CLEARING THE MOUNTAINS
With the birth of his daughter, Shirer’s home life and his busy career with CBS became even more challenging. He was a brand-new family man in the middle of a growing storm that threatened to engulf Europe. Like other keen observers, he could guess where it was all leading: all but certain war. But beyond that guess, he could not have imagined what that war would look like in all its many phases or the full scope of the Germans’ intentions toward their enemies.
A cataclysmic eruption was certain, he was sure of that, as the Germans under Hitler continued to remake their own country and push outward with the quasi-religious conviction that their “race” was entitled to reimagine and then reshape the very landscape of Europe as well as populate the vast and fertile lands to the east with their own kind. These lands would be for the Germans their Lebensraum—their living space, for them only. That millions of other people were in their way was a problem the German government was more than willing to address. These other people were not to be allowed to stand in the way of the German dream. Nazism was the foundation upon which a racial war would be articulated, then fought and won.
The anger that drove Hitler after the German defeat of 1918 continued to boil in 1938, but it was in large part no longer about the terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Those grievances had been pushed aside by 1938. Even earlier, German anger over the defeat and its bitter aftermath had been overplayed politically as it had also become fully mythologized into a national grievance. It was in some respects a cover story, a smokescreen. Real, yes, but overplayed.
Hitler’s anger was a different kind of rage. How else to explain the almost immediate establishment of concentration camps for Germany’s new enemies of the state after Hitler’s coming to power? Or the Nazis’ forcing elderly Jews and women with children in Vienna to clean gutters with small brushes while being taunted and insulted? How else to explain random, violent attacks on Jews and their places of business? These actions amounted to wholesale theft, and before the end of 1938, across Germany and Austria they would intensify to state-sponsored robbery on a vast and organized scale, with bureaucrats keeping record books and tally sheets and setting the foundations for new family fortunes that would last for generations. Hitler talked about other grievances when he wasn’t talking about the Jews, but the Jews and what exactly to do with them were on his mind day and night. By this argument, the coming war would be a sideshow; the main event was the Nazi plan, evolving and moving in different and conflicting directions, to rid Germany—and every square mile of land it conquered— of the Jews.
* * *
For Shirer, the trick was to continue to give CBS what it had hired him for—the setting up of musical venues for radio programs played in the United States— but also to stay in touch with his journalist colleagues and look for opportunities to broadcast news. He and Murrow had pulled it off magnificently after the Anschluss, and the question had been answered as to whether the two men could broadcast themselves. Shirer knew it would happen again for him as big events piled up. Beyond work, he wanted to spend at least the first few weeks at home with Tess and the baby at their apartment at Plösslgasse 4 in Vienna. Tess had not yet recovered fully from the ordeal she had suffered in the hospital. She needed him at home.
At his desk he kept up with his voluminous correspondence with friends across Europe, with family in the United States, and also with business contacts. Soon after Eileen’s birth, an uncle in Humboldt, Iowa, wrote to congratulate Shirer. In his letter, T. G. Ferreby wrote that, when he arrived at home from church that morning, he turned on the radio to catch up on the news and heard an announcer say: “We now turn to Vienna to hear William Shirer’s talk.” For a family member in a small Iowa farm town, hearing Shirer’s voice come across the radio was a profound thrill. In a letter to a friend, Shirer said he had planned to travel but decided to stay in Vienna to cover a speech by “the big boy”—Hitler—and also so that he could stay closer to the apartment. He closed his letter by saying the baby was crying in another room.
Shirer wrote a German couple in Berlin, who had apparently written him in praise of the Anschluss. In response, Shirer wrote: “I can understand your joy at the Anschluss and I hope it means better times for the Austrians whom I love. Though I don’t like the way it was done. If 99 per cent of the people were for it, why was it necessary to pour in 200,000 troops and thousands of police and threaten war? You see, your German newspapers only told one side of the story. We Americans, being very strange people, like both sides.”
Just before his daughter’s birth, Shirer had written Gottfried Aschmann, the official in the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, to request an interview. “Mr. Edward R. Murrow, our European director, and I would like very much to come to Berlin one of these days and have a brief talk with Reichminister Dr. Goebbels on the subject of broadcasts from Europe to America. We will naturally be seeing the officials of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, with whom we are already in contact, but we should like to talk with Dr. Goebbels if it can be arranged.” The request went nowhere.
Shirer’s relationship with Paul White in New York City began to fray at this time. It would only grow more difficult over the following two years. While Shirer had been praised by William S. Paley for the historic broadcast from London after the Anschluss, White now wrote Shirer to castigate him for leaving Vienna without a backup in place once the state radio system went back on the air and Shirer was still in London and Murrow had left Austria. It was an incredible complaint, bizarre in its allegiance to corporate rules without weighing the reality, from an office manager in a safe and comfortable midtown Manhattan office building to a journalist in the field in Europe. Only a fool ignorant of the hardships of reporting would register such a complaint.
A full month later, White wrote again, this time to apologize for the previous letter, saying he had had no idea that Tess Shirer was in the hospital during the time the network had no one at the station. In response, Shirer wrote White to tell him he had no hard feelings. Reading between the lines of Shirer’s response suggests a newfound wariness of Paul White. It’s not a leap to think that Shirer wrote him off at that point, putting him down as simply a corporate suit.
Shirer explained that he had tried to line up a replacement for the time he was in London, but “one broke down and sobbed hysterically, a second, with his wife, was already in the jug, and a third was hiding preparatory for making for the Swiss border, which he did the following night.” He then added a warning: “The point is that there is now no outlet for us from Central Europe which is not subject to German censorship, as all the landlines even to Geneva now go through Germany.”
* * *
In mid-April, Shirer left Vienna for Prague to interview the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, who like others in his country could look to the west and see the threat building in Berlin. One day before departing from Vienna, Shirer had written in his diary that Czechoslovakia “will certainly be next on Hitler’s list. Militarily it is doomed now that Germany has it flanked on the south as well as the north.” His goal was to interview Beneš about his country’s relationship with Germany and to inquire about the future status of the German-speaking regions along the country’s border with Germany.
Hitler had long spoken about his desire to incorporate ethnic Germans into a single empire, often using the pretext that those who lived beyond the borders of Germany were cruelly treated, oppressed, and disadvantaged because they were Germans and beyond his protection. These lands would, of course, include Austria, but also the Polish corridor, Alsace-Lorraine in France, which the Germans had seized after the Franco-Prussian War but lost after the Great War, and also German-speaking regions of a number of countries, including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
When, in the interview, as Shirer later related in his diary, he asked Beneš about the “German question,” Beneš’s voice suddenly faded on the radio as if the system had broken down. “I suspect the Germans faded out Beneš on purpose, though Berlin denied it when I spoke with the people there on the phone after the broadcast. They said the fault was here in Prague. The Czechs deny it. I had a long talk with Svoboda, the chief engineer for the Czech Broadcasting System, urging him to rush work on his new short-wave transmitter, explaining that if the Germans got tough, that would be Prague’s only outlet … . A good-natured fellow, he does not think the Germans will do anything until they’ve digested Austria, which he thinks will take years.”
Shirer was back in Vienna for Easter, but in early May he boarded a train bound for Rome, where he planned to cover an appearance by Hitler. The journey did not go smoothly. Late at night, as the train crossed into Italy, SS guards pushed into Shirer’s compartment and rudely looked through his belongings. One of the guards confiscated all of Shirer’s money, and he understood them to say he was under arrest. But he wasn’t, and after a long conversation they returned the money and withdrew from his compartment, leaving a nervous Shirer to fall back to sleep as the train sped south across Italy.
In Rome, Shirer set up his microphone on the roof of a stable overlooking the grand Quirinal Palace, which had been built in the sixteenth century as a residence for Pope Gregory XIII. Hitler was to arrive in a horse-drawn carriage on a lovely spring evening, and Shirer would broadcast live as the sights and sounds—clomping horse hooves on cobblestones, the marching of gaily decorated guards—unfolded before him and his microphone. A listener in a farmhouse in the American Midwest could sit in his living room and hear William L. Shirer speak off the cuff from Rome while Hitler paraded by in a gilded carriage and imagine what it all looked like in such a far-off country.
* * *
Late May found Shirer able to spend long days with Tess and Eileen in Vienna. They ate in outdoor restaurants and walked through magnificent gardens and palace grounds and listened to music, always a favorite activity for the couple. Shirer, like his mother back in Cedar Rapids, who spent her Sundays seated in front of her radio listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast from New York City, adored classical music. There were few things that made him happier than to sit in auditoriums and concert halls and outdoors under starry skies and be entertained by an orchestra.
On the evening of May 20, Shirer and Tess met two friends at a Hungarian restaurant near the Opera House in Vienna. On the street outside the restaurant, uniformed Nazis enjoyed the evening, too. The Shirers’ friends were Charles Dimont, a correspondent who wrote for Reuters, and his wife, whom Shirer does not identify in his diary. Halfway through dinner, Dimont was called away to a phone. When he returned, he announced that his editor in London had informed him that the Germans were sending large numbers of troops toward Czechoslovakia. Dimont immediately left the table and made arrangements to drive to the Czech border. Shirer decided to work the phones and see if he could find out if the Germans were in fact preparing to move militarily into the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia.
Within a day, Shirer had learned enough to convince him that he should leave for Prague. He wrote in his diary on May 21: “The story is that Hitler has mobilized ten divisions along the Czech frontier … . Had hoped to remain here a few days since Tess must have another operation day after tomorrow.” Shirer also planned to move his family to Geneva, and he wanted to accomplish that by mid-June since Tess had applied for a Swiss visa that would shortly expire. The point of the move was simple, he explained: “Have picked Geneva because it’s no longer possible to do my job from here, what with the currency restrictions, the Nazi censorship and snooping, and all.”
On June 10, the Shirers packed up their Vienna apartment under the watchful eye of the Gestapo, who went through Shirer’s belongings looking for anything he should not be allowed to take to Geneva. Tess was weak and in poor condition from her recent operation. At the airport, more Gestapo went through all the belongings again, as well as wallets and pockets, looking for currency violations. In his diary, Shirer said a “Nazi spy” he identified as “X” greeted him at the offices of a shipping company and that for a moment Shirer feared he was about to be arrested.
In the airport terminal, Shirer helped a very weak Tess to a bench, where she lay down while a nurse held the baby. Another Gestapo officer demanded that she sit up so she could answer his questions. “I tried to hold her up,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
Then a police official led me away … . In a little room two police officials went through my pocketbook and my pockets. Everything was in order. They led me into a side room. “Wait here,” they said. I said I wanted to go back to help with the baggage inspection, that my wife was in a critical state; but they shut the door. I heard the lock turn. I was locked in. Five, then, fifteen minutes. Pacing the floor. Time for the airplane to leave. Past time. Then I heard Tess shout: “Bill, they’re taking me away to strip me!” I had spoken with the Gestapo chief about that, explained that she was heavily bandaged, the danger of infection … . I pounded on the door. No result.
Through the window I could hear and see the Swiss racing the two motors of their Douglas plane, impatient to get away. After a half-hour I was led out to a corridor connecting the waiting room with the airfield. I tried to get into the waiting room, but the door was locked. Finally Tess came, the nurse supporting her with one arm and holding the baby in the other.
“Hurry, there,” snapped an official. “You’ve kept the plane waiting a half hour.” I held my tongue and grabbed Tess.
She was gritting her teeth, as angry as I’ve ever seen her. “They stripped me.” she kept saying … . We hurried across the runway to the plane. I wondered what could happen in the next seconds before we were in the plane and safe. Maybe X would come running out and demand my arrest. Then we were in the plane and it was racing across the field.
The airplane rose sharply to clear the mountains and was lost in storm clouds. Airsick passengers heaved into bags. “Then there was Zurich down there, Switzerland, sanity, civilization again.”
Shirer summed up the horrors of the trip out of Vienna in a letter written to Valerie Fuhrmann, who owned the apartment the Shirers rented in Vienna. “We had a very bad time at the airport the day we left. They locked me in the waiting room while they took all the clothes off my wife and searched her … . Even though we had a very stormy flight in the fog most of the way to Zurich, we felt very good at setting our feet on free soil again.”
Fuhrmann wrote back, reminding Shirer that he owed her money. She then referred to “abuse and lawlessness everywhere,” an obvious reference to what the Nazis had wrought in her country in just a few short weeks. In a second letter, she told Shirer: “You will understand how worried I am, if I tell you that my son has been called to military service yesterday and I could not even say goodbye to him and do not know where he is. Where is this going to lead to?”
* * *
The Shirers found in Switzerland everything they needed and wanted—great beauty all around them, in the lakes and mountains, and peace and quiet. Being away from the Nazis suited them both. The fear that somehow either one of them would do something seen as criminal by the Gestapo and be arrested now abated. To Bill in particular, not being in Vienna or Berlin meant breathing easier, and he was grateful for it and to Murrow for agreeing to let him move his family to a neutral country.
In Geneva, they rented an apartment at 29 Avenue de Miremont. When Shirer wasn’t working, they enjoyed the city and all that it offered. They looked for places to hear classical music and for small restaurants and cafés where they could sample the food and wine and still live within the confines of a very tight budget. For the Shirers, money was—and always would be—a neverending source of worry and tension.
On a warm day in June, the Shirers and Ed Murrow boarded a paddleboat on Lake Geneva for a day on the water. Shirer found the lake fantastically beautiful—a huge body of blue water surrounded by the tall snow-covered Alps. “It was almost overwhelming,” he wrote in his diary. He and Murrow were together to attend a conference of the International Broadcasting Union, a group of European broadcasters who gave lip service to cooperation on technical matters. Both found the proceedings boring, which allowed them to enjoy the lake and stay outdoors.
What did draw both men’s attention was the political talk that dominated the conference. The London Times, which to Shirer’s eye tilted toward the Nazis and was the paper Norman Ebbutt had complained about in his and Shirer’s nightly gatherings at the Taverne, published an editorial calling on the Czechoslovakian government under Edvard Beneš to allow the Sudeten Germans—German-speaking Czechs living in a broad rim along the country’s border with Germany—to vote on whether they wanted to split off and join the Reich. As an editorial in a major European newspaper, it was remarkable for its wide-open embrace of the German cause. Shirer found it deeply offensive, writing in his diary, “The Times argues that if this is done, Germany would lose any claim to interfere in the affairs of Czechoslovakia.” Shirer found the argument specious and naïve.
“This Old Lady [the Times] simply won’t learn,” he wrote. “Ed and Dick Marriot of BBC, an intelligent and courageous young man, very pessimistic about the strength and designs of the ‘appeasement’ crowd in London.” If Shirer had any doubts about Ebbutt’s complaints that his paper would not print his stories, they were erased now.
In July, Shirer traveled to Evian on Lake Geneva to sit in on a conference meant to deal with European refugees. “I doubt if much will be done,” Shirer wrote. “The British, French and Americans seem too anxious not to do anything to offend Hitler. It’s an absurd situation.”
He found it upsetting that CBS had not asked him to do a broadcast from the conference. The refugee issue, and perhaps the far larger issue of the growing peril surrounding Germany’s Jews, evidently held no interest for the network.
“I guess I was a little hasty thinking the ‘radio foreign correspondent’ had been born at the time of the Anschluss,” he wrote. “We are not really covering it at all.”