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

by William L. Shirer

The shortage of textiles is felt not only by civilians but also in the army, which is hard put to it to find enough overcoats for all its troops this winter. Hitler has already had to put his Labour Service men into stolen Czech uniforms. The so-called Organisation Todt, comprising several hundred thousand men who perform the jobs usually done by our army labour battalions, has no uniforms at all for its men.

As to British air attacks on Germany, their value so far has been principally psychological, bringing the war home to the weary civilian population, wearing their already frayed nerves still thinner and robbing them of sleep. The actual physical damage wrought by bombs after six months of night attacks has on the whole not been very great. Its exact extent, of course, we do not know. Probably only Hitler, Göring, and the High Command know, and they do not tell. But I think we have a fair idea.

First, that the millennium-old longing of Germans for political unification has been fulfilled. Hitler achieved it, where all others in the past—the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, Bismarck—failed. Few people outside this country realize how this unification has knitted the German nation together, given the people self-confidence and a sense of historical mission, and made them forget their personal dislike of the Nazi regime, its leaders, and the barbaric things it has done. Also—coupled with the rebirth of the army and air force and the totalitarian reorganization of industry, trade, and agriculture on a scale never before realized in this world—it makes the German feel strong. For most Germans this is an end in itself, for to be strong in their scheme of life is to be all. It is the emergence of the primitive, tribal instinct of the early German pagans of the vast forests of the North to whom brute strength was not only the means but the end of life. It is this primitive racial instinct of “blood and soil” which the Nazis have reawakened in the German soul more successfully than any of their modern predecessors and which has shown that the influence of Christianity and western civilization on German life and culture was only a thin veneer.

Second, morale is good because the German people feel they have this summer revenged the terrible defeat of 1918 and have achieved a string of military victories which has at last ensured their place in the sun—domination today of Europe, tomorrow perhaps of the world. And German character is such that the German must either dominate or be dominated. He understands no other relation between human beings on this earth. The golden mean of the Greeks which the Western world has achieved to some extent is a concept beyond his comprehension. Moreover, the great mass of workers, peasants, and petty tradesmen—as well as the big industrialists—are conscious that if Hitler succeeds with his New Order, as they are confident now he will, it will mean more of the milk and honey of this world for them. That it will of necessity be obtained at the expense of other peoples—Czechs, Poles, Scandinavians, French—does not bother the German in the least. On this he has no moral scruples whatsoever.

Third, one of the prime springs which push the German people along in full support of a war for which they have no enthusiasm, and which they would end tomorrow if they could, is their growing fear of the consequences of defeat. Slowly but surely they are beginning to realize the frightful magnitude of the seeds of wrath which their high-booted troops and Gestapo men have sown in Europe since the conquest of Austria. They are beginning to see that a victory with the Nazi regime, however much many of them may dislike it, is better than another German defeat, which this time, if it ever comes about, will make Versailles seem like a peace of sweet reason and destroy not only the nation but the Germans as a people. More than one German of late has confided to me his fears. If Germany loses, they see the embittered peoples of Europe whom they have brutally enslaved, whose cities they have ruthlessly destroyed, whose women and children, many of them, in such places as ...

For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.