A LONG TRAIN RIDE TO TESS
Here for a week’s rest. The excited cries of Eileen when I take her in swimming for the first time in her life, the soft voice of Tess reading a fairy tale to Eileen before she goes to bed—these become realities again and are good. Everyone full of talk of the “new Europe.” The Swiss are resigned to it and have no military position, as they are now surrounded. Mt. Blanc from the quai today was magnificent, its snow pink in the afternoon sun. We had dinner along the lake, on the Alpine side. Lights sparkled across the lake.
—William L. Shirer, diary, Geneva, July 4, 1940
Two weeks after visiting his family in Geneva, Shirer mingled with a huge crowd at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin for a victory parade. Long columns of German troops paraded in front of cheering crowds, including thousands of school children in their uniforms, let out of their classes for the day. Businesses and government offices closed in honor of the country’s great victory over France.
“Hitler to speak in the Reichstag tomorrow, we hear,” Shirer wrote. “But we’re threatened with expulsion if we say it to America. My hotel filled with big generals arriving for the show.”
Shirer watched the speech with Joe Harsch. Hitler spoke of “peace” with Britain in a tone that made it clear it was all up to the British. “Of course it is peace with Hitler sitting astride the continent as its conqueror,” he wrote in his diary. It was Harsch’s first time witnessing Hitler, and he was mesmerized. “Said he couldn’t keep his eyes off his hands; thought the hand work brilliant,” Shirer wrote. The two sat near Göring, now the Reichsmarschall, who to Shirer’s eye “acted like a happy child playing with his toys on Christmas morning.”
In mid-August, Tess took the train to Berlin to spend a few days with her husband. At 2:00 A.M., soon after Shirer returned to the Adlon Hotel from his broadcast, the air-raid alarms across the city sounded. Tess was to leave the next morning, and neither of them wanted to stay in the cellar of the hotel until the alarms went off hours later. Under orders from the air-raid wardens to go to the cellar, they at first said they would and then abruptly changed their minds and stayed in their room, watching the sky over the city light up with antiaircraft fire.
The next day, Shirer flew to the French coast aboard a German army transport to watch the air war against Britain. “Germans are claiming 80 to 100 British planes shot down daily against 18 to 25 of their own,” he wrote. “Doubt I will get to the truth.”
There were fourteen correspondents on the flight, and because there were no seats, they all squatted on the floor of the transport, flying low the entire way, bouncing and holding on to anything they could to avoid being tossed about. When they neared an airstrip in Ghent, a German fighter escorted them to the ground. When they reached Ostend on the Belgian coast, Shirer left his group and walked on the beach, smelling the salt air. Just back from the beach, hundreds of destroyed houses lined city streets. He was reluctant to proceed with his group, which included officials from the Propaganda Ministry. But he was curious to see if the Germans were preparing for a massive invasion of England, so he went on to Calais on the French coast.
While he was eating lunch at a seaside restaurant, someone shouted that bombers were overhead. Shirer looked up to see twenty-three German aircraft surrounded by fighters. “It’s going to be a nice day—for death in the air,” he wrote in his diary. Later in the day they watched a wave of Heinkel bombers “limp back from the direction of Dover, gliding down over our heads. One was in difficulty and just managed to make the first field on the mainland. Messerschmitt 109s and 110s dash about at 350 mph like a lot of hens protecting their young. They remain in the air until all of the bombers are safely down, then climb and make off for England. We have stopped our cars to watch.”
* * *
On this trip, Shirer and a number of the correspondents came to the conclusion that the Germans wanted them to see their preparations along the French coastline and to hear the talk of an invasion of England across the Channel. German pilots flying missions over London were brought around to talk freely with him. One of them told Shirer: “It’s a matter of a couple of weeks, you know, until we finish the RAF … . The British are through.”
Shirer did not believe it, in large part, because an American official in Berlin had told him prior to his trip that if he did not see large numbers of barges and other transports being readied to bring troops and tanks across the Channel, it could not happen. And Shirer, so far on the trip, had seen very little evidence that the Germans were assembling transports for such a massive undertaking. They were constructing defensive works—he saw that everywhere along the French coast. But he could not envision the Germans moving huge numbers of troops, tanks, and armored equipment across the Channel.
Still, the officials from the Propaganda Ministry kept pushing the correspondents to write and broadcast that an invasion was imminent. Telephone lines and radio facilities would be made available. There would be no censorship. “I began to grow very suspicious,” Shirer wrote. “I think the Germans want us to launch a scare story about an imminent invasion of Britain.”
When the group arrived in Brussels, a high-ranking German officer told them: “We naturally cannot tell you the invasion date. But we are relaxing military censorship in order to allow you to report what you have seen the past few days on the Channel.” Shirer told the officer he had not seen any barges that could transport an entire army, and the officer said there were things he could not show the correspondents. “But I believe you have seen enough to convince you that we are ready to invade,” he told Shirer.
At the hotel, Shirer was shown a phone line reserved for him. “I would have no part of it,” he wrote later. “To broadcast now and say that the Germans were all set to invade would be not only a lie, but do the beleaguered British a terrible disservice that could be fatal … . It suddenly occurred to me that we American correspondents … were faced with a decision that had consequences far more serious than we had ever experienced. The decision was not difficult for me. I would not broadcast.”
With no work to do, Shirer went to the hotel bar and then to the restaurant, where he had a hearty dinner. He returned to his room at approximately 10:00 P.M. A few minutes later, as he prepared to go to bed, he answered a knock on his door and was greeted by an official from the RRG and one of the military guides who had escorted the group the previous few days.
“We’ve got an excellent line for you to Berlin,” the radio man said. “When do you want to broadcast?”
Shirer told them he would not broadcast at all. Asked why, he said, “Because I do not believe, from what I’ve seen, you’re going to invade, at least for now.”
After the two Germans left Shirer’s room, Fred Oechsner, the United Press bureau chief in Berlin, knocked on his door. He showed Shirer cables he had received from the home office in New York demanding to know why he had not filed a story on the imminent invasion of England as the other correspondents on the trip had with their wire services. Oechsner was certain he would be fired as a consequence but told Shirer he could not write that story because he did not believe it was true.
“How did you handle it in your broadcast?” Oechsner asked Shirer.
“I didn’t broadcast,” Shirer answered. “For the same reason you didn’t cable anything.”
As Shirer wrote years later, Louis Lochner, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin, and Pierre Huss, a wire service correspondent, filed stories that night predicting a German invasion of England. Shirer and Oechsner were disgusted. “Pierre, it seemed to me, had always played the Nazi game a little,” Shirer wrote a half-century later. “Louis too, if only to get a beat, a scoop. I did not envy them.”
* * *
When he returned to Berlin, certain that the Germans would call off any plans to launch an invasion of England from ports along the French coast, Shirer began assessing where he stood with the censors and what he needed to do in order to satisfy his internal demand that he not report propaganda. He would not be used by the Germans, even if that put him in a bad place with Paul White, the CBS manager in New York. As he had been since arriving in Berlin in August 1934, Shirer was fully aware of how thin the ice was beneath his feet.
In July the Propaganda Ministry had ordered Ralph Barnes, the Berlin correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, out of the country, along with an assistant who also occasionally worked for Shirer. Barnes, one of Shirer’s oldest friends in Europe, was no longer welcome to cover the German government. Barnes’s sin was to have written a story for his newspaper suggesting that the German government was not all that friendly with the Soviets in Moscow, which ran counter to the official line in Berlin. It was read by a German, living and working in New York City or Washington, D.C., who reported back to Berlin. In his diary entry when he heard that Barnes was to be expelled, Shirer wrote that, in addition to the offending story, he was certain that the bureaucrats in the Propaganda Ministry loathed the Herald Tribune itself. To Shirer’s eye, the Herald Tribune was the only New York newspaper with a Berlin bureau that insisted its correspondents maintain their independence from government officials.
The afternoon before Barnes boarded a train that would take him to the coast and then aboard a ferry to England, he and Shirer walked through the Tiergarten, Shirer’s favorite place in Berlin. He had loved it since his arrival six years earlier and always found paths to walk that seemed fresh to him, and now he was with his friend. Neither knew, of course, but it would be the last time they saw each other. While Barnes was upset about having to leave the country, he was determined to cover it from another location. Shirer, for his part, was proud of Barnes for showing “more integrity than any of us who are allowed to stay.”
Later in July, a second American correspondent was ordered out of Germany. Maxwell Corpening, who liked to be referred to as Captain Corpening, of Shirer’s former newspaper the Chicago Tribune, arrived in Berlin and wrote a story for his paper about Germany’s offering peace terms to the British. The story was immediately attacked by the Propaganda Ministry as false.
By late August, dealing with German officials and censors was the least of Shirer’s concerns. The city was hot, its people tense as they awaited the certain arrival of British bombers bent on punishing Germans in their capital city for the attacks on London. On the night of August 19, Shirer, seated in his small studio at the broadcast center, jumped up when the air-raid alarms erupted. In less than a minute he was to speak into the microphone. A censor seated next to him to make sure Shirer followed the approved script indicated he could go on the air, even as dozens of people began rushing down staircases to the safety of the basement.
As Shirer waited to speak, a seventeen-year-old Englishman shouted and banged on Shirer’s studio window. Shirer knew the boy had come to Germany with his mother to work for the Nazis. The German censor ignored the boy and indicated Shirer could begin his broadcast. Shirer knew enough not to mention that the air-raid alarms had sounded.
“This is Berlin,” he began, quickly summarizing the previous day’s bombing campaign by the Germans against London. “This evening’s papers and even the early editions of tomorrow morning’s newspapers are still playing up yesterday’s attack. They all headline the final score as given out today by the High Command: 147 British planes destroyed against thirty-six German machines missing. The total number of British planes shot down in the last eight days is given in Berlin as 732.”
Shirer reported that the German commander in the Netherlands had issued stern warnings against giving shelter to “enemy soldiers” and had declared that sabotage against the Germans would not be tolerated. Shirer went on to say the Germans would punish entire towns and villages where saboteurs lived, but the censor deleted a line in which Shirer intended to say that the Germans would take hostages of their own in retaliation.
The next afternoon Shirer was back on the air, and this time, after his “This is Berlin” opening, he mentioned the previous night’s air raid. The censor again deleted sections of Shirer’s script, which infuriated him. But there was nothing he could do about it except refuse to broadcast. “Afterward I went out to watch the excitement, but there was n’t any,” he said into the microphone. “A few anti-aircraft guns roared in the distance, some searchlights went into action, but that was about all. Later it was explained that two bombers came over and cruised over a suburb without dropping any bombs. Later, say the Germans, one of the planes was picked up by the searchlights at Brunswick, and shot down in flames.”
Early on the morning of August 25, British bombers appeared directly over the city. The sirens went off at 12:20 A.M. as Shirer sat in his office in the short-wave station preparing a script in the presence of one of the censors. Moments after the sirens sounded, the German antiaircraft guns positioned around the city exploded en masse, shaking the building. Shirer could hear the low thud of bombs hitting the ground—as far as he knew, the first the British had dropped on Berlin.
As the attack commenced, Shirer and one of the censors from the Propaganda Ministry argued. “About midnight I got into a heavy argument with K., censor from the P.M. [Propaganda Ministry] as to whether British planes could penetrate the Berlin defenses and reach the heart of the city,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “I maintained that at night they could, and probably would visit us now that the Germans had dropped bombs on the center of London. He was dead certain they wouldn’t because they couldn’t. If it were at all possible, he argued with some vehemence, they would have been all over here long before now. Hardly were the words out of his mouth before the siren blew and the guns started sounding off.”
To reach his studio from the short-wave station, Shirer walked out of one building and dashed madly across an open lot to another building and a series of sheds where the broadcast studios were set up. As he ran, the antiaircraft guns positioned around the broadcast buildings and other government buildings exploded. Pieces of twisted metal fell out of the night sky and landed all around him. “It sounded like falling hail,” he wrote. “I hesitated in the shelter of the doorway for a moment. In a couple of minutes my broadcast would begin. I made a dash for it.”
Once he reached his studio, Shirer sat in front of his microphone, the sounds of the attack all around him. One of the German engineers told him to lean close to the microphone so the noise of the attack could not be heard on American radios. Shirer began: “This is Berlin. We’re having an air raid alarm here at the moment. The sirens went off some time ago, about midnight, and afterward you could hear the big antiaircraft guns going into action, and see the searchlights trying to pick up the British planes. More details are not yet available.”
When he finished with his broadcast, Shirer attempted to run back across the open lot to his office in the short-wave building but was stopped by a guard. Shirer had with him a flashlight lent to him by Sigrid Schultz earlier in the evening, and he was anxious to give it back to her, since she was shortly to give her own broadcast. The guard ordered Shirer to stay in the building, explaining that shrapnel was “falling like rain drops” and he could get killed. Shirer refused, pushing past the guard and making his way along the sides of the sheds that sat along the edges of the lot in order to reach the main building where Sigrid was waiting for him.
When he was halfway across the lot, “all hell broke loose, guns all around firing with everything they had. A rain of shrapnel came tumbling down.” Shirer hugged the sheds trying to avoid the falling metal and made a mad dash for the safety of the nearest building, where he found Sigrid waiting for him. He handed her the flashlight, and in full flight she started out across the lot, hoping to reach the studios on the far side. Halfway across she stumbled and fell hard onto her knees, shrapnel falling all around her and noisily bouncing off the ground and the roofs of surrounding buildings. She picked herself up and continued to run as Shirer, stepping out into the lot to see if she was all right, heard the engine roar of the British bombers directly overhead, the searchlights desperately trying to pick them out.
The next day’s Berlin newspapers gave the bombing raid six lines of an official communiqué, which caused Shirer to laugh out loud. The government-controlled papers spoke in big headlines of “the cowardly British attack” against civilians. Shirer, knowing from Murrow in London of the destruction and deaths in that city from the German bombing campaign, threw down the papers in disgust. The people of Berlin knew the truth even if their papers were going to pretend otherwise. “There is not a line about the explosive bombs we all heard,” he wrote in his diary. “Nor is there a word about the three streets in Berlin which have been roped off all day to prevent the curious from seeing what a bomb can do to a house.”
The government, of course, knew the reality that British planes had made it across occupied Europe and struck Berlin in the early morning hours. Someone Shirer called “X” in his diary told him the British had dropped one hundred bombs on the city, seventy of them incendiary bombs meant to start large fires.
On the night of August 29, the British returned, and the government press conceded that there were a number of fatalities on the ground. Shirer, watching the attacks from his vantage point in central Berlin, guessed that the British were trying to destroy the airport at Tempelhof along with a major nearby rail junction. This concerned him, for the obvious reason that the British would want to destroy government buildings—he worked in a government building—and because, if the airfields at Tempelhof were destroyed, it would reduce the possibility of his being able to flee the country if he had to.
For Shirer, the fear of being killed in a nighttime bombing raid, or being trapped in Germany as the war escalated and unable to join his family in Switzerland, was made worse by his daily struggles with the censors. They read his scripts and crossed off sentences, paragraphs, and entire sections. You can say this, you can’t say that. None knew the difference between the truth and the government version as written and approved by the bureaucrats in the Propaganda Ministry and reprinted in the city’s newspapers. On the night of one bombing of the city, the censors ordered Shirer not to mention that it was underway. He knew what Murrow did during bombing raids in London— describing them vividly as they happened—and he admired his colleague for it, but it would be impossible for Shirer to accomplish the same thing here. Shirer lost his temper, but he complied and when his broadcast was over, he was ordered to the bomb shelter in the basement of the building. When Shirer refused to go to the cellar, the censors rounded up two policemen to escort him.
* * *
As September 1 arrived, the one-year anniversary of the German assault on Poland, Shirer was certain he could not continue to stay in Berlin without risking his life more than he already had. On more than one occasion, as he returned to his room at the Adlon Hotel after an early morning broadcast, he saw fires burning along the city’s skyline from the night’s attacks. The hotel—at the intersection of two busy central Berlin streets, Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse, which was lined with government buildings including the Chancellery—could easily be struck, if not on purpose then by mistake. On several nights he stood on the roof of the broadcast center and watched the mad circling of the dark sky by the German searchlights and heard the deafening explosion of the antiaircraft guns. “There was nothing you could do against the night bomber but pray that its bombs would not fall on you,” he wrote years later.
As he prepared to broadcast to America on the anniversary, the censor warned Shirer not to refer to Germany as the aggressor. “Please remember it was Poland who attacked us first,” the censor told him. As they argued, the air-raid sirens sounded, and the antiaircraft guns positioned around the government buildings roared as bombers appeared overhead.
“How do the Germans feel today, after one year of war, you may ask?” Shirer said in his broadcast.
Well, judging by the front-page editorials in such leading papers as the Völkischer Beobachter, the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung today, they have a clear conscience that the war was forced upon them by Britain, that they have a righteous cause, that they’ve done pretty well in a year of fighting, and that victory stands not far off. That is the official view, to be sure, but it would be a mistake to assume that it is not also the view of the great mass of the German people … .
Well, how fare the German people, you may ask, after a year of war? Take food. On the whole, right now they are probably better fed than a year ago. Butter, bacon and eggs imported from Denmark, and vegetables imported from Holland have helped. Also, Germany’s own stocks of food are still, I take it, very sizeable. Germans will not starve this winter. The situation in occupied Holland, Belgium and France is not so rosy. I don’t know where their food is going to come from this winter. The official German standpoint is that if they suffer, it will be the fault of the British blockade.
Late in September, Shirer covered a speech by Hitler in the big Sportpalast in which he promised to punish Britain for its air attacks on Berlin. The crowd became hysterical when Hitler vowed to drop hundreds of thousands of kilograms of bombs on London in retaliation. “ ‘We will stop the handiwork of these air pirates, so help us God,’ Hitler shouted. At this point the poor imbeciles sprang to their feet, the better to screech out their barbarian yells of approval.”
Hitler’s lies—he said in his speech that Britain had tyrannized the Continent and that Germany was fighting for its freedom—and the lies of all the government officials Shirer dealt with on a daily basis continued to take their toll. “Lies. Lies. I’m getting tired of the censorship restrictions on our telling even a modicum of truth to America,” he wrote in his diary. “And yet our American offices insist on our staying here, though they know our position. Personally, I shall not do it much longer.”
Making his own situation worse with the authorities, Shirer turned down official offers of guided tours of the capital meant to show how well the Germans were dealing with the nightly attacks. He saw it as nothing but propaganda, and he would have nothing to do with it. “This attitude of mine greatly resented,” he wrote in his diary. “A P and INS and buro chiefs which have played the Nazi game completely from the start were welcomed because they write only what will not displease the Nazi lords.”
When officials at the broadcast center handed him a new kind of microphone that was supposed to keep out the sounds of the air attacks, Shirer reacted angrily. He knew the attacks were heard in New York because one of the CBS broadcasters there, Elmer Davis, had commented on the sounds, and the Germans had listened to his broadcast and responded accordingly.
To put additional pressure on Shirer to comply with their rules, the Germans required him to submit his work to three censors: one from the military, a second from the Foreign Office, and a third from the Propaganda Ministry. One night the arguing with all three was so intense that Shirer missed his broadcast; the following evening, Tess called him from Geneva to tell him that Paul White had called her to ask why Shirer had not broadcast. Making Shirer look worse in New York, White told Tess he had received a cable from Berlin saying, “Regret Shirer arrived too late tonight to broadcast.”
Shirer felt he had another person lined up against him: Paul White. “God knows I had had constant difficulties with the Germans,” Shirer wrote years later. “But I was surprised to meet with a considerable lack of understanding at CBS.” Earlier, when Shirer had complained to White that he would not broadcast if it was nothing but German lies, White had cabled him to make his position clear: “Bill, we thoroughly understand, sympathize condition in Berlin, but feel we must carry on with broadcasts even if only reading official statements and newspaper texts.”
Writing a half-century later in his memoir, Shirer’s anger still boiled. “CBS would have to get someone else for that menial chore,” he wrote. “I replied to White I could hire a pro-Nazi American for $50 a week and no expenses to read that crap.”
The night of September 11 brought the largest and most severe British bombing of Berlin. Three incendiary bombs fell near the Adlon Hotel, and a number landed close to the American embassy. A series of bombs hit a nearby train station and the Reichstag building. Shirer found himself in the middle of the attack as he left the broadcast center after the all-clear had sounded. He drove as fast as he could in a borrowed car and slammed on the brakes when he skidded into debris on the road, narrowly missing a bomb crater that would have swallowed the car.
The following day, Shirer boarded a train in Berlin for the long ride to the Swiss border, where Tess would be waiting for him. He had made up his mind to tell her that he could not stay any longer in Berlin. He also wanted to clarify his position with Paul White in New York, and he did not want to have that conversation over the phone in Berlin. As much as he yearned to be with Tess and Eileen in Geneva, Shirer worried that he was leaving Berlin at precisely the wrong moment. Rumors abounded in the city and among the military that the invasion of England was planned for the night of September 15, when the moon would be full and the tide right.
“I’ll chance the trip anyway,” he wrote in his diary.