LIES AS THICK AS GRASS
In late September 1939, nearly a month after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and after England and France had declared war on Germany in response, Shirer received a letter at his Geneva address from Blanche Knopf, the cofounder (along with her husband, Alfred A. Knopf) of the publishing firm that bore the Knopf name. He was thrilled to receive it, seeing in it a ratification of his place in the world, even though he barely had time to ponder its significance in his life or to think through what it might mean to the direction of his career as a journalist.
Blanche Knopf, who followed events in Europe closely, if only to keep her eye out for writers of talent she might bring into her publishing house, had a suggestion for Shirer. She saw in him someone who could possibly write an “important” book about Germany. “The only thing I suggest you do now, if you haven’t been doing it, is to keep a very careful diary … of everything that has happened because it will be of human interest as well. You would, of course, include in this a broadcaster’s experiences and what he has to go through to get the news.”
As grateful as he was for the suggestion, Shirer did not need Knopf’s advice to get him started. He had been keeping a diary for years, his earliest being entries he made in a pocket-sized notebook while an ROTC student at an army camp in Kansas when he was still in high school in Cedar Rapids. Since his arrival in Germany in August 1934, he had faithfully maintained regular entries, writing in notebooks, on typed sheets of paper, and on pocket calendars. He wrote on what was in front of him. He was now more than five years into his “Berlin diary.” As onerous and as time consuming as it sometimes was, particularly when he was exhausted, he kept at it, adding entries every few days.
He saved important German newspapers critical to understanding events at a certain moment. Backing that up, he saved clippings of the articles he had written for the Chicago Tribune and also copies of New York newspapers that picked up his stories from the Hearst wire service. He carefully maintained files and moved them whenever he moved, an informal archive of everything related to his life. He saved carbons of outgoing letters, as well as those letters that came to him. Because it was a diary, and because he lived in a police state, he was careful with names, concealing important contacts with an “X,” made-up initials, or nothing at all.
* * *
September brought the first wave of British bombers over Germany. Shirer noted in his diary of September 7 that bombs were dropped on two German coastal towns, Wilhelmshaven and Cuxhaven. The Berlin papers dismissed the attacks as meaningless. They also dismissed British charges that on the night of September 2, a German U-boat had sunk the SS Athenia en route from Scotland to Canada, carrying 1,103 passengers, including more than 300 Americans. “The war of propaganda is on,” he wrote in his diary. “Lies as thick as grass everywhere. Germans conducting terrific press campaign to convince their own people Britain alone is responsible for the crime of war. Mystery here about why no action on the Western Front … . Last night for first time moon was hidden by clouds and getting about in blacked-out Berlin difficult. You couldn’t see people in the streets. Lucky ones with flashlights used them to keep from bumping into one another. But no more flashlights to be had in the stores. J. and I met at 1 A.M. this morning in my room to talk things over. We have an idea Britain and France will not shed much blood on the Western Front.”
In spite of events going on around him, Shirer did everything he could to stay in touch with Tess and their daughter in Geneva. He called Tess during his free time or early in the morning when he returned to his room at the Adlon Hotel, often waking her up. He longed for mail from his wife and was thrilled when she sent photographs of Eileen. He could not look at them enough, could not miss them more than he did every night when he finished work in the broadcast center and returned to his room or stopped for a drink at the Taverne.
On warm afternoons he walked by himself or with a colleague through the vast Tiergarten, lost in thought, wondering how it could be so calm, so peaceful, in Berlin, while fierce fighting raged in Poland. He would sit on a bench and look up at the sky and wonder how long it would be before British bombers appeared overhead in great numbers, bombing the government buildings and setting the city ablaze. Some nights, unwilling to go upstairs to an empty hotel room, he would stand at the bar in the Adlon and have a drink and talk to perfect strangers until the conversation went dead and there was nothing to do but go to bed.
The third week of September, Shirer drove along roads clogged with German troops and armor from Berlin to Danzig. He was surprised to see troops marching toward home rather than toward the front, a sure sign that a war not yet a month old was going well for the invaders. In a thick stand of woods he smelled mountains of dead Polish cavalry horses. A division of Polish cavalry had charged German tanks and been slaughtered. The Germans with their new tanks were in Poland to fight a modern war, with modern tactics and modern weapons; the Polish were fully prepared to fight a war that had ended in 1918. Dead Polish troops lay in the woods, abandoned where they fell.
In a diary entry made in Berlin on September 9, Shirer wrote of the monstrosity of the German machine attacking Poland: “Not a word in the press about the heroic resistance of the Poles, no talk amongst the Germans of the righteousness of a country defending itself against a gigantic military force which has attacked it. People here absolutely unmoved by that spectacle.”
It was yet another rap against the German character, which Shirer thought little of even without a military campaign like the one the Germans were waging in Poland. “P. H … told me this noon he’d seen some of the horribly mutilated bodies of G’s killed by Poles, but also how G’s were rounding up civilians, men, women, boys, marching them into a building for a summary court martial then out the backyard against a wall, where disposed of by firing squads.”
Two days later, on September 11, a German naval officer he knew well told Shirer that Germany was fighting an honorable war in Poland. Shirer was sickened. “Not a word from him about the women and children their bombers have killed … . F. O. told me when he was up at the front, he noticed how the blackcoated boys came in to take care of things behind the lines. Tough faced babies, he said. Of four Polish boys in their hands … he said he bet they didn’t live very long.” Three days later, on September 14, Shirer wrote: “The boys also tell me how the Polish Jews are being put to work on road gangs.”
In the same diary entry, Shirer fumed bitterly about the Germans as a people. Germans he encountered on the subway were “rather smug about their country’s actions.” Recounting a conversation he had with the maid who cleaned his room at the Adlon, he wrote: “For a people who like it both ways, these people are unbeatable … . I haven’t heard one German who gave a second thought to the lot of the Czechs. Here they scream to heaven about how foreign countries treat their own Volk, but they have absolutely no feeling for other racial or national groups which they are terrorizing far worse than G’s ever were … . The number of sincere, intelligent G’s who take in every lie they’re told is appalling.”
As he drove toward Danzig, Shirer could see the backwash of the fighting—bodies in fields, rotting carcasses of horses alongside dirt roads, destroyed houses in rural villages, the inhabitants gone. Near the city of Gdynia on the Baltic Sea where Shirer and John Gunther had spent a night gambling just five weeks before, Shirer and a group of foreign correspondents were allowed to stand on a hilltop and watch fighting being carried out miles away. In his diary he wrote that it was “tragic and grotesque. We stood there and watched the lives being snuffed out as though we were spectators at a football match. About 15,000 Poles surrounded on three sides by Germans and the sea on the fourth side were making a last desperate stand … . We were only 2 miles away, and our hilltop was being used as an observation point by the General Staff.”
Shirer’s trip to the Polish front was not sponsored by the military but by the Propaganda Ministry. The journalists were to be shown only what the ministry’s officials wanted them to see, told only what they wanted them to be told. Shirer chafed under the restrictions and grew angry at himself for going along with it. It was crap, all of it. A number of the ministry’s bureaucrats were along to mind the correspondents and to reinforce the German narrative that the Poles were the aggressors and the Germans were defending their people. They lied as they looked at him. He had been able to deal with it a year or two before at press briefings in Berlin, but now it had reached a new level of arrogance and shamelessness. Before he had been able to smile and nod and pretend to be listening; now he could barely contain his anger and cynicism. His contemptuous feelings toward the bureaucrats, and the Germans in general, threatened to boil over. He held his tongue.
Making matters worse on this trip to Poland, the ministry had paired him off with an odd American named Philip Johnson, who was described to Shirer not as a visiting journalist but as a Fascist on a fact-finding mission. The two would be sharing rooms on the trip. Johnson was in his early twenties and told Shirer he was a representative of the Catholic priest Father Coughlin, whose radio broadcasts in the United States Shirer knew to be anti-Semitic diatribes. And here was one of his acolytes come to watch the country he admired pushing its army into Poland. Like the journalists, British and American, who played up to the Germans, Johnson was to Shirer a loathsome wretch. It was all he could do to hide his contempt for him and keep his distance. Shirer and some of the other American correspondents agreed to stay away from Johnson out of concern that he was there to spy on them. Alone in a hotel room with Johnson, Shirer wrote in his diary that the visiting American posed as an anti-Nazi and engaged Shirer in a conversation about his political views.
“I have given him no more than a few bored grunts,” Shirer wrote.
Physically and emotionally exhausted, Shirer made it to Geneva on October 11, six weeks after the invasion of Poland. He felt drained, as if his body and mind had given up on him. Tess met him at the train station—“pretty and fresh as ever.” He had not seen his wife in two months and felt great love for her as she drove back to their home, where, to his disappointment, he found Eileen asleep. Geneva was a city aglow, and Shirer found the change enormously welcome. The streetlamps burned, homes and storefronts were brightly lit with welcoming warmth, and cars ran with their headlights on. Six weeks of blackouts in Berlin had taken a grim toll, suffocating him with cold dreariness and wrapping him in fear. He’d walked into streetlamps in the dark of night and banged up his face as everyone waited nervously for British bombers to appear. He had not gotten used to it, the gloom of a city that turned itself off to conceal itself until sunup, laden with the weight of official oppression.
The next afternoon, he and Tess went out to dinner. Everything unavailable in Berlin could be found written happily on a Swiss menu—butter, steak, eggs, snails, fresh vegetables, cheese, coffee, red wine, and cognac. He was stunned by how normal life was in Switzerland, even with a war underway in Poland and conflict—but not yet open warfare—in the West. It was coming, he knew that. On the train to Switzerland, he had seen the Germans hauling supplies to the western front. “Queer kind of war,” he wrote in his diary.
He was sad and overcome with emotion when on October 15 he boarded the train for the long overnight ride back to Berlin. Tess stood on the platform, weeping. Of his wife, he wrote in his diary, “We dined and danced and talked and loved.” He played with his daughter, whom he found “perky and bright and growing every day, physically, mentally and especially the latter.” He read to her from picture books. He hoped above all his hopes that whatever happened in the West would not involve Switzerland, that the Germans would simply let it be.
The journey back into Germany was like going from day into night, from bright light and happy people and glorious music to a dark underground world, grim and burdened with the fear and day-to-day concerns of life in a robust police state. It was a world filled with informers, officious bullies, and beaten-down inhabitants. When the train arrived in Frankfurt, he found the station shrouded in complete darkness. Soldiers bumped into each other on the platform and tripped over their bags. Exhausted, miserable at leaving Geneva, Shirer switched platforms in search of the overnight train to Berlin, but it was so dark he got lost looking for his sleeper car. To his horror, he discovered he had boarded the wrong train, but it was too late to flee back onto the platform. All the berths were taken, and there was no place for him to sleep, so he sat up all night, the train’s aisles packed with scared people who had nowhere to go. He sat on the floor, squeezed in between other people, no one acknowledging the other person, and closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
The hardships were piling up, from the concerns that full-scale war would come to Berlin, to the daily hardships of just getting by, to dealing with the censors and their demands that he say only what they wanted him to say. There were more and more Eintopf days—one-pot meals, usually a poor stew—at Berlin’s restaurants. He had heard that clothing rationing was to be imposed, that shoe sales and even shoe repairs were to be severely restricted. On top of these impositions was the matter of just dealing with the government and its actions. A typical diary entry, this one in late October, reads: “The secret police announced that two men were shot for ‘resisting arrest’ yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.”
That the mass of the German people believed the newspapers and government pronouncements strained Shirer’s ability to look at these people as anything but intellectual and moral failures. “The people are very patriotic and being fed a terrific barrage of propaganda … . I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime, who sees anything wrong in the destruction of Poland,” he wrote in his diary. “All the moral attitudes of the outside world … find little echo among the people here. People from all classes, women and men, have gathered in front of windows in Berlin and approvingly gazed at maps in which little red pins showed the victorious advance of the German troops in Poland.”
His clock was ticking. He was not sure he could tolerate all the hardships and indignities much longer or handle emotionally the long separations from his family as he continued his broadcasts for CBS. It made him wonder, as he had for so many years now, if he could support himself as a book writer and live wherever he wanted. His and Tess’s year on the Spanish coast now seemed like the most idyllic time in his life; the financial hardships and worry about the future that had consumed them that year had faded and been replaced by the picture of a writer at work. He had the letter from Blanche Knopf in his files, and he could only hope he could hand her a manuscript one day that she would be happy to publish.
* * *
The indignities and horror piled up for Shirer as 1939 came to a close. At a November reception in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, Shirer spoke with Göring, who lectured him on America’s lack of production of airplanes. Shirer recounted the conversation with Göring when he later wrote in his diary:
“What do you think of the general situation?”
“Very favorable to Germany.”
“So far your air force has only attacked British warships. Why?”
“Warships are very important objects. They give us good practice.”
“Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?”
“We’re humane … . You shouldn’t laugh. I’m serious. I am humane.”
He noted later in the month a German press report that nine young Czech students at the University of Prague had been executed before a firing squad. One of the press spokesmen for the Propaganda Ministry, when asked at a press conference about the executions, said the students had staged anti-German demonstrations. Three more Czechs were executed later in the day. In Germany, three students were executed for “treason,” the press reported.
To Shirer’s disgust, a journalist with the New York Herald Tribune, Beach Conger, who had only recently arrived in Berlin, was forced to leave the city after he refused to retract a story the Nazis complained about. As they had done when Norman Ebbutt left Berlin, Shirer and a small group of his colleagues, in defiance of the government, escorted Conger to the train station and wished him well on his return to New York.
Shirer reflected on Conger’s fate in his diary. “Though the Nazis don’t like me, I suppose I shall never get kicked out of here. The trouble is my radio scripts are censored in advance, so that whatever I say over the air cannot be held against me. The newspaper correspondents can telephone out what they please, subject to the risk of getting what Conger got. This is almost a worse form of censorship than we have, since the New York offices of the press associations and New York newspapers do not like their correspondents to be kicked out.”
While Shirer had no way of knowing exactly what the Germans were doing in Poland, he picked up tips here and there, all of them horrifying. In a late November diary entry, he wrote that Hans Frank, the German governor-general of Poland, had decreed that the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw would be walled off as the Jews were “carriers of disease and germs.” Shirer learned more from an “American friend” who had been in Warsaw, who was almost certainly an official of the US embassy in Berlin. This friend made it clear that the German policy was to exterminate the Polish Jews. The years of official policies against the German Jews, harassment, stealing their property, and forcing them to leave the country, had, if this report was true, now come down to extermination.
“They are being herded into eastern Poland and forced to live in unheated shacks and robbed of any opportunity of earning bread and butter. Several thousand Jews from the Reich have also been sent to eastern Poland to die, he says.”
* * *
In December, Shirer was pleased to see Christmas trees for sale on street corners, and Berliners buying them up, no matter their own hardships. In visiting different stores looking for Christmas gifts, Shirer could see there was little to buy, and everything except books was rationed. He wanted to buy some gramophone records but could not find any. Music, he concluded, was too much to ask for these days. He tried to avoid reading the papers for a few days, as more and more death notices for soldiers killed in Poland appeared in the city’s newspapers. More executions were reported in the newspapers, and Germans were told they would be shown no mercy if they listened to foreign news broadcasts like the BBC.
Without his family for Christmas, Shirer stayed around his broadcast office at the RRG to attend an official party complete with champagne and music. He was at least glad for the company but disgusted when he saw William Joyce, who was born in New York and raised in England, arrive to celebrate with the Germans. Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda, as did an English actor, Jack Trevor, who also showed up at the party. To his relief, Shirer’s friend Fred Oechsner, who covered Germany for United Press, invited Shirer to his studio apartment for a Christmas dinner complete with turkey, trimmings, and a pumpkin pie. He spent New Year’s Eve with a group of American correspondents at Sigrid Schultz’s apartment.
* * *
At their home near Dresden, Victor Klemperer and his wife, Eva, endured. Each day he wrote, each time he expressed himself, his diary took on added importance to him. It would only grow more important, but like any diarist, he could not see far enough down the road to know that. There was, to Victor and Eva, the here and now in the new Germany. The diary was his way of expressing the bitterness he lived with daily and his way of committing treason against the government he loathed by expressing his personal thoughts in these pages.
Like the Germans Shirer saw sacrificing by buying a Christmas tree and decorating it with candles in a corner of their homes, the Klemperers found a tree and did the same. As comforting a ritual as it was to them, it brought no happiness. “We are simply, so to speak, in extremis,” Klemperer wrote, adding on a positive note that he was now certain the West would finally go to war against Hitler. He welcomed that.
To celebrate the holiday, a former student of Klemperer’s showed up at the house with extraordinary Christmas gifts purchased with ration cards: “two big scallops of veal, an egg, a tin of ersatz honey, a bar of chocolate, two gingerbreads, a pair of socks, two tins of milk and half a liter of opened skimmed milk.” As happy as Klemperer was at the abundance of the gifts, he saw nothing ahead but trouble. “Either this is our last bad Christmas or our last Christmas altogether.”
Of the gifts from his former student, one stood out enough for Klemperer to comment on it in the last line of his diary for 1939. “I believe the pogroms of November ’38 made less impression on the nation than cutting the bar of chocolate for Christmas.”