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The excitement of a city preparing for war pounded in my veins.
Today was Friday, the thirty-first of August, 1939.
My British and French friends were leaving Berlin on every train.
The Embassy was a madhouse that morning. It overflowed with tearful refugees, clamoring American citizens, many fearful Germans. All of them wanted to escape from Germany before it was too late, before the war broke out and sealed the borders forever.
Dutchmen, Belgians, Danes, Swedes, Poles, Frenchmen, Englishmen and Swiss jabbered in their respective languages as they fought for seats or standing room or any space whatsoever on the trains which were destined for some foreign border. Nobody knew whether the trains would reach the borders before being halted by German authorities.
“You people ought not to make these Jews wait outside like that,” he grumbled, wiping his red forehead with a handkerchief. “It gives people a bad impression of Germany.”
“You know, it’s too bad about these people,” the pot-bellied Nazi said expansively. “If they only had sense enough to live like decent people, der “Fuehrer wouldn’t have to send them away from Germany.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe answered sympathetically. “There are thousands of applicants registered before your husband. He has at least eight years to wait.”
Some demanding. Some pleading. Some trying bribes. Some too wrought-up to speak. All wanting the same precious thing. A visa for the United States. An escape from an unnamed fear which rolled nearer and nearer with every passing minute.
How many German soldiers of how many generations had walked with their girls through this park before going off to battle? How many had come back to walk again?
As in most European countries, all radio stations are owned by the government. Since no advertisements are allowed, the cost of the programs must be borne directly by the people.
Richard Wagner marched slowly into the room as the radio heated up. I smiled to myself. Whenever it was necessary to rouse the people into a fighting spirit, German radio stations trotted out their most stirring recordings of Wagner. Blustering old Wagner, as German as any German, with his violins shouting and his horns locking with each other. Was Hitler having this exciting music broadcast in order to give courage, or to get it?
“Nobody knows what is going on. The newspapers don’t print anything but Goebbels’ lies.” Hanna pointed to the Allgemeine. “You won’t find anything there. They never tell us ahead of time what is going to happen. They just let us know after they have done it. Then it is too late.”
On the other side of the Tiergartenstrasse, under the shade of the trees, I saw an old man, probably a World War veteran, running along beside the soldiers on his feeble legs. As he tried desperately to keep up with the men, his face was aglow with the remembered glory of battle. The music had entered his blood, the sight of the marching men brought back the glorious old days. “Paris by Christmas,” his blood was singing. “My army, my wonderful German army!”
After the planes had disappeared into the distant blue sky, the policeman bummed an American cigarette off me and reminded me not to forget that he was saving foreign stamps for his nephew. I think that every second German is saving stamps for his nephew.
One reason we were so popular: There was no European country which would admit a German or a Polish Jewish refugee unless he could first show that he was registered with the American Consulate for an immigration visa.
Tonight might be the last time the German borders would still be open for them, the disowned children of Germany.
The Germans practiced persecution not only by committing the major crimes at which they were past masters — murder, unjust imprisonment, arson, robbery. The Nazi government stooped to the smallest things, petty persecutions such as special yellow park benches for Jews to sit on; special restricted shopping hours for Jews, special laws for Jews; newspapers attacking Jews, which were pasted up on bulletin boards all over Germany. As terrible as were the beatings and the killings, I sometimes thought that it was the little things which hurt the average Jew most. One day he was a respected citizen
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The customs official opened the passport slowly and laid it down on the railing. He checked the name with a type-written list he took from his pocket. He made a mark in the passport with his rubber stamp and handed it back to the refugee. “See that you don’t come back to Germany,” he warned. “If you do, you’ll be sent back to a certain place.”
Outside, I watched the large plane taxi down the field, turn around and take off. It roared close over the roofs of Berlin apartments and was soon lost in the dark sky, I drove back to the Embassy and parked Richard’s car in our courtyard.
Without one word of answer, he put the receiver slowly back on the hook. He drew a pad of white paper toward him. “Russell, will you wake the code clerk?” he asked quietly. “That was the British Embassy calling. The first German bombers left for Poland ten minutes ago.”
My diary entry for that Sunday was: September 3, 1939:
I think this is nothing like the beginning of the World War in 1914. They marched through the streets carrying flags, then; they yelled with joy, they shouted their hatred of the enemy.
Today, I think they feel that they have been led into something which may turn out to be too big for them.
Many American citizens came in and asked in German how they could get back “home.” “Can’t you speak English?” the consul or vice-consul would ask. “Nein,” answered many of them, continuing to wave their red American passports in the air. One man was born in Pennsylvania, reared in Rumania, attended college in Germany. He spoke Rumanian, German and French, but not one word of English. He was an American.
They had a son in the flyers’ corps, of whom they were very proud. Sometimes when the son was home on leave, all four of us would go downstairs to the pub and sit there in the thick, steamy atmosphere until dawn, drinking beers and whiskeys and vodkas and “Eiercognac” and a peculiar form of dynamite called “Himbiergeist,” That means, roughly, spirit of raspberries, and oh, my golly! We were sitting in that small pub the night the German army marched into Austria.
The clerk refused, politely. “We are not allowed to sell anything until the ration cards come out,” he said.
The Charge d’Affaires of the United States, many times over a millionaire, couldn’t even buy a necktie.
Wowo is a tall, blond, clumsy lad, the same age as I am. We used to work for the Associated Press together, before he was called to the army and I went to work in the Embassy.
Instead of writing it down on a pad every time you order another beer, German waiters simply make a mark on your coaster. They trust you not to swap coasters when they aren’t looking; nobody swaps.
What a strange, nostalgic feeling one gets from reading preserved copies of old newspapers.
The American Consulate General at Stuttgart, Germany, had a bad scandal, involving three clerks who had been employed there for years. The total amount of the bribes involved was several thousand marks; to our embarrassment, the German Gestapo was the first to uncover the whole affair.
Practically every German wore a phosphorous button on his coat; thousands of small buttons glowed and bobbed along the Kurfuerstendamm. Many people, the kind I call one hundred and fifty percent Party members, wore phosphorous buttons in the pattern of the Nazi swastika.
I learned one lesson in war-time Berlin: Cities were never built to be blacked-out. Cities were meant to be well lighted; they are unbearable otherwise.
Ice tinkled in the glasses. St. Lows Blues, Star Dust, Melancholy Baby were played over and over. They made America seem close, and the war far away.
I have never seen in any German newspaper any criticism of the government, the bureaus, the army, the municipal governments, the state-owned railways (though they badly needed criticism), the weather bureau, the state agricultural program, the rearmament program and on and on. On the other hand, practically everything foreign, with the exception of Italy, came in for constant vituperation.
Here are two black-bordered clippings which tell their own sad little story. Remember that in Nazi Germany, the survivors of a dead soldier are supposed to show no grief and wear no mourning. They are supposed to be glad that their loved one could make the supreme sacrifice for Adolf Hitler.
The English cabinet has fallen, they cried. Chamberlain is out! The English King has abdicated! Peace has come to Europe! Berlin began to rock with the news. It was October 10, 1939, a nice, sunshiny day, when the population first got wind of the news.
In Germany, where no adverse opinions are allowed to creep into the newspapers, the only way one can know what the people actually think about things is to talk to them in person and to watch how they behave in crowds. I felt I could not stay in my office any longer. I closed the door on the stacks of dossiers and walked out into the sunlight.
I had not seen them smiling like that at the time of the Anschluss with Austria; they had not smiled on the street when Germany conquered Czechoslovakia bloodlessly; the fall of Warsaw had not caused such a general good humor.
I waited a while with the crowd, and then moved on toward Potsdamer Platz. At this busiest intersection in Berlin I saw people who had gone crazy with joy. Strangers grabbed strangers by the arms to tell them the wonderful news. Peace, brother, peace! Other people grabbed strangers and embraced them in a delirium of joy. It looked like New Year’s Eve in the daytime.
One happy father, anxious to write his soldier son the good news, was told at a branch post office that he could not buy a postcard bearing the word “Feldpost” since the war was now over and there would be no more free postal delivery to the army.
There was no mention of the new peace in any sentence. The Germans on the sidewalk around me were puzzled. Could it be that everybody in Germany knew that peace had arrived, except Hitler? Had nobody told him? The crowd was bewildered, and disappointed.
Gloom settled with the night. The faces which had been alight with joy all day were secret and hurt. People who had augmented their natural elation with alcohol bought in every pub along their paths, by nightfall had their alcohol in them still; their elation had disappeared down the drain. Well, that night Berlin was completely blacked out.
The rulers of Germany know how to bring forth from their people loud tones, and they know how to make them quiet.
“On the German border I greeted every house, every tree, every single flower; had I trusted the English newspapers I would have expected to see a destroyed and neglected country. But I had known that Germany would hold her own. “I was deeply aware of the tranquillity and the self-confidence which existed in Germany. I compared it to the nervousness and unsteadiness in England. In Germany there is security, positiveness and confidence in the future. After all I went through abroad, I certainly can say: “The Germans at home have every reason for being happy!
Richard and I were riding on a street car at noon.
The heat and the massage had relaxed me. That was the first time I had felt tranquil in months. I was asleep almost immediately.
October 15: Although they are strictly forbidden to listen to foreign radio broadcasts, from my observations I would say that approximately sixty to seventy percent of all German adults do so regularly. They do not dare to listen openly. They turn the volume down to a whisper, they send their maids out to the picture show in the evening, they sit on the floors with their ears directly in front of the loud speakers. Old-fashioned headphones, which could be used for extra-private listening, were sold out in every German radio shop during the first week of the war.
It was not difficult to tune in London or Paris, even on the cheapest of radio sets.
