Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941

by William L. Shirer

Every German I’ve met today liked Colonel Lindbergh’s broadcast. The

story gets a good play in the Berlin newspapers, which is more than Roosevelt’s speeches get. The headlines are friendly. The Börsen Zeitung: “COLONEL LINDBERGH WARNS AGAINST THE AGITATION OF THE WESTERN POWERS.”

(midnight).—The Germans have just announced that if Warsaw does not surrender within twelve hours, the German army will use all military methods to subdue it. That means bomb it and bombard it. There are more than half a million civilians in the city, the majority women and children.

At six o’clock this morning, Moscow time, the Red army began an invasion of Poland. Russia of course had a non-aggression pact with Poland. What ages ago it seems now—though it really wasn’t ages ago—that I sat in Geneva and other capitals and heard the Soviet statesmen talk about common fronts against the aggressor. Now Soviet Russia stabs Poland in the back, and the Red army joins the Nazi army in overrunning Poland. All this of course is heartily welcomed in Berlin this morning.

Dr. Boehmer, press chief of the Propaganda Ministry in charge of this trip, insisted that I share a double room in the hotel here with Phillip Johnson, an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin’s Social Justice. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our room here he has been posing as anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude. I have given him no more than a

few bored grunts.

Heard President Roosevelt ask the special session of Congress to repeal the neutrality law and allow cash-and-carry goods to be sold to those who could buy—France and Britain. Hardly had the President stopped talking before the Wilhelmstrasse issued a statement to the foreign press charging the President with being unneutral. Last summer I tried to find out whether America came into the calculations of the Nazis at all. I couldn’t find any evidence that they gave a damn about us. 1914–17 all over again. But now they’re beginning to think about us.

The D.A.Z., commenting on Roosevelt’s message asking for the repeal of the neutrality law, says tonight: “America is not Roosevelt, and Roosevelt must reckon with

the American people.” Yesterday the B.Z. saw some hope in what it called the “Front of Reason” in America. In that front it put Senators Borah and Clark, Colonel Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin!

Germany’s peace offensive is now to be backed by Russia. In Moscow last night Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a treaty and a declaration of purpose. The text of the latter tells the whole story:

Two choice press bits today: The 12-Uhr Blatt headline in red ink all over page 1: “ENGLAND’S RESPONSIBILITY—FOR THE OUTRAGEOUS PROVOKING OF WARSAW TO DEFEND ITSELF.” The Nachtausgabe’s editorial, arguing that America is not nearly so anxious to join the war “as are Herr Roosevelt and his Jewish camarilla.”

Bad news for the people today. Now that it has become cold and rainy, with snow due soon, the government has decreed that only five per cent of the population is entitled to buy new rubbers or overshoes this winter. Available stocks will be rationed first to postmen, newsboys, and street-sweepers.

The Soviet Union has invaded Finland! Yesterday Red air-force bombers attacked Helsinki, killing seventy-five civilians, wounding several hundred. The great champion of the working class, the mighty preacher against “Fascist aggression,” the righteous stander-up for the “scrupulous and punctilious observance of treaties” (to quote Molotov as of a month ago), has fallen upon the most decent and workable little democracy in Europe in violation of half a dozen “solemn” treaties. The whole moral foundation which the Soviets have built up for themselves in international relations in the last ten years has collapsed like a house of cards, which the skeptics and anti-Communists always claimed it was. Stalin reveals himself of the same stamp as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japs. Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as “imperialist” as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

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.

Hitler decreed today that henceforth babies must have ration cards for clothing. A country is hard up when it has to save on diapers.

In Germany it is a serious penal offence to listen to a foreign radio station. The other day the mother of a German airman received word from the Luftwaffe that her son was missing and must be presumed dead. A couple of days later the BBC in London, which broadcasts weekly a list of German prisoners, announced that her son had been captured. Next day she received eight letters from friends and acquaintances telling her they had heard her son was safe as a prisoner in England. Then the story takes a nasty turn. The mother denounced all eight to the police for listening to an English broadcast, and they were arrested. (When I tried to recount this story on the radio, the Nazi censor cut it out on the ground that American listeners would not understand the heroism of the woman in denouncing her eight friends!)

Sumner Welles arrived this morning. He’s supposedly over here on a special mission from the President to sound out the European leaders on their respective standpoints.

Sumner Welles was the go to guy of Roosevelt's in the State Department bypassing Cordell Hull until Hull contrived to get rid of him. Roosevelt never forgave or forgot and always held it against Hull.

1. That there is no chance for an immediate, negotiated peace. The war must be fought out to the bitter end. Germany is confident of winning it. 2. That Germany must be given a free hand in what she considers her Lebensraum in eastern Europe. She will never consent to restore Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Austria. 3. A condition of any peace must be the breaking of Britain’s control of the seas, including not only her naval disarmament but the abandonment of her great naval bases at Gibraltar, Malta, and Singapore.

I think in the end Norway and Sweden will pay for their refusal to allow Allied troops across their territories to help Finland. To be sure, they were not in a pleasant spot. Baron von Stumm of the F.O. confirmed to me today that Hitler had informed both Oslo and Stockholm that had Allied troops set foot in Scandinavia, Germany immediately would have invaded the north to cut them off. The trouble with the Scandinavians is that a hundred years of peace have made them soft, peace-at-any-pricers. And they have not had the courage to look into the future. By the time they make up their minds to take sides, it will be too late, as it was with Poland. Sandler, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, alone seems to have seen the situation correctly, and he has been forced to resign.

It is announced today that all church bells made of bronze are to come down and be melted up for cannon. Next week begins a nation-wide house-to-house collection of every available scrap of tin, nickel, copper, bronze, and similar metals of which the Germans are so short. Today the army ordered all car-owners whose automobiles are laid up by the war-time ban—which means ninety per cent of them—to surrender their batteries.

(What happens to the inner fabric of a people when they are fed lies like this daily?)

Two weeks ago today Hitler unloosed his Blitzkrieg in the west. Since then this has happened: Holland overrun; four fifths of Belgium occupied; the French army hurled back towards Paris; and an Allied army believed to number a million men, and including the élite of the Franco-British forces, trapped and encircled on the Channel.

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.

German line—a move which if pushed home would have saved the Franco-British-Belgian armies in Flanders—has convinced the German generals, if they needed convincing, that they can crack his forces fairly easily and quickly break through to Paris and to the Norman and Breton ports.

It is still a mystery to me how this campaign has been won so easily by Hitler. Admitted, the French fought in the towns. But even in the towns not many of the millions of men available could have fought. There was not room. But they did not fight in the fields, as in all other wars. The grain twenty yards from the main roads has not been touched by the tramping feet of soldiers or their tens of thousands of motorized vehicles. I do not mean to say that at many places the French did not fight valiantly. Undoubtedly they did. But there was no organized, well-thought-out defence as in the last war. From all I’ve seen, the French let the Germans dictate a new kind of warfare. This was fought largely along the main roads; rarely on a line running across the country.

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.