GESTAPO AT THE TRAIN STATION
Shirer arrived in Paris at the end of January, found an apartment for Tess and himself, and reported for work on the copydesk at the Herald. He was glad for the job, greatly relieved to have a paycheck again, but he could not conceal his disappointment at the entry-level nature of his new employment. It felt beneath him. Nine years after his arrival in Paris as a naïve American, possessed with an overly developed sense of his own worth and looking for a bright future, Shirer was back working on a newspaper, but this time not as a staff writer or correspondent with all of Europe and Asia at his doorstep.
His first week at the Herald felt like his first nights on the copydesk of the Tribune back in 1925, meeting new people and introducing himself. He was far too experienced for his new job; he felt keenly that he was starting over. He did not wear his resentment well; the experienced journalist and foreign correspondent was now rewriting wire copy. He was determined that it would not last.
The Paris of the winter of 1934 was not the same city he had been introduced to in 1925. Nor was France the same country he had known nine years before. “I scarcely recognized them,” Shirer wrote, his disappointment at the fundamental change in the city he worshipped for its culture, art, and sophistication profoundly embittering.
A curtain had fallen, and the stagehands had rearranged everything so that when the curtain was raised, nothing was recognizable. The country was sharply polarized, with hardcore Communists on the left and violent Fascists on the right. “Rancor and intolerance poisoned the air. Insults and threats were hurled at each other by the Right and the Left … . I was astounded at the strength of incipient fascism in this democratic republic.”
As France had been fundamentally changed by the world depression, Europe itself was in a political upheaval. Since coming to power in Germany, Hitler had brought out into full public view the program that mattered to him the most—the first forays in the war against the Jews, whose very presence on German soil (however Hitler chose to define “German soil”) drove his agenda. There were of course other items on his plate—firmly establishing Germany’s place in Europe and in eastern Europe, creating “living space” for the “Aryan” people, and getting rid of what he saw as the onerous conditions imposed on the country after 1918—but nothing burned so hot as Hitler’s contempt for the Jews and his desire to physically remove them from society. While Hitler and those closest to him knew a second European war was inevitable—there was no other way for the Nazis to realize their goals—they placed the blame for it firmly at the door of the Jews. They would cause it. It would be the war against the Jews first and foremost, then against everyone else.
Victor Klemperer, in the home in Dresden that he shared with his wife, Eva, wrote early in February, days after Shirer’s arrival in Paris, of his personal depression and the bleakness of their situation. “And my strength, all my physical and mental strength is increasingly exhausted,” he wrote on February 7. Eight days later, on the fifteenth, he wrote of going to a meeting on the campus where he taught and being confronted by a student representative in an SA [Sturmabteilung] uniform. “But this arm raising makes me literally feel sick, and the fact that I always dodge it will cost me my neck one day.
“The hope that this state of boundless tyranny and lies must yet collapse at some time, never completely disappears,” he wrote.
Klemperer, of course, saw only a small portion of the events unfolding all around him, just what was in his view, or relayed to him by Jewish friends, or what he read in the Nazi-controlled press. In France, as Shirer went about his new job at the Herald, he could only read about these events in the papers and in wire dispatches at his desk, or as he sat in cafés at night after work, and guess at where it was all headed.
In April 1933, after Bill and Tess had moved into their seaside home in Lloret de Mar, the new German government had organized official boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses—shops, department stores, factories, and a host of other businesses big and small. When these efforts were written up in foreign newspapers, government, business, and some church leaders denounced stories about assaults on Jews as so many lies meant to damage Germany’s international reputation.
For Jews trying to go about their lives, the uniformed men attacking them and their businesses were straight out of another age. With some exceptions, non-Jewish Germans said nothing to protect businessmen they had known and bought from for years. Historian Michael Burleigh writes of a decorated Jewish war veteran who handed out leaflets protesting the boycott of his family’s department store in the town of Wesel. The leaflets detailed his family’s long military service to the country, going back to his grandfather.
“With such a record of past national service, do we now have to be subjected to public humiliation? Is this how the fatherland today expresses its gratitude, by placing huge pickets in front of our door with the demand not to buy from our house?” The leaflet went on to note that twelve thousand “German front soldiers of the Jewish faith” had given their lives in action during the Great War.
A year later, by the time Shirer was in Paris, official actions in Germany against the Jews included a newly passed law forcing Jews out of the civil service. Jewish lawyers were disbarred; Jewish judges were removed from the bench and Jewish prosecutors from their offices. Even before Hitler assumed power in 1933, the Nazis had begun an assault on newspapers across the country. There was one party-owned newspaper in Germany in 1926; there were ninety-seven by early 1934, with combined circulations of more than three million. Marxist newspapers were among the first victims of the Nazis. After Hitler came to power, SA thugs stormed some newspapers around the country whose policies and coverage they didn’t like or that had published criticisms about the new chancellor. “Under heavy pressure, or facing economic ruin, many small and middle-size publishers sold their newspaper properties to the Nazi competitor,” Oron J. Hale has written.
Moving to consolidate control, the government created a press leader to oversee the entire publishing industry; press organizations were also created whose memberships, including all editors and reporters, were strictly controlled by the government. Undesirables—leftists, Jews, Socialists, any journalists who opposed official control of newspapers—were purged.
Within weeks of Hitler’s being named chancellor, an American named James G. McDonald traveled to Berlin as part of an official mission for President Roosevelt. McDonald was under consideration for the post of US ambassador to Germany—he would be named the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—and he began the process of meeting high-ranking Nazis as well as other Germans to assess their goals and to learn more about conditions for Jews in the country. In Berlin on April 3, 1933, he visited the home of Siegmund Warburg, whose banking family had long been influential in both Germany and New York, at Tiergartenstrasse 2a, the lovely boulevard that ran along the edge of the Tiergarten.
Warburg was deeply worried about the Nazis’ intentions toward his fellow German Jews and the impact of critical comments about Hitler’s government made by Jewish leaders in America. At the meeting was an associate of Warburg’s, a Dr. Melchior. “ They were obviously much worried and concerned for themselves, their business, and their people,” McDonald wrote in his diary. “I told them I was to dine later with Hanfstaengl. They said I might tell him that their people were considering a public statement signed by a hundred prominent Jews for the rest of the world to leave the [solution of the] problem to Germany.”
That night, McDonald dined with Ernst Hanfstaengl, a top aide to Hitler whose job was to manipulate foreign journalists, who called him by the nickname “Putzi.” He was a graduate of Harvard University and had met Franklin Roosevelt years before. His living in the United States had done little to make him a different sort of man. After meeting Hanfstaengl at his apartment at Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse 30 near the Reichstag building, McDonald walked with him to a nearby restaurant to have a meal and talk.
“Eventually we reached the subject of the Jews, especially the decree just announced for Monday’s boycott,” McDonald wrote in his diary. “He defended it unqualifiedly, saying: ‘When I told Hitler of the agitation and boycott abroad, Hitler beat his fists and exclaimed, ‘Now we shall show them that we are not afraid of international Jewry. The Jews must be crushed. Their fellows abroad have played into our hands.’ ”
As the two men ate their dinner, Hanfstaengl spelled out Hitler’s plans, abandoning any effort to couch his words. He didn’t go on about the humiliation of 1918 or the harsh economic climate after the Great War—he didn’t touch on these subjects at all. “Then he launched into a terrifying account of Nazi plans: The boycott is only a beginning. It can be made to strangle all Jewish business. Slowly, implacably it can be extended with ruthless and unshakable discipline. Our plans go much further. During the war we had 1,500,000 prisoners; 600,000 Jews would be simple. Each Jew has his SA [storm trooper]. In a single night it could be finished. (He did not explain, but I assume he meant nothing more than wholesale arrests and imprisonment.)
“I protested the danger to Germany’s economic life. He laughed: ‘The Jews are the vampire sucking German blood. We shall not be strong until we have freed ourselves of them.’ ”
McDonald, who by then had made strong connections with the foreign journalists based in Berlin, particularly the Americans, brought up several of them whom the German government had openly harassed and were attempting to force out of the country. “About Mowrer he said, ‘Of course, he is a Jew and so is his wife. So also Knickerbocker.’ What of Enderis and Birchall? I asked. He answered, ‘You know what hand feeds them.’ ”
Edgar Mowrer wrote for the Chicago Daily News and was president of the Association of Foreign Correspondents in Berlin, a position the German government wanted him to give up as a first step to leaving the country. Guido Enderis wrote for the New York Times, Frederick Birchall was the paper’s Berlin bureau chief, and H. R. Knickerbocker wrote for the New York Evening Post. Hanfstaengl thought them all troublemakers.
* * *
In Paris, going about his new job with one eye on events unfolding in Germany, it was all Shirer could do to keep up on developments in the French government. He knew about conditions in Berlin for his colleagues, nearly all of whom—Mowrer, Knickerbocker, Birchall, and Sigrid Schultz—were close friends. For now he had to worry about his own work.
With all the political and cultural changes, it felt very much as if he were in a different country from the Paris he had lived in before. When he was in the city then, he wrote, “The theaters, concert halls, cabarets, restaurants, cafes were crowded. Prices were reasonable. The art museums and galleries attracted great throngs. Books poured from the presses and were bought and read … . Now, in the bleak January of 1934, that Paris, that France, seemed gone … . Now, I found to my surprise that rowdy, antiparliamentary Fascist leagues had sprung up in France like mushrooms.”
With fighting common in the streets between rival groups and members of Fascist organizations battling the police, Eric Hawkins decided to take Shirer off the night copydesk and put him on the Paris streets as a Herald reporter. Suddenly, the unhappiness that had gripped Shirer tightly over his job on the desk evaporated. He was a reporter again, and he was covering a major story. “ To my utter astonishment it began to look to me as if France, which seemed so stable and peaceful … was drifting, like Spain, toward civil war.”
The Depression had drained France of its economic vitality and its people of their savings and optimism. Among many groups that sprang up in the bitter atmosphere of economic fear, the financial collapse forged a deep-seated contempt for the government in power. With wages falling, as well as production in large industries, misery and resentment spread. In response, right-wing leagues sprang up, demanding an overthrow of the government. Right-wing newspapers advocated the establishment of a Fascist government built on the Mussolini model in Italy. One of the biggest organizations, Action Française, which published its own newspaper, sent out its members to storm government buildings. Another of the groups was the Solidarité Française, established by a perfume magnate. Shirer saw the group’s shock troops in the street—“outfitted in blue shirts, black berets and jackboots, and their slogan, which they shouted in the streets, was ‘France for the French.’ ”
Fueling the resentment even further were a series of financial scandals. “In the last years of the 1920’s and stretching into the 1930’s one financial scandal after another followed, all having the same pattern,” Shirer wrote. “Crooks, with the aid of bribed cabinet members, senators and deputies, were able to set up in business, including banking, and then, when they were caught, evade trial or have their cases continually postponed or the charges quashed, sometimes by the minister of justice himself, who was in on the deal.”
In December 1933, Shirer wrote, the newspapers reported the arrest of Serge Alexandre, a Russian-born Jew—as the papers noted—on widespread fraud charges. He’d been arrested several years earlier for bilking investors, and he had a long criminal record as well as an association with men in power. Nothing seemed to stick against Alexandre. Within a day, rioting broke out in Paris. A mob of several thousand stormed the Chamber of Deputies. Barricades went up in the streets. “They overturned newspaper kiosks and set them on fire,” Shirer wrote. “They jammed the third-rail conduits furnishing electrical power to the streetcars, which, along with the public buses, were halted. A police report I saw a few days later described the damage as the worst in Paris in twenty years. The spirit of insurrection was spreading in the city.”
Riots erupted almost daily toward the end of January. Covering the action in the streets, Shirer noted the injuries to police and reporters. He heard the mob shouting “Hang the Deputies” within earshot of government officials. The government teetered and then fell, pushed out by the revelation of yet another banking scandal, this one involving a top minister in the government. Forming a new government was the Socialist Édouard Daladier, whom Shirer met soon after he took over the government. Almost from their first meeting the two men hit it off. Daladier, a veteran of the fighting at Verdun, had been named premier just the year before, but his government fell within months. “Now in February, 1934, as the battles in the streets of Paris grew in intensity, Daladier appeared to many to be the man France needed.”
On February 6, acting on instructions from Hawkins, Shirer went to the Place de la Concorde to cover a demonstration. By early evening the street was packed—“several thousand demonstrators who were standing their ground against repeated charges of mounted, steel-helmeted” police. “A mob was crowded behind the railings, pelting the police and Guards with stones, bricks, garden chairs and iron grilles ripped up from around trees,” Shirer wrote, “the rioters were using sticks with razor blades attached to one end to slash away at the horses and legs of the mounted men, and they were throwing marbles and firecrackers at the hooves. A number of horses went down and their riders were mauled.”
Shirer pushed his way through the mob to reach the Hôtel de Crillon and fled inside. Up on a third-floor balcony, a large group of frightened reporters had gathered to escape the violence. Shots were fired from the street, and a female correspondent standing immediately to Shirer’s left collapsed. “When we bent over her, blood was flowing from her face from a bullet hole in the center of her forehead,” Shirer wrote. “She was dead.” He never learned her name.
Inside the nearby Chamber of Deputies, gunshots and the angry chants of the demonstrators could be heard. A mob grabbed Édouard Herriot, a former premier, and tried to throw him into the Seine. He was rescued by the police. At the Crillon, Shirer phoned in stories to the Herald newsroom. As evening settled over the city, thousands of war veterans took to the streets as well, carrying flags and banners demanding law and order. Shirer fell in with them and watched as they confronted police who blocked them from moving toward the Chamber of Deputies.
For the next several hours, a mob Shirer estimated at nearly thirty thousand tried to cross the bridges over the river and seize the Chamber. After more than a dozen attempts, the mob tried again, and wholesale gunfire broke out on the part of the police. The mob reformed, and, from Shirer’s viewpoint, it looked certain that they would break through.
“Suddenly a large squadron of Mobile and Republican Guard cavalry, with drawn sabers, surged into the square, followed by several hundred police and foot guards brandishing their white batons. The surprised rioters gave way; they started to run. I could scarcely believe it. Within a few minutes the Place de la Concorde was cleared and the horse guards were chasing stragglers through the avenues that led from the square.”
* * *
As preoccupied as he was with events in Paris, Shirer saw events unfolding in Germany and Austria as equally unsettling. In his wife’s home country, on February 12, 1934, a week after the huge rioting in Paris, the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, set troops against Socialists in the public housing projects—the very place Shirer had written about that drew the ire of Colonel McCormick. Hundreds were killed and injured. In his diary, Shirer wrote: “And there goes democracy in Austria, one more state gone.”
In Germany at the end of June, Hitler set out to crush his own SA, arresting and killing many of its leaders, including Ernst Röhm, one of his earliest and most militant supporters. Even as he was repelled by the violence, Shirer saw in Germany a great opportunity for a correspondent. On the night of June 30, after hearing about the purge against the SA and Röhm’s murder, Shirer wrote in his diary: “Wish I could get a post in Berlin. It’s a story I’d like to cover.”
On the afternoon of August 9, Shirer was sitting in the Herald newsroom going through a stack of Paris newspapers when his phone rang. It was Arno Dosch-Fleurot, who had covered the Great War and stayed on in Europe to write for the New York World newspaper. He now ran Universal Service, a news wire company owned by William Randolph Hearst. He offered Shirer a job in the service’s Berlin bureau, named the salary, and Shirer quickly accepted.
Writing about the phone call years later, Shirer described Dosch-Fleurot as “a gentleman of the old school, courtly, wise, warm, with a fine mind and a passion not only for journalism but for history, literature and the arts.” Overjoyed at the job offer, Shirer bolted from the Herald newsroom and into the bar of a nearby hotel, where he ordered a double cognac.
The next morning, a letter from Dosch-Fleurot arrived at Shirer’s Paris apartment. The stationery showed that Universal Service Inc. had offices in Berlin, at Dorotheenstrasse 19, and in the World Building in New York City.
The job you have accepted is that of correspondent in Berlin of the Universal Service, that is to say, for the Hearst morning newspapers and other newspapers which buy the service. I was recently put in charge of the Universal Service for Central Europe with the title of “director of the Berlin bureau.” That makes me automatically chief correspondent in these parts, so you are to be the second man in Berlin, except when I am away. Mr. Von Wiegand who has been the chief correspondent of the Universal Service abroad is often in Berlin also and, when here, is overlord of the whole show.
Your pay will be sixty dollars a week with equalization. That is approximately one hundred dollars when it gets into marks … . The Universal Service will pay yours and your wife’s … expenses from Paris to Berlin and will also foot your hotel and other living expenses for the first week in Berlin. You will find the work very interesting here. This is a really good opening and the Universal Service has a habit of keeping and looking after the men who serve it well.
On August 18, Shirer wrote back to Dosch-Fleurot, informing him that he and Tess would arrive in Berlin by train from Paris on August 25. “Don’t go to all the trouble of meeting us. We’ll go to the Continental Hotel.”
Soon after Shirer got the job, Jay Allen wrote Shirer to congratulate him. Now it was Allen who needed help finding work as a correspondent again. “I meant at once to congratulate you on your job with Hearst,” he wrote. “As much as we dislike him we realize, don’t we, that a job is a job, that a job with Dosch-Fleurot is a very good job, that a job in Berlin at a time like this is close to ideal.”
Bill and Tess arrived at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at ten o’clock on the evening of August 25. As they stepped off the train, two men greeted them as if they were on an official mission. One of the men, leading Shirer away from the train, shouted at him, “Are you Herr … ?” Shirer could not make out the name and the man shouted it again. Alarmed, Shirer pulled his passport out of a coat pocket and offered it as evidence that he was not who the man was looking for.
“So,” the man said, lowering his voice. “You are Herr Shirer.”
“None other,” Shirer said, “as you can see by my passport.”
At the Continental, Shirer booked the biggest room available. He told Tess he’d come up with a pun that summed up the last months of their lives: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.” Exhausted from the long train ride, he ached to sleep, to report fresh for work in the newsroom of Universal Service in the morning. He wrote in his diary: “Tomorrow begins a new chapter for me.”