PARADING DOWN THE WILHELMSTRASSE
“This has been a day of the wildest rumors.”
—William L. Shirer, diary, March 6, 1936
Among the American and British correspondents, who talked as much to each other about what might be going on as they did with the government officials they covered, the rumors centered on Hitler’s abruptly ordering the Reichstag to convene on March 7, 1936. There was some sort of emergency—Germany was walking away from a series of treaties approved in the late fall of 1925 among France, Belgium, and Germany in the Swiss resort town of Locarno. The Locarno treaties had made formal the boundaries among the three countries as set by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The agreements signed at Locarno made permanent France’s ownership of Alsace-Lorraine and required Germany to keep troops out of the Rhineland. Hitler was going to tear up the agreements and, if the rumors were true, order the German army into the Rhineland. The history of the end of the Great War, the terms laid down to the losers, was being cast aside.
An official Shirer knew well told him Hitler probably wouldn’t send in troops—it was too provocative, and the French army could push them out easily if he did. The official—Shirer calls him an “informant” in his diary entry—said Hitler might just declare the German police in the Rhineland part of the national army, which, as Shirer noted that night, would have the same “practical effect” as sending in fresh troops.
Berlin was filled with government officials summoned for the convening of the Reichstag. Shirer found himself near the Foreign Ministry in a large crowd of Reichstag members wearing their shiny party pins on their lapels, along with uniformed troops and SS men. The mood was tense and defiant. Their Führer was a bold man! Shirer got the press chief at the Wilhelmstrasse, Dr. Gottfried Aschmann, on the phone, who denied vociferously that German troops would enter the Rhineland. (The Wilhelmstrasse was the name the reporters gave the Foreign Ministry, although other important party and government offices were also on the street, including the Propaganda Ministry.)
“That would mean war,” Aschmann said, as if that were the last word on the subject.
Shirer of course did not believe Aschmann. He was almost certainly uninformed and under orders to say just that and nothing else. All the officials who dealt with the foreign correspondents were liars. That was their job. They made up stories. They bullied journalists to drive them away from the stories they were reporting on. They intimidated them so they’d stop asking questions the officials did not want to answer. They looked them in the eye indignantly and got theatrical about it: Don’t you believe me? Do you know who you are talking to? We don’t lie. We’re not like you. Disgusted with Aschmann, Shirer rushed back to his office and typed out a dispatch and cabled it to the New York office, suggesting that German troops would not be sent into the demilitarized Rhineland because French troops could easily push them out.
* * *
As the sun rose the next morning, March 7, 1936, German troops marched into the Rhineland. Rushing to the Reichstag, which was meeting in the Kroll Opera House, Shirer found a seat in the press section and heard Hitler talk about peace in Europe and demilitarizing both sides of the Rhine. William Dodd, the American ambassador, was seated in the audience. General von Blomberg, whom Shirer had met at the Foreign Press Ball, was seated nearby, and to Shirer’s eye looked pale, which Shirer interpreted as a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the regular army for their leader’s escapades.
“Hitler began with a long harangue which he has often given before, but never tires of repeating, about the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and the peacefulness of Germans,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “Then his voice, which had been low and hoarse at the beginning, rose to a shrill, hysterical scream as he raged against Bolshevism.”
Shirer watched six hundred deputies—
personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bodies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream “Heil’s,” the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: “Men of the German Reichstag!” The silence is utter.
“In this historic hour, when in the Reich’s western provinces German troops are at this minute marching into their future peace-time garrisons, we all unite in two sacred vows.” He can go no further. It is news to this hysterical “parliamentary” mob that German soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland. All the militarism in their German blood surges to their heads. They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet. The audience in the galleries does the same, all except a few diplomats and about fifty of us correspondents. Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah.
Hitler vowed that Germany would not yield to any army or force as it went about the “restoration of the honour of our people,” and he pledged that Germany had no territorial demands to make on Europe and wanted only peace. Shirer stood with the other correspondents and felt as if the intensity in the room would lift the roof off the opera house.
After the speech, Shirer rushed outside to watch Hitler drive off with his entourage. He and his colleague John Elliott, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, walked across the Tiergarten to the Adlon Hotel for lunch, both too overwhelmed by the speech to say much to each other. After lunch, Shirer walked by himself back through the park and there ran into Blomberg walking two dogs. It seemed so bizarre—the general walking his dogs in silence after Hitler’s speech. If Shirer toyed with the idea of stopping to talk to him, he thought better of it, and instead proceeded to his office on the Dorotheenstrasse. At his desk he typed furiously, stopping every few minutes to telephone sections of the story to the office in Paris.
Shirer was surprised that the French did not immediately react to German troops marching unmolested into the Rhineland. “It seemed incomprehensible they would not march with so much at stake,” he wrote of the French army. In his diary that night, he wrote: “Tonight for the first time since 1870 grey-clad German soldiers and blue-clad French troops face each other across the upper Rhine.”
As for Hitler’s speech proposing peace for Europe, Shirer knew it was a lie. He was disgusted with himself for not declaring it so flat out. But he knew he could not, nor could he find a German outside the government to say it, and the frustration ate at him. “The proposal is a pure fraud, and if I had any guts, or American journalism had any, I would have said so in my dispatch tonight,” he wrote. “But I am not supposed to be ‘editorial.’ ”
As darkness fell over the city, Shirer stood at his office window and watched columns of storm troops parading down the Wilhelmstrasse, past Hitler’s Chancellery, holding aloft burning torches. It was an extraordinary sight—thousands of uniformed men, their faces lit by the fires, marching in unison, a single, machinelike mass. Shirer dispatched a German office worker, who called back from the street that Hitler stood on this balcony admiring the parade with Julius Streicher next to him. A radio in the office broadcast that there were torchlight parades occurring simultaneously across the country. A correspondent working for Shirer in Cologne phoned to say that German troops had been greeted enthusiastically as they marched into the Rhineland. Women lined the streets throwing flowers at the soldiers. Reaching a government official on the phone, Shirer was informed that the Germans had sent in approximately fifty thousand men.
When he was done with his story, Shirer dashed to the Taverne to join a dozen or more journalists gathered at their table. It was well after midnight. He ordered beer and, famished, two plates of spaghetti, sitting at the table until nearly 3:00 A.M., listening to a French journalist predict that his country’s army would march in the morning and push the Germans out of the Rhineland.
That’s the end of Hitler if the French move, Shirer thought.
* * *
“Hitler has got away with it!”
—William L. Shirer, diary, March 8, 1936
Sunday, March 8, was Heroes’ Memorial Day, a national holiday created by Hitler to commemorate the two million German dead of the Great War. Like France, where Shirer had seen the wounded in the streets, Germany’s wounded—there were four million of them in 1918—were a large army of the crippled and the limbless and the misshapen. (The combined total of military and civilian dead, plus the wounded, amounted to more than 10 percent of the country’s total population the year the war ended.) Shirer went to the Opera House for the celebration of the holiday and saw Hitler, Göring, and Blomberg—“all smiles this noon”—celebrating their bold move into the Rhineland. Hitler wore a “simple brown party uniform, his Iron Cross pinned over the left breast pocket,” Shirer wrote.
A government official, unidentified in the diary, told Shirer that afternoon that the German troops were under orders “to beat a hasty retreat if the French army opposed them in any way. They were not prepared or equipped to fight a regular army. That probably explains Blomberg’s white face yesterday.” Shirer later identified the source as an officer on the general staff of the army.
The correspondent in Cologne had told Shirer that the German troops acted more like a parading army. “The gray-clad Reichswehr troops simply marched in behind blaring bands—there was no battle order whatsoever,” Shirer wrote. “God knows I had seen the rot in France during my return to work there in 1934. Frenchmen were more concerned with fighting Frenchmen than Germans. Still. With their army so much more powerful than Hitler’s it seemed incomprehensible that they would not march with so much at stake: not only the security of the northeast frontier, over which had come so many German invasions in the past, but perhaps the overthrow of the Nazi regime.”
Shirer stayed in the Opera House to hear Blomberg deliver the Memorial Day speech. To Shirer, the general “was surprisingly defiant—even cocky. But then I remembered he was merely uttering words prepared for him by his Master.” When the event ended, Shirer walked to Hadel’s, a nearby restaurant. He sat alone in a window seat and looked out at the people calmly going about their business on the busy Unter den Linden, the dramatic boulevard he and Tess loved to stroll on warm days. When he had eaten, he returned to his desk and called the Universal News Service office in London to inquire about the British reaction to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland. There was none at all, he was told. The prime minister was away for the weekend. The cabinet was not meeting.
In mid-March, Shirer traveled to Karlsruhe to cover Hitler’s speech on the upcoming Reichstag elections, to be held on the twenty-ninth. In his diary on March 13, while in Karlsruhe, Shirer cynically put quotation marks around “election,” knowing the event was a fraud. Shirer knew the script by now: Hitler would receive 99 percent of the vote, and the government spokesmen would tell the world how beloved he was and how much he wanted peace. A huge crowd packed under a tent waited for Hitler and his entourage to arrive. Bothered by the crowds, Shirer and a group of correspondents returned to their hotel to drink wine and listen to Hitler’s speech on the radio. “Nothing new in it,” Shirer wrote in his diary, “though he drummed away nicely about his desire for friendship with France.”
On election day, Shirer tried to report on whether there was any dissent anywhere in the country, but he only heard rumors that some election districts in Berlin that had once been communist strongholds delivered a “no” vote that was perhaps as high as 20 percent. But he didn’t know, and there was no way to know anything with certainty. The one sure thing was that the Nazis would win all the seats. During the day, Shirer stood in the street outside his office and watched Germany’s new zeppelin, the Hindenburg, sail over the city. Leaflets urging the populace to vote “yes” in the plebiscite floated down to the street.
For Bill and Tess, life in Berlin was a whirl of activity that centered on his work for the wire service. When the job could be put aside, they did their best to make a social life for themselves constructed around the things they loved to do. His day as a correspondent typically began in the early afternoon and ended after midnight, most often at his regular table at the Taverne. In March, as he prepared to cover the plebiscite, he wrote to the New York office to ask for a pay raise. He complained that his $60 a week salary was wholly inadequate for the task at hand. Prices in Berlin were 25 to 100 percent higher than in New York, the cost of clothing had skyrocketed, and tobacco for his pipe was absurdly high and the quality poor.
“A tin of miserable weeds costs 60 cents compared to 15 cents for a tin of good pipe tobacco at home,” he wrote. “A suit you could buy in NY for 30 costs 80 here. A luncheon that can be had there for 50 to 60 cents costs $1.25 to $1.50 here.” He was now the sole correspondent in the office, he added, “And without wishing to overestimate myself I think it can be said that by dint of a 12–14 hour working day I, with the help of one office boy, am giving the opposition, whose staffs are four to five times as large, a fairly good run for their money.” A raise was not forthcoming; little did Shirer know that Universal News Service was struggling to pay its bills and maintain its foreign operation.
Bill and Tess’s love of music, theater, and the arts was the same as it had been in Vienna, but Berlin under the Nazis was not Vienna. “Now and then we stole off for an evening at the opera, the concert house, the theater,” he wrote, adding that the quality of everything had fallen dramatically because of the “idiotic and depressing” banning of works by Jews. Many of the country’s Jewish composers and writers had either fled the country for new lives elsewhere or were living lives in the shadows, waiting for more shoes to drop.
Shirer’s day was built around a period of hard work from 5:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M., reporting and then writing a story he would telephone to either Paris or London for transmission to New York. By midnight he would join his colleagues at the Taverne, sometimes, but not often, joined by German journalists who were little more than surrogates of the Nazis and who could not be trusted. “Occasionally they could be helpful in tipping us off to something or in explaining the in-fighting going on around Hitler, [but] we were always suspicious of them and their news,” he wrote.
The nights at their long table in the corner were dominated by political talk, with reporters each having their different views. It was one part of the country, one small piece of the capital city—a corner table in a busy Italian restaurant—where speech was free, opinionated, and seditious. One journalist in Shirer’s circle who had more neutral views toward the Nazis was Guido Enderis, who ran the New York Times bureau in Berlin. Shirer was fond of him, in large part, because he was the experienced elder journalist in the room, “likeable … [and] rather apolitical,” Shirer recalled, “and not seeming to mind the Nazis.” Enderis had a wealth of knowledge that impressed Shirer, who was easily impressed around journalists who had seen and done a great deal more than he had. Remarkably, Enderis had ridden out the 1914–1918 war in Berlin without being arrested by the Germans, no doubt because he held a Swiss passport. But, to Shirer’s eye, he parted ways with his colleagues who loathed the Nazis.
“He had little interest in, and no sympathy at all for, the hatred most of us felt for the Nazis,” Shirer wrote. “He thought we were too ideological—as bad as the Nazis in this.”
Shirer was in some ways being kind to Enderis, and he may not have been fully aware of his sympathies for the German government. In the Times’ Berlin bureau, Enderis was seen as someone who papered over his sympathy for the Nazis with demands for fairness and balance in the paper’s coverage. Enderis was loath to write about the country’s concentration camps and the status of Jews in the country.
Included in Shirer’s circle of good friends was Ralph Barnes, who worked for the New York Herald Tribune. Bill and Tess, Barnes, his wife, Esther, and their two daughters spent holidays together, particularly the American ones like Thanksgiving. Christmas and New Year’s found them together, and he and Ralph frequently collaborated on a story, with Tess often helping with translations.
* * *
In search of time away from his work he could spend with Tess, Shirer bought a small sailboat from a man he’d met in a bar. The sloop ran eighteen feet in length and had two small beds in a cramped cabin and presented the possibility of getting away on one of the beautiful lakes around the city, where the rich and the party elite also went. Their routine on hot days when Shirer felt confident about escaping the office and the demands of his work was to take a streetcar to the Havel River, where they kept the boat in a marina. They would pack food, beer, and wine and “sail it for eight or nine miles, anchor in a cove, swim off the boat for an hour, have a drink, fix up a dinner, wash it down with a bottle of wine and hit the bunks for a good night’s sleep after checking the news on the radio to see that nothing very sensational was breaking.”
In June, Bill and Tess left Germany altogether and traveled to Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Sea. They checked into a small hotel overlooking the water where Shirer met Katherine Anne Porter, a Texas-born writer noted for her short stories, who had lived in Germany in the early 1930s. Shirer knew her work and was disappointed that Porter showed no inclination to become better acquainted. They spoke briefly on several occasions, but Porter was there to work and Shirer to vacation, and his effort to sit and speak with her about her writing came to nothing.
Bill and Tess were joined in Dubrovnik by H. R. Knickerbocker, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for his coverage of Russia, and his wife, Agnes, who was far along in her pregnancy. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Knickerbocker had filed a story with his paper about the Reich’s treatment of its Jewish citizens in which he didn’t shy away from the truth. “An indeterminate number of Jews … have been killed. Hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured. Thousands of Jews have fled. Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood. All of Germany’s 600,000 Jews are in terror.”
On the morning of June 20 in Dubrovnik, Shirer joined Knick and Agnes on the hotel terrace for breakfast. Tess had gone off by herself to take photographs by the big cathedral. As Shirer sat eating his breakfast, two big cumbersome Yugoslavian bombers appeared overhead, flying low and wildly, as if putting on a show. Suddenly one of the bombers rolled over and went into a dive and in seconds, crashed nose first into the center of the city, followed by a huge explosion. Flames and a column of thick black smoke rose into the sky.
Shirer pushed himself away from the table and made a mad dash for the street, convinced his wife had been killed in the crash. As he got closer to the cathedral, he passed burning houses and, in the small open area in front of the church, saw police carrying away bodies in bloody blankets. He pulled up the blankets to look at faces but stopped himself, growing hysterical and shouting out Tess’s name, asking police if they could help him find her. As he stood in a full panic, Tess came up behind him holding her camera and taking photographs of the burning hulk of the airplane.
On another day, Bill and Tess took a steamer up the coastline to visit an ancient chapel filled with sculpture and artwork. For the first time since they left Spain, Shirer felt awed in the presence of great art. He lingered for hours in the chapel examining every painting and sculpture. He couldn’t accept the thought that the trip would end soon, that they would board a train back to Berlin and he would pick up his reporting where he had left off. Besides, he was thrilled to be with Tess.
“Tess was twenty-six that summer and I was thirty-two, a wonderful age for married love and much too early for time and circumstance to take their toll,” Shirer wrote years later as he looked back on the trip. “We felt lucky to have such a happy, exciting, harmonious marriage.”