have understood it, or to have had anything ready to stop it. This is incredible.

Also in the centre is a great granite block which stands some three feet above the ground. Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it, steps up, and reads the inscription engraved in great high letters on that block. It says: “HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE… VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.”

To sum up: Make some reservations. That it is too early to know all. That you didn’t see all, by any means. And all that. But from what I’ve seen in Belgium and France and from talks I’ve had with Germans and French in both countries, and with French, Belgian, and British prisoners along the roads, it seems fairly clear to me that: France did not fight.

One German tank officer I talked to in Compiègne said: “French tanks in some ways were superior to ours. They had heavier armour. And at times—for a few hours, say—the French tank corps fought bravely and well. But soon we got a definite feeling that their heart wasn’t in it. When we learned that, and acted on the belief, it was all over.” A month before, I would have thought such talk rank Nazi propaganda. Now I believe it.

On the whole, then, while the French here and there fought valiantly and even stubbornly, their army seems to have been paralysed as soon as the Germans made their first break-through. Then it collapsed, almost without a fight. In the first place the French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was invaded by their most hated enemy. There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul. Secondly, there was either treachery or criminal negligence in the High Command and among the high officers in the field. Among large masses of troops Communist propaganda had won the day. And its message was: “Don’t fight.” Never were the masses so betrayed.

For the first time since 1871, German troops staged a victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate today. They comprised a division conscripted from Berlin. Stores and factories closed, by order, and the whole town turned out to cheer. Nothing pleases the Berliners—a naïve and simple people on the whole—more than a good military parade. And nothing more than an afternoon off from their dull jobs and their dismal homes. I mingled among the crowds in the Pariserplatz. A holiday spirit ruled completely. Nothing martial about the mass of the people here. They were just out for a good time. Looking at them, I wondered if any of them understood what was going on in Europe, if they had an inkling that their joy, that this victorious parade of the goose-steppers, was based on a great tragedy for millions of others whom these troops and the leaders of these people had enslaved. Not one in a thousand, I wager, gave the matter a thought.

The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror, and conscious of it, and yet so wonderful an actor, so magnificent a handler of the German mind, that he mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses when they know a man is on top. His voice was lower tonight; he rarely shouted as he usually does; and he did not once cry out hysterically as I’ve seen him do so often from this rostrum. His oratorical form was at its best. I’ve often sat in the gallery of the Kroll Opera House at these Reichstag sessions watching the man as he spoke and considering what a superb actor he was, as indeed are all good orators. I’ve often admired the way he uses his hands, which are somewhat feminine and quite artistic. Tonight he used those hands beautifully, seemed to express himself almost as much with his hands—and the sway of his body—as he did with his words and the use of his voice. I noticed too his gift for using his face and eyes (cocking his eyes) and the turn of his head for irony, of which there was considerable in tonight’s speech, especially when he referred to Mr. Churchill.

The point was that a square mile or more in the centre of Rotterdam had been utterly wiped out in one half-hour of bombing by German Stukas. Why had not the British, then, in two months of bombing wiped out the Hamburg harbour works and the Blohm & Voss shipping yards, which were busy constructing naval vessels, especially submarines? The important targets were largely concentrated on two islands in the Elbe—objectives which at night you could hardly miss if you followed the river up from the sea. It was depressing, too, to think that perhaps British propaganda had exaggerated the effects of their raids in other places in Germany.

French coal mines are working again. They were not destroyed by the French this time as in 1914. A photograph in one of the papers shows French miners unloading coal at a pit. Watching over them is a steel-helmeted German soldier with a bayonet. Their Moscow-dominated Communist Party and their unions told them not to work and not to fight when France was free. Now they must work under German bayonets.

There is another kind of thud, deeper, and one of our officers thinks this comes from the bombs falling. In an hour what looks to us like the same bombing squadron returns. We can count only eighteen bombers of the original sixty. Have the British accounted for the rest? It is difficult to tell, because we know the Germans often have orders to return to different fields from those they started from. One reason for doing this apparently is to ensure that the German flyers will not know what their losses are.

BOULOGNE, August 16 How wonderfully the Germans have camouflaged their temporary airfields! We drove by at least three between Calais and Boulogne. They have established them not in pastures, as I had expected, but in wheat-fields. The shocks of wheat are left in the field, with only narrow lanes left free across the field for the planes to take off from and land on. Each plane is hidden under a hangar made of rope netting over which sheaves of wheat have been tied. As at Ghent, the sides and back of each hangar are protected by sandbags. In one big wheat-field there must have been a hundred of these little hangars. Workshops and oil dumps were also housed under the same kind of netting. The “pocket” system which I saw at Ghent is also used. The planes, when they have landed, taxi down a lane or a road to a nearby “pocket” that may be some distance from the field proper. Here the planes are either hidden under netting or backed up into a wood.

Studying the German figures on air losses over Britain, which are manifestly untrue, I find that nearly every day they run 4 to 1 in favour of the Luftwaffe. This ratio must have a magic attraction to someone in the Air Ministry.

The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself—he often takes a hand in writing the official army communiqués—deliberately perpetrates the lie that Germany has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British first bombing Berlin. And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they’re told nowadays. Certainly never before in modern times—since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world—have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.

I noticed several lightly wounded soldiers, mostly airmen, getting off a special car which had been attached to our train. From their bandages, their wounds looked like burns. I noticed also the longest Red Cross train I’ve ever seen. It stretched from the station for half a mile to beyond the bridge over the Landwehr Canal. Orderlies were swabbing it out, the wounded having been unloaded, probably, during the night. The Germans usually unload their hospital trains after dark so that the populace will not be unduly disturbed by one of the grimmer sides of glorious war.

It begins to look now (though I still think Hitler may try to attack England) as though the war will shift to the Mediterranean this winter, with the Axis powers trying to deliver the British Empire a knockout blow by capturing Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Palestine. Napoleon did this once, and the blow did not fell the British Empire. (Also, Napoleon planned to attack Britain, gathered his ships and barges just where Hitler has gathered his, but never dared to launch the attack.) But the Axis seizure of Suez might knock out the British Empire now. The reason Franco’s handyman, Serrano Suñer, is here in Berlin is that Hitler wants him either to take Gibraltar himself or to let the German army come in from France to do the job. Much talk here, I find, of Germany and Italy dividing up Africa between themselves, giving Spain a larger slice if Franco plays ball.

The same newspapers which have now begun to chronicle with glee the “reprisal” attacks on the centre of London town and which, to show the success of the “reprisals,” published British figures telling of the thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, killed by German bombs, today are filled with righteous indignation against the British for allegedly doing the same thing to Germans. Some of the headlines tonight: Nachtausgabe: “NIGHT CRIME OF BRITISH AGAINST 21 GERMAN CHILDREN—THIS BLOODY ACT CRIES FOR REVENGE.” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: “MURDER OF CHILDREN AT BETHEL; REVOLTING CRIME.” B.Z. am Mittag: “ASSASSINS’ MURDER IS NO LONGER WAR, HERR WINSTON CHURCHILL!—THE BRITISH ISLAND OF MURDERERS WILL HAVE TO TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES OF ITS MALICIOUS BOMBINGS.”

BERLIN, September 26 We had the longest air-raid of the war last night, from eleven p.m. to four o’clock this morning. If you had a job to get to at seven or eight a.m., as hundreds of thousands of people had, you got very little sleep. The British ought to do this every night. No matter if not much is destroyed. The damage last night was not great. But the psychological effect was tremendous.

The army would not move until the Royal Air Force had been annihilated. On this being accomplished depended the whole setting-in-action of the plans for actual invasion. Göring promised its speedy accomplishment. But like many a German before him, he made a grave miscalculation about British character and therefore British strategy. Göring, I think it is now clear, based his confidence on a very simple calculation. He had four times as many planes as the British. No matter how good English planes and pilots were—and he had a healthy respect for both—he had only to attack in superior numbers, and even if he lost as many planes as the enemy, in the end he would still have a substantial air fleet, and the British would have none. And there was little likelihood of losing as many as your opponent if you always attacked with more planes than he had. What Göring and all the other Germans were incapable of grasping was that the British were prepared to see their cities bombed and destroyed before they would risk all of their planes in a few great air battles to defend them. To the British this was mere common sense and the only tactic that could save them. To the German military mind it was incomprehensible. It is primarily due to this error of judgment, so typically German, I’m convinced, that the plan to invade Britain this year had to be abandoned.

According to the German radio and the Warsaw Zeitung, Mr. Hoover’s American representative here has offered his congratulations to Dr. Frank, the tough little Nazi Governor of Poland, on the anniversary of his year in office. He congratulates him for what he has done for the Poles! My information is that there will be no Polish race left when Dr. Frank and his Nazi thugs get through with them. They can’t kill them all, of course, but they can enslave them all.

At this point Bethel, already mentioned in these notes, creeps into the story. Dr. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh is a Protestant pastor, beloved by Catholics and Protestants alike in western Germany. At Bethel, as I have noted down previously, is his asylum for mentally deficient children. Germans tell me it is a model institution of its kind, known all over the civilized world. Late last summer, it seems, Pastor von Bodelschwingh was asked to deliver up certain of his worst cases to the authorities. Apparently he got wind of what was in store for them. He refused. The authorities insisted. Pastor von Bodelschwingh hurried to Berlin to protest. He got in touch with a famous Berlin surgeon, a personal friend of Hitler’s. The surgeon, refusing to believe the story, rushed to the Chancellery. The Führer said nothing could be done. The two men then went to Franz Gürtner, Minister of Justice. Gürtner seemed more troubled at the fact that the killings were being carried out without benefit of a written law than that they were being carried out. However, he did agree to complain to Hitler about the matter. Pastor von Bodelschwingh returned to Bethel. The local Gauleiter ordered him to turn over some of his inmates. Again he refused. Berlin then ordered his arrest. This time the Gauleiter protested. The pastor was the most popular man in his province. To arrest him in the middle of war would stir up a whole world of unnecessary trouble. He himself declined to arrest the man. Let the...

The third motive seems most likely to me. For years a group of radical Nazi sociologists who were instrumental in putting through the Reich’s sterilization laws have pressed for a national policy of eliminating the mentally unfit. They say they have disciples among many sociologists in other lands, and perhaps they have. Paragraph two of the form letter sent the relatives plainly bears the stamp of this sociological thinking: “In view of the nature of his serious, incurable ailment, his death, which saved him from a lifelong institutional sojourn, is to be regarded merely as a release.”