THE DIRTY LIAR
Shirer arrived back on German soil at the end of September 1935, two weeks after the close of the party rally at Nuremberg, to find the government even more secretive and more difficult to deal with than before. The most minor requests to bureaucrats produced loud arguments. Officials in the Propaganda Ministry who dealt with foreign journalists were more arrogant, and the passage of the Nuremberg Laws had emboldened the wing of the party that wanted to lower the hammer on the Jews. There was no time for Shirer to pause and think back on the reunion with his brother and his mother or to dwell on the thought that he should perhaps give serious consideration to moving back to the United States. He and Tess would stay in Berlin as long as they could.
There was a greater degree of concern among the foreign correspondents that any wrong move—ask the wrong question, write the wrong story, speak to the wrong people—would result in a visit from the Gestapo and an order to leave the country. All feared that any Germans around them—housekeepers, office assistants, part-time employees of any sort—were Gestapo plants listening to their every word. All worried that a vacation or an assignment outside the country’s borders could result in their being denied reentry. Beyond that concern was a genuine worry that the government’s efforts to punish them could be far worse than expulsion, and that they—and the American Embassy under Dodd in Berlin—would be powerless to prevent it.
For Shirer and a number of the correspondents who privately loathed the Nazis, taking any sort of position, even a private one mentioned only among themselves at the Taverne, could be a very bad move. They had all watched with alarm as their colleagues—Edgar Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News in 1933 and Dorothy Thompson of the New York Evening Post in 1934—were ordered out of the country, while others were summoned to official offices, where they were berated and threatened. Their goal was to stay and continue to work, not to draw criticism and be expelled on short notice. They had to watch themselves, and that meant, to one degree or another, censoring what they said and wrote.
For his part, Mowrer seems to have been one of the only American correspondents in Germany, prior to his expulsion, to have referred to the Nazis’ “barbarous campaign” against the Jews as a sign of far worse to come. In 1933, he used the word “extermination” as a possible future outcome. He was probably not using the word to suggest that the German government would round up its Jews and attempt to murder them all. Neither he nor any other observer could possibly have seen that coming. “Those who today claim that the world should have recognized from the outset in 1933 that the Final Solution was in the offing are using historical hindsight, a tool that was obviously not available to contemporary observers,” historian Deborah E. Lipstadt has written.
As historian Michael Burleigh has noted, the Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, together known as the Nuremberg Laws, satisfied those in the party who wanted to move aggressively against the Jews. They wanted a program, and new facts on the ground, and they got them. “Under the first law, Jews forfeited German citizenship, becoming ‘state subjects,’ ” Burleigh has written. “The second law prohibited marriage and sexual intercourse between ‘Aryans’ and Jews; the employment of female ‘Aryan’ servants under forty-five years of age in Jewish households; and finally the hoisting by Jews of either German flag.”
Those Jewish war veterans who had served on the western front during the Great War fell under the umbrella of the law. If the members of this group thought that somehow their service would allow them to fall between the cracks of government efforts against the Jews, the passage of the Nuremberg Laws dashed all hopes. The one-armed, one-legged veteran who knocked on the door of the Shirer flat looking for help was no longer a citizen of the country for which he had lost both limbs. These veterans could not fly a German flag, let alone the swastika flag, which Hitler now declared the national flag.
In late July, before Shirer had sailed to the United States on board the German liner Bremen, the ship had docked in New York Harbor. Passengers disembarked and supplies were taken on board for the return trip to Germany. Before the Bremen pulled away, a mob managed to get onto the ship’s deck, where they pulled down the big swastika flag and tossed it into the Hudson River. In his speech at the party rally in September, Göring blamed this incident on “an impudent Jew, in his bottomless hatred” for Germany.
As 1935 came to a close, the tension between government officials and a number of foreign correspondents increased dramatically. For days running, Shirer found it hard to work and to write anything good enough to cable back to New York. There were few facts to find and fewer reliable people to discuss them with. Goebbels, whose Propaganda Ministry managed all the country’s journalists and the news they put out, began calling out individual correspondents by name, using highly provocative language. He labeled H. R. Knickerbocker a “dirty liar.” A second correspondent, Otto Tolischus of the New York Times, was threatened as well, as was Norman Ebbutt. Shirer’s friend John Elliott, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, left Berlin for Paris out of sheer disgust at Goebbels and his staff and concern that he would be expelled.
Shirer made only one diary entry in December, on the thirtieth, when he jotted down a short paragraph in which he said that he and other American correspondents—presumably Wally Deuel and Sigrid Schultz—had gone to the American embassy to see Dodd and to meet the visiting US undersecretary of state, William Phillips. There was an urgent need for the meeting: Shirer and the others wanted Phillips’s assurance that he would intervene if they faced expulsion. Their hopes were quickly dashed.
“We asked him what action Washington would take if the Nazis began expelling us,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “He gave an honest answer. He said: None.”
* * *
As the year came to an end, Shirer set out for the mountain village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen to write about planning for the Winter Olympics, which were scheduled to start in early February. Germany had been awarded both the winter and the summer games, and Shirer wanted to write about the preparations for the games as well as show how Hitler hoped to showcase his government’s achievements and cast its actions in the best possible light. Three years had passed since he had been named chancellor; his government had opened concentration camps for political opponents, forced Jews out of their careers, and passed laws removing them as citizens of the country, but the world would arrive in the Bavarian Alps for the winter games as if none of this had happened in the country.
Making his way into the snow-filled Alps, Shirer noticed that the ubiquitous signs “Jews Get Out” and “Jews Unwanted” had been removed from the roadsides. He could think of only one reason for this: the government didn’t want international visitors arriving for the games to see them. He did see one sign that read: “Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve. Jews 75 kilometers an Hour!” but others were gone, as if an army of volunteers had fanned out across the country in the dead of night and taken them all down.
When Shirer returned to Berlin, he wrote a four-part series for the wire service on preparations for the games, noting in his final story that “All Jew baiting is officially off in Germany during the Olympics,” and mailed it to New York. He had all but forgotten the series when, early on the morning of January 23, three weeks into the new year of 1936, the phone rang in the apartment. When Shirer, exhausted from a late night of work, picked up the phone, he heard the loud, angry voice of Wilfred Bade, a “fanatical Nazi careerist” in the Propaganda Ministry.
“Have you been in Garmisch recently?” Bade shouted.
“No,” Shirer responded.
“I see,” Bade said. “You haven’t been there and yet you have the dishonesty to write a fake story about the Jews there—”
“Wait a minute,” Shirer said, “you can’t call me dishonest.”
The line went dead as Bade slammed down the phone.
At noon, while Shirer was getting ready to go to the office, Tess turned on the radio to hear the announcer denouncing her husband by name. The stories, the announcer charged, were lies meant to embarrass Germany and force countries to boycott the games. That night, when he wrote in his diary, Shirer noted that the stories had also accused local Nazi officials of taking all the good hotels in Garmisch for themselves. Tess was horrified, but Shirer continued to dress, after which the couple shared a quick lunch and Shirer left for the office on the Dorotheenstrasse. He knew the dispute would not quietly go away. He was now in the spotlight.
Arriving at his desk, Shirer scanned the city’s newspapers and saw he was being singled out “as a liar and a cheat and a ‘German hater.’ ” His phone began ringing, one call after another from journalist friends advising him to ignore the attacks. It would blow over. To fight back would only push his name further up the list, surely kept on a desk in the Propaganda Ministry, of foreign correspondents to be ordered out of the country for their attitudes and dishonest reporting. The Germans who worked in the office and in the other newspaper offices in the building came to Shirer’s desk to speak with him, expecting the Gestapo to show up and drive him to the airport.
With the arrival on his desk of new editions of the afternoon papers, Shirer grew angrier. He wanted to confront Bade. At this moment, seething over what they were saying about him, he did not care what they did in response. Picking up the phone on his desk, he called Bade’s office and demanded to see him, only to be told he was not in. Every few minutes he called again, only to be told the same thing. Rushing out of the office, Shirer walked to the Propaganda Ministry building and, ignoring the rules of formality, entered Bade’s office. He found him sitting at his desk. Shirer, his temper uncorked, shouted in Bade’s face that he wanted an apology and a correction in the newspapers and on the next news broadcast. Bade lost any composure, shouting in Shirer’s face that he would receive nothing of the kind and who did he think he was. Furious, Shirer spoke so fast most of the words came out in English and mangled German.
Hearing the commotion, several office workers opened the door and peered in to see if their boss needed any help. Bade waved them out and after the door was shut again, the shouting resumed. He slammed his fist on the desk.
Smugly, Bade told Shirer he would not be expelled.
Infuriated, Shirer dared him to try anyway.
When Bade did not react, Shirer turned and walked out of the office and back out into the street.
* * *
A week after Shirer’s confrontation with Bade, he and Tess set out for Garmisch-Partenkirchen to cover the winter games. Although she wanted to be in the mountains and on skis herself, Tess also came along to help her husband cover different events going on at the same time. At the end of the day, she would give him her notes for his stories. As usual, she brought along her camera. The mountain village was filled with athletes from all over the world, and the German government was determined to play the good host. German soldiers and SS troops filled the streets. “On the whole the Nazis have done a wonderful propaganda job,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “They’ve greatly impressed most of the visiting foreigners with the lavish but smooth way in which they’ve run the games and with their kind manners, which to us who came from Berlin of course seemed staged.”
Among the visiting American correspondents was Westbrook Pegler, who had also written for the paper in the mid-1920s when Shirer was working for the Tribune. Now he wrote a popular column for the Scripps-Howard Syndicate. Each day, Tess and Bill, sometimes joined by Pegler, set out to cover the events—downhill skiing, what Shirer in his diary referred to as “bob races,” hockey matches, and the thrilling Norwegian skater Sonja Henie.
On several days, when Hitler was in the stadium, Shirer, Pegler, and another American journalist, Paul Gallico, who covered sports for the New York Daily News, had confrontations with the SS troops guarding their leader. Pegler was irritated at their presence everywhere. Writing in his diary, Shirer said Pegler was particularly upset at a story in the Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter that quoted the New York Times reporter Fred Birchall as praising the games and going so far as to criticize American reporters who said the event was tinged with Nazi propaganda.
Shirer was upset enough at what he saw as the pro-German mood of visiting American businessmen that he organized a luncheon and asked a representative of the American embassy in Berlin, Douglas Miller, to address the visitors on the true nature of the Nazi government. As Shirer wrote in his diary, Miller barely got a word in edgewise. The businessmen were not interested in that side of the story.