THE WATERING HOLE
The knock on the apartment door on the morning of April 11, 1935, startled Tess, who had not expected company. Her husband had left early for the Universal Service office and would not return until late in the day. Some nights he did not return until after midnight, preferring to go with his colleagues to the Taverne, an Italian-themed restaurant run by a gregarious German named Willy Lehman, that was the informal meeting place and something of a safe haven for Berlin’s foreign correspondents. She was startled when she opened the door. Standing there was a man, an older gentleman. His face was bruised. When he introduced himself, Tess learned he was a friend of a friend. He needed help and a place to stay. Some biographical details followed: he was a distinguished veteran, having lost an arm and a leg fighting for Germany during the Great War; he was a well-known Berlin lawyer; he was a Jew.
When he wrote in his diary later that night, Shirer called the lawyer “Dr. S” to conceal his identity if the Gestapo ever searched the flat. On the morning he knocked on the door of the Shirer apartment, the lawyer had just been released by the Gestapo after several months in prison. Tess told her husband the man was “a little out of his head” and afraid to return to his family. Why the man had sought help from the Shirers is not explained in the diary, although Shirer wrote, “Many Jews come to us these days for advice or help in getting to England or America, but unfortunately there is little we can do for them.” Perhaps the man went to the apartment because he believed the Jewish couple who owned it might still be living there.
Writing about the incident a half century later, Shirer expanded on his and Tess’s assistance to Jews and to the lawyer in particular. “We foreign correspondents tried to help the Jews the best we could,” he wrote. “Tess and I sheltered some we knew, who had gone into hiding, until they could escape abroad. We used our contacts at the embassies and consulates of the U.S.A., Britain, France and Switzerland to facilitate their getting visas … . Sometimes Tess and I would put up a Jewish friend, or a friend of a friend, who had come out of the jail beaten badly, caring for him until he recovered enough to return to his family without shocking them too much.”
While in the diary Shirer wrote that Tess “fortified him with whiskey, cheered him up, and sent him home,” he told the story another way years later and added two significant details. “The head of the Jewish War Veterans Bund, he had been incarcerated without any formal charges and given the usual treatment. When he came to us one morning he was so battered in body and spirit he did not dare to face his family. We hid him in one of the rooms of our spacious studio apartment until he was healed enough to go home. A few weeks later we were able to spirit him out to London.”
Throughout the spring, Shirer, growing more comfortable in his role and speaking German well, covered several of Hitler’s speeches, even though he was the number two man in the bureau. Dosch-Fleurot, Shirer’s boss, covered one speech Hitler gave at Tempelhof airport, and later in the month Shirer packed into the Reichstag with the other correspondents to hear Hitler shout “Germany wants peace!” assuring the world that he had no interest in annexing Austria or amassing heavy armaments. “The man is truly a superb orator and in the atmosphere of the hand-picked Reichstag, with its six hundred or so sausage-necked, shaven-headed, brown-clad yes men, who rise and shout almost every time Hitler pauses for b reath, I suppose he is convincing to Germans who listen to him,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
Afterward Shirer ran back to his office to file his story. After drinks with his colleagues at the Taverne, Shirer went to bed, “tired and a little puzzled by the speech, which some of the British and French correspondents at the Taverne tonight thought might really after all pave the way for several years of peace.”
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On any given night, a dozen or more foreign correspondents gathered at the Taverne to talk about events and how to cover them, and to complain about the hardships they endured. Some nights the reporters brought their wives. Here they could meet, eat and drink, and talk amongst themselves without being bothered by Lehman and his Belgian wife, or feeling they were being spied on, or that someone was writing down what they said to each other and forwarding it to Gestapo headquarters on the Alexanderplatz. The fear of expulsion faded as the correspondents took their seats at their regular table and settled in for the evening. Nightly, the group had a corner table reserved just for them—“and from about ten p.m. until three or four in the morning it is usually filled.” Shirer went most nights after filing his story to compare notes with the others and to see what they had written and what they had heard, but also to drink, eat, and socialize.
The informal head of the gathering of American, British, and sometimes French journalists was the Englishman Norman Ebbutt. Shirer regarded him highly, and they usually sat together, talking and happily puffing away on their pipes, filling the air over their heads with clouds of tobacco smoke. It was useful for Shirer, who’d been in the country only since the previous August, to associate with someone who had so rich and varied a list of contacts and who knew so much about the players and the day-to-day routines and hardships involved in covering the secretive offices of a police state. Ebbutt, Shirer wrote in his diary, “has contacts throughout the government, party, churches, and army, and has a keen intelligence.”
On one of the nights when they sat together, Ebbutt complained to Shirer that the London Times was not publishing all the stories he filed. He feared that the paper did not want to print stories critical of the German government and went so far as to suggest that Nazi supporters in London had acquired a voice at the paper and were now asserting their views, steering the coverage in a pro-German direction. “He is discouraged and talks of quitting,” Shirer wrote in his diary. Soon, Ebbutt began giving Shirer his tips, since he believed that, if he wrote them up himself, his paper would not print them.
Others around the big corner table on most nights were Ed Beattie of the United Press, “with a moon-faced Churchillian countenance behind which is a nimble wit and a great store of funny stories and songs”; Fred Oechsner, also of the United Press, and his wife, Dorothy—“he a quiet type but an able correspondent, she blond, pretty, ebullient, with a low, hoarse voice”; Pierre Huss, of International News Service, “slick, debonair, ambitious, and on better terms with Nazi officials than almost any other”; Guido Enderis of the New York Times, “aging in his sixties but sporting invariably a gaudy race-track suit with a loud red necktie, minding the Nazis less than most”; Al Ross, Enderis’s assistant, “bulky, sleepy, slow-going, and lovable” ’; Wally Deuel of the Chicago Daily News, “youthful, quiet, studious, extremely intelligent, his wife Mary Deuel, much the same as he is, with large pretty eyes, they both very much in love”; Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune, “the only woman correspondent in our ranks, buoyant, cheerful, and always well informed”; and Otto Tolischus, also of the New York Times, “complicated, profound, studious, with a fine penchant for getting at the bottom of things.”
At the Taverne on some nights was Martha Dodd—“pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer” and barely in her mid-twenties. She was a woman with close friendships inside the German government and also with officials of other governments with embassies in Berlin. Being the American ambassador’s daughter suited her well, and she played the part to the fullest. Others who came irregularly were Louis Lochner of the Associated Press, and John Elliott of the New York Herald Tribune, “a very able and learned correspondent, being a teetotaler and non-smoker and much addicted—as we should all be—to his books.”
The true oddball among them all was Martha Dodd, who cultivated close relationships with the correspondents who also covered her father, and who always seemed to be privy to a wealth of information that she should not have had. She dropped names—of American officials, of Germans high up in the government, of other foreign officials in the tight diplomatic circle in Berlin, particularly Russians—and acted as though she were on intimate terms with some of them. Some of the correspondents steered clear of her, even as they needed to be on good terms with her father; Shirer did not mind her at all. She was a regular at press events, including the big yearly Foreign Press Ball.
Not long after President Roosevelt sent her father to Berlin to be the American ambassador, Martha set out to “capture Berlin,” according to writer Shareen Blair Brysac. “Soon princes, the press, members of the foreign diplomatic corps, and acolytes of three secret services would be at her carefully shod feet.” Brysac described Dodd’s friendships back in the United States, including those with the film director Otto Preminger, the poet Carl Sandburg, who may have been her lover, and Thornton Wilder, along with a wide assortment of others from the worlds of high finance and academia who made up a Dodd “fan club.” There was also a deserted husband in New York. “Martha was bright and talented,” Brysac wrote. “She was also impulsive and indiscreet and would acquire a Byronesque reputation of being mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Martha and her father hosted parties at the embassy that featured members of the “hard-drinking, fast-moving international set,” Brysac wrote, along with journalists and people who liked to be referred to by meaningless royal titles. Her politics, if she had any, were bizarre to the extreme—she flirted with Fascism and later Stalinism. “Initially, Hitler’s Germany impressed Martha,” Brysac wrote. “Conditions had improved under the new regime. Her letters home, reflecting her father’s initial optimism, were enthusiastic.” Brysac quotes from one gushing letter, in which Martha praises the violent anti-Semite street b rawler Horst Wessel, who had been killed in 1930 and was then elevated to sainthood by the Nazis: “The youth are bright faced and hopeful, they sing to the noble ghost of Horst Wessel with shining eyes and unerring tongues. Wholesome and beautiful lads, these Germans, good, sincere, healthy, mystic, brutal, fine, hopeful, capable of death and love, deep, rich, wondrous and strange beings.”
Martha went dancing with the German foreign minister’s son, Brysac wrote; she flew in the airplane of Ernst Udet, the great ace from the world war; Göring took her falcon hunting at his estate; she thought Goebbels “had a great sense of humor.” In her private life, which wasn’t so private, she “liked sleeping with attractive men, and that’s how she learned about politics and history.” At one point, Hanfstaengl tried to arrange a date between Martha and Hitler.
At a party given by Sigrid Schultz, which Shirer presumably attended, Martha met Boris Vinogradov, the first secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. He met her later at a nightclub, Brysac wrote, and they soon began a relationship—an official of Stalin’s government sleeping with the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany. Their affair was well underway by the spring and summer of 1934 in the months before Shirer’s arrival in Berlin. Martha also found a way to juggle relationships with a Gestapo official, whom Brysac identifies as one Rolf Diels. She had enough affairs in the American embassy that the embassy’s butler referred to the building as a whorehouse.
* * *
For Shirer and his colleagues, gathering news that was not handed out as official truth was a monumental task. Trying to speak to anyone in the government was an act of frustration for Shirer and potentially dangerous for the official. Developing friendships with German journalists from the big newspapers was equally difficult and frustrating, since the papers had all been purged of anyone not racially “qualified,” as well as of anyone not fully supportive of the Nazis. All reporters working for the German newspapers were members of the Nazi-controlled Reich Press Chamber. Large numbers of journalists who could not or would not meet the new requirements either quit and went into internal exile or fled to the West. Official harassment of foreign correspondents and their bureaus in Berlin was commonplace. In mid-1935 Shirer wrote: “We have been approached for commenting on the disappearance of Der Tag with regret. However, we lack all understanding for an attitude which welcomes conformity and monotony in the German Press.”
In late August, Dosch-Fleurot wrote to Hanfstaengl to try to head off his criticism about a story Universal Service had filed that had run in the New York American on July 24. The tone of the letter is more than a bit groveling, as might be expected of Dosch-Fleurot, who was trying to protect his wire service from bullying by the government.
“Thank you for calling my attention to the Berlin dispatch in the New York American … . As only a portion of this dispatch, and not the portion which you criticized, was sent by Universal Service, I have protested to New York against the use of the initials (US) on this story by the New York American. As a rule our papers do not change or add to Berlin dispatches, although they sometimes rewrite the ‘leads’ in a more sensational form than we cable. I shall always be very glad to have your criticisms of any news stories in the American newspapers accredited with Universal Service (US) or International News Service (INS).”
All the correspondents found it extraordinarily difficult to write the stories they wanted without the thought in the backs of their minds that they would be read in US papers and their contents reported back to Hanfstaengl. The writer could censor himself—not write anything that might draw criticism and threats of expulsion— or write the story he thought should be written and take his chances. Even more challenging was protecting those few sources of information from arrest.
While he was in Berlin, Shirer fretted daily that one of his sources—he had a number of them—would be arrested by the Gestapo and executed. Nowhere in the diary he kept in Berlin does he mention a name or position, fearing that the diary might be seized and used to incriminate someone. He wrote that he had been interrogated by the Gestapo, in his office and in the apartment, but he said little except that he offered them no help at all.
Years later, Shirer wrote that two influential sources of his had been arrested, and the effect was to sink him into despair. “When sometimes one of my sources did get nabbed and, in two cases, sentenced to death, I would walk the streets of the capital, dazed and despairing, searching my conscience and my memory to try to discover if anything I had done, any slip I might have made, could possibly have implicated him,” he wrote.
In his writing a half century after the events recorded in his diary, Shirer identified one of his sources as a “fearless young Protestant pastor.” They met after dark in the Tiergarten near Shirer’s flat or on a busy street or at a railway station; other times, throwing all caution aside, the man came to Shirer’s flat to talk. He does not name the pastor but says he was arrested and sentenced to death. Another was a journalist he identified as “X” in a January 1936 diary entry. The man was an editor of the Börsen Zeitung who secretly gave Shirer copies of Goebbels’s daily instructions to the foreign press. In the January 1936 entry, Shirer wrote that the instructions from Goebbels “made rich reading, ordering daily suppression of this truth and the substitution of that lie.”
Later, Shirer was greatly relieved when he learned that both the editor’s and the pastor’s death sentences had been commuted. They would spend the rest of the Thousand Year Reich in prison. Shirer vowed in another diary entry not to talk to anyone, or encourage anyone to work with him, if it risked the person’s arrest and execution. Shirer knew that other German officials had provided him with information he was sure was wrong, and he suspected they were working for the Gestapo to try to entrap him. One, a young man in the Foreign Office, admitted to Shirer one night when they were drinking together that he had been assigned by the Gestapo to follow him. A very good and reliable source was a woman who held an important post in the radio division of the Propaganda Ministry. Shirer knew she loved a Jewish artist who had fled the country. She wore a party pin on her lapel as she went about her work, and Shirer came to both like and trust her. They met in secret, and she supplied him with information about the inner workings and plans of the government, at least as she knew them.
* * *
Early in the summer of 1935, Bill and Tess moved out of the flat on the Tauentzienstrasse to one in the Tempelhof district of the city. Neither wanted to be in the flat owned by the Jewish couple when the heat of summer arrived, as it was on the top floor of the building, just under the roof, and warmed up uncomfortably on sunny days.
If the owners of the flat were anonymous before, now, with the move, they disappeared entirely from the pages of his diary. However he felt about them as individuals, how he felt about their treatment by the German government, Shirer did not write down. If Shirer—and the other American and British correspondents who almost certainly had similar encounters, involving scores of other Jews in Berlin—felt a moral quandary as to what was the right course of action to take as they carried out their roles as correspondents, he did not write about it. Nor did he use his diaries or letters, at least the ones he saved, for a debate on the role of the journalist when watching injustice on a large scale take place right before his eyes. This is not to say he or the other reporters did not care about the dire conditions in which the German Jews found themselves; everything in Shirer’s character, all the words he wrote about himself and his life, strongly suggests otherwise. He was in Berlin to report on the fundamental transformation of the German state and the movement toward a world war, after all, not to act as a lifesaver or advocate for a beaten minority. Nonetheless, the German government’s war against the Jews went on without the foreign press getting its hackles up.
The Shirers’ new landlord was a different sort of German—a flying ace from the Great War who Shirer refers to in his diary as Captain Koehl. As the first landlord was Jewish and had to flee the country, the new landlord was, as Shirer described him, something of a dissident. Koehl and his wife were acquaintances of some of Shirer’s journalist friends, so Koehl, however critical of the government he may have been, seems to have moved in important circles. “He is one of the few men in Germany with enough courage not to knuckle down to Göring and the Nazis,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “As a result he is completely out, having even lost his job with Lufthansa. A fervent Catholic and a man of strong character, he prefers to retire to his little farm in the south of Germany rather than curry Nazi favour. He is one of a very few. I’ve taken a great liking to him.”
In an undated letter addressed to “Herr Koehl,” Shirer wrote that he would soon be going to America on a trip and then referred to the mood of Germany in an unguarded way that might have gotten Koehl into trouble had the letter been opened. “Yes, the political situation is dark indeed. I suppose during 1936, though, there will be a decision one way or the other, for war or against.” On a lighter note, he added, “Frau Hensel has been here for two days collecting your things.”
As summer wore on, Shirer grew weary of the demands of his work and eagerly planned for a trip to America. He hoped to sail to New York in mid-September, which he knew was when the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg rally was scheduled. It was more important for him to leave Germany for a brief respite than to attend what would have been his second party rally. In August he wrote a friend to explain why he was so eager to leave Germany.
“I’ve been in Europe with a year’s interlude in the Near East and India, for ten years—since I was 21—with only two weeks off in America, and that during the fall of 1929 when the stock market was crashing and many of our citizens seemed stark mad,” he wrote, forgetting his and Tess’s extended stay on the Spanish coast. “And after ten years one can become very weary of the Old World and its quarrels and of the role of the eternal outsider, looked on suspiciously in the more pleasant countries, and regarded as an outright enemy and ‘foreign liar’ as in this country.”
He wrote to his friend Nicholas Roosevelt, who lived on Long Island not far from the family estate of his distant relative Theodore Roosevelt. After a number of years in Europe, Nicholas Roosevelt was back in New York writing editorials for the Herald Tribune. In August, after learning from Shirer about the upcoming trip, Roosevelt wrote to say he wanted to get together with him when he arrived. Shirer also wrote his brother, John, to tell him when he would be in New York, and to make the sad point that he had not seen their mother since 1929. It was nothing to be proud of, not seeing his mother in six years, and Shirer felt the sting of it, wondering as he did on many occasions if he’d made the correct choices for his career. She was in her mid-sixties and lived in Cedar Rapids. He loved his mother, knowing full well what she had done for her children, and was haunted by the thought that she might die before he saw her again.
Tess stayed behind, to visit relatives in Austria, and also because the couple did not have enough money for tickets for both of them. Docking at Southampton in Britain, Shirer received word that Tess had come down with an acute attack of appendicitis while hiking in the Austrian mountains. “An ox cart, a bus and a train had just managed to get to Vienna in time for an operation that saved her life,” Shirer wrote a friend. A few weeks later, Shirer wrote his brother asking for a loan of $100 to help pay for Tess’s operation.
After he reached America on board the German liner the Bremen and visited his brother and mother—who had come east to see her son in New Jersey—Shirer took the train out to Long Island, to Roosevelt’s mansion, for a weekend in the country. He had last seen Roosevelt in Budapest, where he was stationed in the US Embassy. They were very different kinds of men—Shirer liberal and left leaning, Roosevelt conservative and outspoken—but they got along well and enjoyed each other’s company.
Over the course of the weekend, the two men argued, not over European political developments but over domestic affairs in the United States, where Roosevelt was profoundly worried that the New Deal would crush the life and democracy out of the country. “He was too preoccupied with Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘dictatorship’ to allow for much time to argue European affairs,” Shirer wrote in his diary. Years later, Shirer wrote that Roosevelt behaved as if he thought FDR was “the devil himself, intent on leading the Republic to Bolshevik ruin. I could scarcely believe it. Indeed it seemed to me that Franklin Roosevelt had saved capitalism in America—despite the capitalists. We sat up arguing through the night, my good friend looking at me more and more as if I were crazy.”
Shirer knew from reading the New York papers that the German Reichstag had met in Nuremberg while he was in New York and passed sweeping anti-Jewish legislation known as the Nuremberg Laws. The news barely registered in America. “No one, at least in New York, paid much attention,” he wrote. “Most Americans I talked to that fall, even Jews, did not grasp the enormity of Hitler’s crimes … . I kept getting the feeling that they thought I was a bit ‘emotional’ and ‘sensational’ on the subject.”
After the weekend was over, Shirer stayed with his mother and brother a few more days until he received an order from the Universal Service office in New York to return to Germany immediately on board the German liner Europa. Italian forces under Mussolini were threatening to invade Abyssinia, and Dosch-Fleurot was being reassigned to Rome. Seymour Berkson, head of the Universal Service office in New York, told Shirer that upon his return he would take over the management of the Berlin bureau.