SIGRID WAKES HIM UP
September 1938 brought the party faithful back to Nuremberg for the annual rally. Shirer was grateful to skip it and instead took the train from Berlin to Prague to cover the crisis between Germany and Czechoslovakia that had been building all summer. In German-speaking regions inside Czechoslovakia, Nazi leaders agitated against their country and in favor of joining the German Reich. In some areas, demonstrations were held and violence erupted.
In the Czechoslovakian capital, Shirer covered a speech by Edvard Beneš, the country’s beleaguered president. “I have never been afraid in my life,” Beneš said in his broadcast. While he prepared his notes, Shirer picked up a Reuters dispatch of Göring’s speech at the party rally in Nuremberg. Referring to the Czechs as a “miserable pygmy race without culture,” Göring said the Czechs were oppressing the Germans—“a cultured people”—and behind the Czechs, as with all the Nazis’ enemies, was “the eternal mask of the Jew devil.”
On the evening of September 12, Shirer and a number of foreign correspondents crowded into an apartment in Prague and listened to Hitler’s speech at the party rally in which he hurled threats against Czechoslovakia. “Prague on this day when war and peace have apparently hung in the balance has been dark and dismal, with a cold, biting, soaking rain,” Shirer wrote in his diary. He walked the streets of the city looking at people’s faces, wondering if they fully understood their plight.
A week later, Shirer took the train back to Berlin and that night went on the air with his CBS broadcast. “Hello America. This is Berlin calling,” he began. He went on to discuss Prague and the crisis and remarked that Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, would be meeting with Hitler at the Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg on September 22. “The hotel lounge was refurbished this afternoon and decorated with bowls of flowers and German and British flags,” Shirer said in his broadcast. “Chancellor Hitler will occupy the little suite which is reserved for him the year around. And probably the meeting will be held there … . One thing is certain: Mr. Chamberlain will certainly get a warm welcome.”
Shirer spent the middle of September with a group of English and American correspondents in the Ambassador Hotel in Prague. They all expected German bombers to appear over the city, but none came. In the Sudetenland he heard reports of rioting and plundering of Jewish-owned businesses. The hotel lobby was chaos; with one outside phone line, it was nearly impossible for the correspondents to phone in their stories. Rumors piled on rumors: the Germans would bomb the city at midnight; they might use poison gas; anyone fearful of the Germans was fleeing the city on any flight or train they could book. To Shirer, it was Vienna the previous March all over again.
For several days in a row, Shirer received cables from Paul White in New York telling him that his broadcast had not gotten through. “Murrow called from London and suggested I get off immediately to Berchtesgaden,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “Don’t know whether I can. Czech trains have stopped running across the border and I can’t find a Czech driver who will take his car across the frontier.”
Because he could not get his broadcasts through to New York, Shirer decided to write out his stories and cable them to New York, where someone would read them on the radio. Everywhere, Czechs stopped to tell him that Chamberlain was going to sell their country down the river, as the Germans demanded a plebiscite so that Sudeten Germans could vote to break away and join the Reich. Murrow called again, strongly suggesting that Shirer find a way to return to Germany and cover Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler.
On September 20, Shirer boarded a train to Berlin and then went on to Bad Godesberg, where Chamberlain and Hitler were to meet. At the big Friedrichstrasse train station in Berlin, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, RRG, the state radio system, set up a microphone so that Shirer could interview foreign correspondents about the prospects for a new European war over Czechoslovakia. He put on Sigrid Schultz, Webb Miller, and his good friend Ralph Barnes.
As Shirer went back and forth between Germany and Czechoslovakia, doing broadcasts from Bad Godesberg, Berlin, and Munich, William S. Paley in New York sent him a telegram, dated September 26, in the midst of the crisis. “Columbia’s coverage of the European crisis is superior to its competitors and is probably the best job of its kind ever done in radio broadcasting stop you have contributed very largely to the establishment of this opining by the superb job you have done both in your broadcasts and the arrangements you have made stop I want you to know how genuinely pleased I am.”
In a telegram Shirer sent to Paul White, he wrote about what lay ahead with a level of certainty. “A week in Berlin gave me the impression that Hitler will invade Czechoslovakia between September 15 and October 15, if he can make sure that France and England will stay quiet.” Meanwhile, Tess and Eileen left Europe for New York for a visit with Shirer’s family, arriving at a berth on the Hudson River on the morning of October 3.
In Berlin, Shirer listened to Hitler’s speech in the Sportpalast on the night of September 26. Hitler boasted he would have the Sudetenland by no later than October 1. “The old man full of more venom than even he has ever shown, hurling personal insults at Benes [sic],” Shirer wrote in his diary. “Twice Hitler screamed that this is absolutely his last territorial demand in Europe.” Seated in the balcony directly above Hitler, watching his every move, Shirer thought that the German chancellor had lost control.
* * *
Shirer went to Munich for Chamberlain’s final meeting with Hitler, which was also attended by Benito Mussolini of Italy and Òdouard Daladier of France. The Czechs had not been invited. “It’s all over,” Shirer wrote in his diary. The Munich Agreement, signed on September 29, gave Hitler the Sudetenland. Chamberlain told Hitler in a formal declaration that his country and Germany would never go to war again. It was this declaration that Chamberlain famously waved over his head upon his return to London. “I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain proclaimed.
In Munich, Shirer stood in the lobby of the Führerhaus as Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, and the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, walked past him. Hitler looked the “conqueror,” Shirer noted in his diary, a man full of swagger. For Shirer, though, the day was a great personal defeat, as Max Jordan, the radio correspondent for NBC, went on the air a full hour ahead of Shirer and read from the complete text of the Munich Agreement. No matter that Paley had congratulated him on his work just days earlier, Shirer now felt himself the source of criticism in New York.
The meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain over, and with Shirer feeling badly defeated because of Jordan’s beating him with the text of the agreement, he boarded the Munich-to-Berlin train. On board was a group of German reporters and newspaper editors and Karl Boehmer, the foreign press chief from the Propaganda Ministry. The German journalists could not have been more elated at Hitler’s great victory. They downed champagne bought by Boehmer as the train rushed to Berlin—“gloating, boasting, bragging,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
* * *
Exhausted, Shirer took a few days off and flew to Paris to meet Murrow, who came in from London to spend time with his colleague. What began as a business partnership, each helping the other to grow a European news franchise, had blossomed into genuine friendship. Each enjoyed the other’s company, and each respected the other’s talents and limitations. Theirs was a partnership of equals. Shirer relished the thought of spending a few nights in Paris with Murrow, as good a companion in a bar as he could find. Besides, he had little desire to be in Geneva, since Tess and Eileen were in the United States—he loathed the empty house when they were away. Shirer missed his wife and daughter acutely, and he had found the pace of recent weeks overwhelming and thoroughly exhausting.
Beyond the work level, the continued success of the German enterprise had depressed him. It had become a mammoth effort for him to have regular dealings with the government, to talk to the bureaucrats in the Propaganda Ministry, and to ask for their permission to go after a certain story. His contempt for the censors threatened his ability to work in Berlin at all. While he had good friends in the foreign press corps who he respected, there were many others he had come to loathe. He saw some of them as collaborators who went along because they would be favored in the future.
Once in Paris, Shirer’s disgust grew. The mood of people he encountered was euphoric—war had been avoided. Just twenty years after the horror of the Great War, they saw it as a blessing that another war had been averted and that Hitler would go no further. Shirer found their optimism contemptible. “The French Socialists, shot through with pacifism; the French Right, with the exception of a few … [are] either fascists or defeatists. France makes no sense to me any more,” he wrote in his diary.
Murrow was as gloomy as Shirer. They drank until early in the morning in different bars and walked the streets, talking about the state of Europe and their belief that another great war “is now more probable than ever, that it is likely to come after the next harvest, that Poland is obviously next on Hitler’s list.” After a few days, unable to bear the mood in Paris, Shirer returned to Geneva.
In December, Tess and Eileen returned to Switzerland from the United States, where Tess had filed papers to become an American citizen. To celebrate the end of a horrific year, the family traveled to Gstaad, the chic ski resort high in the Swiss Alps, for the Christmas holiday. Snow was plentiful, and Shirer was glad to be back skiing for the first time since the accident in Austria six years earlier had nearly gouged out his eye. He was also thrilled to escape the gloomy mood of the previous year, noting in his diary that he’d gone through the Austrian Anschluss, the birth of his daughter, Tess’s brush with death, the Czech crisis, and the extraordinary British capitulation at Munich.
At a Christmas ball held at one of the hotels, hundreds of wealthy, socially prominent guests crowded into a ballroom to celebrate the holiday, drinking champagne and singing hymns, as if Europe were the same old place it had always been, their lives unchanged. “I found the merry-makers so nauseating that we left early,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
As was their custom after nearly eight years of marriage, Tess and Bill sat up New Year’s Eve after they put the baby to sleep to look ahead to the coming year, wondering what it could possibly bring that would be more eventful than 1938.
* * *
Spring 1939
A few days into the new year, one of the officials in the Propaganda Ministry cornered Shirer and told him that officials were displeased with the work of H. V. Kaltenborn, the Wisconsin-born radio commentator who worked for CBS in New York. They were particularly displeased over his work during the Czech crisis. Shirer could not have been happier.
“I consider that a great compliment,” he wrote in a letter to Kaltenborn.
The censors’ constant demands and threats had by now pushed Shirer to a new low point. He wondered, as he had many times during the previous year, if he could go on working in Berlin if all he was allowed to do was broadcast propaganda. He shared his pessimism with Murrow in London, who faced no restrictions, and with Paul White in New York. Of the two of them, Murrow was more in agreement with Shirer’s views. Shirer liked White but did not trust him, whereas he trusted Murrow to look out for him. He saw in White a man too quick to criticize and judge others who worked far away and under far more difficult conditions than he had ever faced. He viewed White as a man who looked out for the interests of the corporation first and foremost.
By contrast, Murrow knew from near daily contact with Shirer how hard the work was, what it meant to be a reporter in the field, and how excruciatingly difficult it was to put together an honest story and come away at the end of the day with any feeling of self-respect. Shirer thought all the time: I am not going to do their bidding for them. In New York—sitting in his office and enjoying life in the city, his secretary typing his letters for him, going to corporate events and looking out for anything that might trip up the company—White could only pretend to understand.
In a letter to a friend in Rome, Father Delaney, who had helped Shirer with CBS’s coverage in February of the death of Pope Pius XI, Shirer said, “I feel low, low tonight because of Hitler’s latest steal. It seems to me the light is going out for European civilization. And that decency and truthfulness are becoming extinct. I’m flying to London Saturday as that is the only spot in Europe from where I can tell the American people the truth—or as much of it as I can see.”
Early in the spring, Shirer flew to Berlin to cover one of Hitler’s speeches and to broadcast it live back to New York. He went to the short-wave control room at the RRG to set up and prepare for Hitler’s speech. A German Shirer had not met before came into the room and demanded that the American relay be cut off. Furious, Shirer confronted the man’s boss who, just as Hitler began his speech, gave orders for the relay to the United States to go ahead. Satisfied, Shirer went into a sound booth to listen to the speech. Twenty minutes later, the same man who had approved the relay now cut it off.
After several minutes of silence—the Germans “put on some silly record,” Shirer wrote in his diary—New York called demanding to know why Hitler had been cut off. Had Hitler been assassinated? Kaltenborn, in the CBS office in New York, got on the line with Shirer and wanted to know what had happened. Shirer, surrounded by a dozen German officials, tried to be circumspect. He assured Kaltenborn that Hitler was alive and giving his speech, which Shirer could hear over another line. For the next ninety minutes, Shirer and the censors argued loudly over whether Shirer should be allowed to read from the notes he had made of Hitler’s speech. Finally, the censors relented.
* * *
In late June, Shirer boarded an ocean liner for the voyage to the United States, where Tess had returned to complete the citizenship process. In New York and Washington, Shirer’s dark view of the situation in Europe and Hitler’s intentions were greeted with blank stares. At one point, Tess took him aside and told him he was making himself unpopular by talking so pessimistically. “The trouble is everyone here knows all the answers,” he wrote in his diary. “They know there will be no war. I wish I knew it … . Oh well, it’s pleasant to be here with the family and loaf and relax for a few fleeting days.”
By mid-July, Shirer was back in Europe. On July 14, he met in London with Murrow and Paul White to talk about news coverage if war broke out in the coming weeks. He played golf with Murrow before going on to Geneva, where John Gunther had arrived to spend a few days. They sat up all night drinking wine, with Gunther arguing that peace was more likely than war.
August came, and Shirer spent much of the first part of the month in Berlin, where he could read in the German newspapers that the Nazis were preparing for war with Poland. Germans he had used as news sources before were now hostile to any criticism of Hitler. “A discussion with Captain D,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “A World War officer of proven patriotism, he was against war during the Munich crisis, but changed, I noticed, after April 28, when Hitler denounced the Polish and British treaties. He became violent today at the very mention of the Poles and British. He thundered: ‘Why do the English butt in on Danzig and threaten war over the return of a German city? Why do the Poles provoke us? Haven’t we the right to a German city like Danzig?’ ”
“Have you a right to a Czech city like Prague?” Shirer asked. Captain D. had no answer to the question.
By the middle of the month, Shirer was in the city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea, where ethnic Germans had been agitating to join the Reich. He found his hotel filled with German army officers. Several Poles told him that the roads into the city were blocked with tank traps. He tried to broadcast from a German facility but was refused, so he hired a driver to take him to a Polish radio station inside a post office twelve miles away.
“Spoke from a floor mike while leaning on a piano,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “Don’t know if the broadcast actually got through.” Wandering through Danzig’s streets, he ran into John Gunther. The two men taxied to a casino on the Baltic and spent the night playing roulette “and talking a blue streak, settling the world’s problems.”
Several days later, when Shirer got to Warsaw, he met the American ambassador to Poland for lunch and did another broadcast at four in the morning. In his diary, as he prepared to board a train to return to Berlin, he wrote: “I think Poles will fight. I know I said that wrongly about the Czechs a year ago.”
* * *
By the third week of August the talk of war had heated to the boiling point. The gov ernment-controlled press portrayed the Germans in Danzig as aggrieved and oppressed and the Poles as foul aggressors. Shirer found the government’s lies to be so over the top that he could not fathom how the German people could possibly accept them as truths. On top of that, his view of the Germans as a people had hardened and grown more cynical. He saw them as cows. They wanted to be led around by a strong leader who lied to them every time he opened his mouth. They did what they were told and did not debate moral issues. They never debated moral issues when self-interests were involved. He thought the women were ugly, “the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women.”
Shirer was in Berlin when Kaltenborn arrived in the city. Minutes after his plane from London landed at Tempelhof, the Gestapo picked him up and held him until he could be forced onto a return flight to London. The Reich did not want him. Infuriated, Shirer felt personally to blame for Kaltenborn’s situation. He had spoken to officials in the German government weeks before about Kaltenborn’s visit and had been told there would be no problem. “We have been nicely double-crossed by the Nazis,” Shirer bitterly wrote in his diary. Shirer waited impatiently for Kaltenborn to clear customs. When he saw all the other passengers free to leave, he knew something was wrong. With Shirer were Kaltenborn’s wife and several of her German relatives. The airport steamed with the August heat, and as the hours went by, the air inside the terminal grew more and more oppressive. Finally, Shirer confronted a Gestapo official, and after a loud argument, Kaltenborn was allowed out of custody as long as he stayed in the building. Shirer took him and Kaltenborn’s family to the airport café.
Soon after they sat down with a round of beer, another Gestapo agent came to the café to tell Kaltenborn he would be taking the 6:00 P.M. flight back to London. Shirer grew indignant.
“Why? He’s just come from there,” Shirer said.
“And he’s returning there now,” the agent said.
“May I ask why?” Kaltenborn asked.
The agent had a quick response. “Looking at his notebook, he said with tremendous seriousness: ‘Herr Kaltenborn, on such and such a date in Oklahoma City you made a speech insulting the Führer.’ ”
Well after midnight, more than six hours after Kaltenborn had been kicked out of Germany, Shirer, bitter and fuming at the arrogance of the Gestapo at the airport, arrived at the Taverne. The room was packed with American, British, and French correspondents, and a number of Germans as well. He found his colleagues talking excitedly about news that had been reported on German radio. Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed to sign an extraordinary nonaggression pact. That day, Wednesday, August 23, the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had traveled to Moscow to sign the accord.
Shirer went on the air in the broadcast center when word broke that the accord had been agreed upon but not yet signed. “Hello, America! This is Berlin,” he began. “Nazi Germany and Bolshev ik Russia getting together! Well, even in Berlin where as a foreign correspondent I’ve seen many surprises since Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933—even here in Berlin people are still rubbing their eyes … . I rode around Berlin today on buses, street cars, the elevated and subway. Everyone had their heads buried in a newspaper … . I mean, you all know that before yesterday Bolshevik Russia was not exactly the idol of the Nazi press. But look today. I have the Angriff, always the most fiery of the Nazi afternoon papers here. It rejoices that the old traditional friendship between the Russian and German peoples has at last been revived.”
After 2:00 A.M. at the Taverne, Shirer spoke with Joe Barnes, who had worked in Moscow for the Herald Tribune and spoke fluent Russian. Barnes was devastated. He was too shocked to comprehend that the Soviet government had climbed into bed with the Nazis. Barnes had hoped the Russians would sign a pact with the French and British that would force the Germans to reconsider attacking Poland. The German journalists, who for the previous six years since Hitler came to power had accepted as an article of faith the party position that Communism was a great evil, now had a complete about-face and toasted the pact. Shirer found their dishonesty and hypocrisy sickening, as he did that of the American correspondents who played up to them. When Mrs. Kaltenborn appeared at the Taverne after 3:00 A.M., she accused Shirer of not having tried hard enough to keep her husband from being expelled. Disgusted, Shirer announced that he was leaving, and he and Barnes left the restaurant to walk through the Tiergarten back to his room at the Adlon Hotel as the sun was beginning to come over the eastern horizon.
* * *
The next day, Thursday, August 24, Shirer awoke in the middle of the afternoon and thought of everything he had to do that day and in the coming days to prepare. He wondered how he would know when the war had started. Would there be some sort of official announcement on German radio after the troops had crossed the frontier into Poland? He had people who could tell him, but he did not know if they would risk it.
All afternoon he thought of Tess and Eileen, and at 7:00 P.M. he reached them on a phone call from the Adlon to Geneva. Tess said hello and then put their daughter, now a year-and-a-half old and jabbering “Papa, Papa, Papa,” on the phone. He could not have been happier. When he was away from them, he missed them keenly, and now, with war approaching and all that it would mean for him, he worried about their safety and well-being, even if they rode out the fighting in Geneva.
“It looks like war tonight,” Shirer told his wife when she got back on the phone. “Across the street they’re installing an anti-aircraft gun on the roof of the I. G. Farben office. The German bombers have been flying over all day. Hitler may go into Poland tonight.” As for Shirer’s colleagues among the British correspondents, the last of them had left Berlin that evening for Denmark on orders from their country’s embassy in anticipation of their country declaring war on Germany in the wake of an invasion of Poland.
Monday, August 28, 1939, 2:00 A.M.
The German government released to the correspondents the text of a French statement. Shirer was struck by one line in it: “If French and German blood is now to be spilled, as it was 25 years ago, in an even longer and more murderous war, then each of the two peoples will fight, confident in their own victory. But surely Destruction and Barbarism will be the real victors.”
At 4:00 A.M., Shirer went on the air in the broadcast center and described last-minute meetings between the Germans and the British. “In the meantime, as the night wore on, troops thundered through the streets, eastward bound towards Poland,” he said.
Wednesday, August 30, 1939, 3:00 A.M.
Shirer borrowed a car from a friend, but when he went to fill it up, he was told he was entitled to only ten liters of gas a day. He met Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, and after seeing her, he found a station that would sell him more gas in spite of the restrictions. He knew he needed to be prepared to travel. In the early morning hours he went to the Taverne to meet up with his colleagues.
Thursday, August 31, 1939
The three-piece orchestra that played night and day in the lobby of the Adlon—he had to walk by it to get to the elevator to go to his room—had gotten on his nerves. He wanted them to stop playing and to recognize the reality of the moment. “It does not go well with the tension,” he wrote in his diary when he reached his room. Another thing bothered him: “the bespectacled automaton who plays the piano every night at the Taverne non-stop should be mobilized. We sit there nightly going hot and cold on the prospects for War and Peace, but he, the pianist, drums on with his stale jazz and light operetta pieces.”
Friday, September 1, 6:00 A.M.
“Sig woke me up at 6 this morning—after two hours sleep—with news that the war was on.” Surely, he believed, the British and French would soon follow with war declarations of their own.
Shirer rushed to the RRG and went on the air, the first American correspondent to do so. “Herr Hitler has at last decided to resort to force against Poland. The decision came in the early morning hours of today, Friday. In a proclamation to the army dated this morning Herr Hitler says: ‘Poland has refused my offer for a friendly settlement of our relations as neighbors. Instead she has taken up arms.’
“ ‘The Germans in Poland have been victims of bloody terror, hunted from house to house. A series of frontier violations that a Great Power cannot accept proves that Poland is not willing to respect Reich frontiers. To put an end to this foolhardy situation, I am left with no other means than from now on opposing force to force. The German army will lead the struggle for the honor and vital rights of resurrected Germany with hard determination.’ ”
As he sat in his small studio in the broadcast center, the morning’s Berlin newspapers spread out in front of him with their bold headlines, he pictured German troops pouring across the Polish frontier. He was grateful to Sigrid for the phone call, and he wondered who had awakened her with the news. Had Göring phoned her this morning to tell her that his country had invaded Poland?
He continued speaking into the microphone: “It’s a gray day here with overhanging clouds. So far absolutely nothing unusual about the picture in Berlin except that the radio is going full blast alternating with martial music and announcements.”
At 1:15 A.M. the next day, Shirer went on the air again. Berlin was preparing for war and British bombers.
Hello. This is William L. Shirer in Berlin. It’s a little bit strange at first, and takes some getting used to. You grope around the pitch-black streets and pretty soon your eyes get used to it, and you can make out the whitewashed curbstones—and there’s a blue light here and there to guide you— and somehow you get along. Every window in Berlin tonight is curtained with heavy black paper. Behind the darkened windows the people sit in their homes and listen to the radio, which plays martial band music, or a stirring symphony from Beethoven or Brahms, and every once in a while you get a news announcement ….
One curious thing about Berlin tonight. The cafés, restaurants and beer halls are full. I went out a couple of hours ago to get a bite to eat. My restaurant looked so dark outside I thought it had shut down. But once I got through the double set of curtained doors, I found the restaurant very light and full of people. I had no trouble getting a good meal, a glass of Pilsner beer and a cup of coffee. It was a vegetarian day, but I got plenty of vegetables and eggs.
An air raid alarm broke Berlin’s calm early in the evening, but nothing came of it. “A word about Americans here,” Shirer said as he closed his broadcast. “Our Embassy today gave Americans a last chance to get out by a special train which will take them to the Danish border tomorrow morning … . All wives and children of Embassy and Consulate staff members will be evacuated on that train tomorrow. The Embassy tonight distributed gas masks to the staff.”
“So there we are. And as long as radio keeps going, I hope to be on the air again tomorrow to tell you what I see from Berlin.”
After his broadcast, Shirer walked out into the dark Berlin morning. He and Max Jordan, the NBC radio correspondent, talked for a few minutes. Both men were exhausted and worried about what would come next for them now that war had been declared. Surely the British—who would declare war against Germany on September 3—would soon begin nightly bombings of the city. Standing on the street waiting for a taxi to take him to the Adlon, Shirer felt an uneasiness and an overwhelming sense of isolation, cut off from the world and his family. At the Adlon, in spite of the time, he got through on the phone to Tess in Geneva. She was worried. As he wrote in his diary, “I felt numbed at this interspersing of a little sweetness in a completely mad world.”