CROWDED BUSES
On his way across Germany on a blacked-out train heading for the Swiss frontier, Shirer went over in his head what he wanted to tell Paul White. His thoughts came down to a simple statement: unless the Germans relaxed the censorship in Berlin and let him speak his mind, and explain on American radio what was going on in Germany, he would get out. He was determined to be candid with White, as White had always been with him. He had proved himself as Murrow’s representative in Berlin. White could not criticize the work. He was approaching White not from a position of weakness but its opposite.
Shirer had been in Vienna for the Anschluss, in Munich for Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” meeting with Hitler, in Prague when the Germans occupied the Sudetenland, with the German Sixth Army as it bored its way across Belgium and into France, on the majestic boulevards of Paris after the city had fallen to the Germans, and in the woods of Compiègne for the French surrender. He had made broadcasting history, and he was cocky enough and sure enough of his own credentials to know it and to speak candidly to White.
Prior to his arrival in Switzerland and after dozens of late-night phone calls, Shirer and his wife had worked out a plan whereby Tess and Eileen would leave Europe for America. They had discussed this before, of course, but leaving Geneva for Lisbon—across France, which was then at war with Germany—would have been perilous. The French surrender and the end of fighting, and now the German occupation of Paris, northern France, and the Atlantic coastline, changed that fundamentally. To Shirer’s mind, it seemed possible that Tess and their child could safely make their way across France, into northern Spain, and from there into Portugal. He tried desperately to come to some sort of solution in his mind, in favor of the plan at one moment and then arguing against it in the next. If Germany invaded England from French seaports, then this plan would fail. He could not get his mind around his and his family’s future in the event of such an expansion of the fighting. What if Britain fell? What would Europe look like? But Shirer, as he had believed all along since visiting the coastline himself, saw no real possibility for a massive German invasion across the Channel. It would take too many boats of all kinds to ferry the men and equipment, and with Germany so far unable to destroy British airpower, such a massive movement of ships would surely be destroyed at sea.
Lisbon was the last port on the Atlantic from which his wife and daughter could board a passenger ship or an airplane for America. Tess was at first reluctant to make such a journey, but she was assured it was the best plan they could follow at the moment. More fighting would close more doors of escape. Shirer could envision a scenario in which he and his wife and daughter would spend the rest of their lives in Hitler’s Europe. He would do anything to avoid that. Shirer promised he would follow her, with the goal of being together in New York by Christmas.
Shirer found Geneva a joy. He played with Eileen all day and sat up late each night with Tess talking about what they wanted for themselves in the future. Each dreaded the morning when Tess would take him to the rail station for the long trip back to Berlin. As he enjoyed his family, rumors spread through the city that the Germans had been overwhelmed by British air and sea power and that an invasion had been thwarted with an enormous loss of life. Shirer did not believe it, and it was quickly proved to be false.
It came as a surprise to Shirer when Tess explained on one of their evenings together that she would rather stay in Europe. Starting a new life in America, while not unappealing, did not fully engage her. Nor did she fancy the idea of living in the United States while her husband worked in Europe. But Tess’s desire to stay in Europe, closer to her husband, didn’t make sense. There was much to be worked out and not a lot of time in which to do it. And first he had to come to an agreement with Paul White.
Shirer called White and asked him to book seats on a passenger plane from Lisbon to New York for his wife and daughter. White agreed to do it but said it would be difficult to arrange. He promised to get Tess and Eileen to New York by Christmas, which was nearly three months away. At that point, Shirer told White he preferred to be with them when they left Europe.
“Bill, we understand your feelings,” White said. “But we want you to stay in Berlin. We think you’re doing a wonderful job.”
Weary of having to explain his situation, Shirer launched into an account of the difficulties of working in Berlin and covering the German government. He tried to explain what it was like to deal with a government that lied about everything, in a country in which informing on your family and friends was encouraged and where enemies of the state were locked up in concentration camps or had their heads chopped off. “He had not the slightest inkling of what trying to work in the Nazi madhouse was like,” Shirer wrote of his conversations with White. “Despite several hours on the transatlantic telephone over three days White and I did not quite solve our differences.”
When the conversations were over, Shirer summed up what they had agreed to in a letter to White: “I realize that the next few weeks may decide the issue of the war, and that it is not the best time to pull out because of censorship … . For that reason I am going back to Berlin to have another crack at the job. But if there is a stalemate this winter and the censorship is not relaxed, I personally cannot remain there and do Nazi propaganda.”
On the morning of September 18, Shirer boarded a train that would take him back across Germany to the capital city. Saying goodbye to Tess and Eileen had been wrenching, but he held on to the hope that they could both get to the United States safely and that he could join them by Christmas. No matter how he left the discussion with Paul White about his next few months in Berlin, Shirer had made up his mind that—barring an enormous change in Germany and how the Nazis ran the country—he would gather up his belongings and leave.
Shirer settled in on the train, reading and sleeping uneasily as the line of passenger cars moved toward the Fatherland. He kept up his diary, typing out his notes and writing on the backs of loose paper, in pocket diaries and calendars, in pencil and ink. He had taken Blanche Knopf’s advice to heart and was faithful about the diary, hoping at some point to present it to her and her publishing company in New York City as a record of his work in Nazi Germany. He would end it when he left. It would be his “Berlin diary,” his first book, and would give him much to talk about with John Gunther. He could only hope Knopf would find it interesting and publishable.
In the darkness of his first night on the train, somewhere between Basel and Frankfurt, Shirer was awakened in his berth by the porter’s shouts. As he pulled himself up in the cramped quarters, he heard the thump-thump-thump of distant gunfire as an antiaircraft battery opened up against British planes. Thankfully, nothing came of it, and the train proceeded, arriving at the big Potsdamer Bahnhof in Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate on time. Stepping off the train, he found himself in a large group of wounded soldiers being removed from a rail car. He assumed they were airmen involved in the bombings of London. Many had serious burns.
On a siding, a Red Cross train stretched out of the station and down the track to the Landwehr Canal, where the body of the murdered Rosa Luxemburg had been dumped in 1919. Shirer was puzzled as to why there would be so many wounded soldiers now, more than three months after the French surrender. “Can it be that the tales I heard in Geneva had some truth in them after all?” he wrote in his diary, quickly dismissing any thought that the Germans had failed in an attempted invasion of England. He was certain they had given up on an invasion and would instead concentrate part of their army on North Africa.
Berlin felt a less gloomy place to Shirer after four days in Switzerland. There had been only one air raid in his absence, which disappointed him greatly. “They really think the British planes can’t get through,” he wrote. “Morale tumbled noticeably in Berlin when the British visited us almost every evening.”
His view that the British bombing of Berlin had so far been ineffective was confirmed a day or two later when he and two American colleagues drove out of the city center to the big Siemens Electrical Works. “We drove slowly around the plant, but could find no trace of any damage,” he wrote. “The thousands of workers filing out after the afternoon shift seemed well fed and quite contented.” Returning to Berlin, Shirer passed another long Red Cross train unloading scores of wounded Germans.
Over the next few days, Shirer battled with the censors, who removed large sections of his broadcasts about bombing raids. Meanwhile, Shirer found it more and more difficult to read the headlines in the daily newspapers, which he found so dishonest as to be laughable. One night when he wanted to read some of the headlines on his broadcast, one of the censors ordered him not to, saying he would be misleading his listeners. “Censorship of our broadcasts is growing daily more impossible,” he wrote in his diary.
“I ask myself why I stay here … . For the last few months I’ve been trying to get by on my wits, such as they are; to indicate a truth or an official lie by the tone and inflexion of the voice, by a pause held longer than is natural, by the use of an Americanism which most Germans, who’ve learned their English in England, will not fully grasp, and by drawing from a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or their juxtaposition, all the benefit I can. But the Nazis are on to me.”
Shirer knew his broadcasts were listened to in the United States by Germans or their spies. Anything found offensive was then written up in a report that was forwarded to the Propaganda Ministry with his name prominently stamped on the envelope. The Nazis were actively following everything he said and how he said it, all with the goal of eventually finding an excuse to expel him from Germany. Shirer resented it greatly, as he also resented the “go along to get along” crowd among the other correspondents, with whom he had fallen out of favor.
Summing up his beliefs in the pages of his diary, he wrote: “The Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry keep receiving reports from the United States—not only from the Embassy at Washington, but from their well-organized intelligence service throughout our country—that I’m getting by with murder (which I’m not) and must be sat upon.” He knew, apparently through friendly contacts in the ministry, that Kurt Sell, a German journalist based in Washington, compiled reports on what correspondents wrote for their newspapers and said on the air. In his diary, Shirer wrote that Sell “has several times reported unfavorably on the nature of my broadcasts.”
Every day Shirer went to his small studio in the broadcast center he dealt with three censors, and it would have been these officials who read Sell’s reports from the United States. As much as Shirer resented being spied on, he had an odd friendship with two recently appointed censors for the Propaganda Ministry. They were “Professor Lessing, who long held a post in an American university, and Herr Krauss, for twenty years a partner in a Wall Street bank. I cannot fool them very often. Personally, both are decent, intelligent Germans, as is Captain Erich Kunsti, former Program Director of the Austrian Broadcasting System and now my principal military censor. But they must do what they are told.”
While Shirer had made up his mind to leave the country and follow his family to the United States, he held out a small measure of hope that Lessing, Krauss, and Kunsti would at least allow him a small measure of independence. As naïve as this was, Shirer thought if he could get across most of what he wanted to say in his broadcasts, he would be willing to stay in Berlin, as Paul White had made clear he wanted him to do during their phone conversations from Geneva.
“I haven’t the slightest interest in remaining here unless I can continue to give a fairly accurate report,” he told himself in his diary. “And each day my broadcasts are forced by the censorship to be less accurate.”
Adding insult, a young German had been placed inside Shirer’s studio. It was this man’s job to call New York on the radio transmitter in preparation for Shirer’s going on the air and reading his script. Now, rather than just following the script as Shirer read it to make sure he didn’t change the wording, the German was underlining some words and sentences. “He was trying to note down, I take it, which words I emphasized, which I spoke with undue sarcasm, and so on,” Shirer wrote. “I was so fascinated by this discovery that I stopped in the middle of my talk to watch him.”
* * *
X came up to my room in the Adlon today, and after we had disconnected my telephone and made sure that no one was listening through the crack of the door to the next room, he told me a weird story.
—William L. Shirer, diary, September 21, 1940
Who X was—an influential German journalist, a party official, someone high up in a ministry or the military?—Shirer did not reveal in his diary on the night he made the entry. Shirer had already begun to think of ways of getting all his personal papers—diaries, letters, official correspondence, and maps— out of the country when he left. To risk his diary’s being read by the Gestapo and a name being revealed from his diary horrified him. Shirer did not reveal X’s identity in his diary at the time, and he did not do so forty-four years later when he published the second installment of his memoirs, The Nightmare Years.
“He says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “The Nazis call them ‘mercy deaths.’ He relates that Pastor Bodelschwingh, who runs a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children at Bethel, was ordered arrested a few days ago because he refused to deliver up some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police … . Must look into this story.”
The program X knew of was an effort directed out of Hitler’s Chancellery to gas Germany’s mentally and physically disabled persons, including young children. It was run out of an office at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin—because of the address, it was known as the T-4 program. It began in the spring of 1939 and resulted in more than 70,000 murders. While it was happening, it was enough of an open secret in the country to be denounced by church leaders. X knew of it, but he also knew of the arrest several days before of Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh.
While Shirer had heard reports of widespread murders in Poland after the 1939 invasion, now he was being told that the Nazis were also murdering the disabled, including children, perhaps on a large scale. While he makes very little in his diary about X’s revelations beyond a single, one-paragraph entry— and he only referred to it in a footnote in his memoir—the news almost certainly strengthened his determination to leave Germany.
Meanwhile, the nightly British attacks on Berlin resumed and intensified, striking industrial and other targets in and around the city, setting fires that could be seen for miles. Shirer could not tell his listeners in the United States anything about them, and his broadcasts more and more took on the tone of a man reading heroic headlines from the German newspapers and from official communiqués, or relating the details of his interview with a German airman who had flown on a bombing raid over London.
The longest bombings of the war occurred the night of September 25, lasting from before midnight until 4:00 A.M. and hitting targets on the outskirts of the city. This time, just as Shirer finished his broadcast, the air warden in the broadcast center forced him down a flight of stairs to the cellar. With him were William Joyce and Joyce’s wife, Margaret, and the three of them found their way to a tunnel beneath the building where they drank schnapps from a bottle Joyce had in his coat pocket. Shirer was amazed at how easily Joyce went about his life in Berlin working for the Nazis. Left alone by the warden, Shirer and the couple made their way back to Joyce’s office to watch the bombardment.
As the bombing went on, Shirer quizzed Joyce about his loyalties. He found him an oddly likable man. “He argues that he has renounced his British nationality and become a German citizen, and that he is no more a traitor than thousands of British and Americans who renounced their citizenship to become comrades in the Soviet Union, or than those Germans who gave up their nationality after 1848 and fled to the United States … . He has a titanic hatred for Jews and an equally titanic one for capitalists,” Shirer wrote in his diary. He referred in his diary to another English traitor, an actor named Jack Trevor, who also broadcast propaganda for the Germans, as also being consumed by hatred of the Jews.
Shirer was taken by Joyce’s passion for National Socialism and his disregard for the consequences of his actions if the Germans were to lose the war. He acted as though he did not much care if the British hanged him for treason. He explained to Shirer that the Germans were involved in a “sacred struggle to free the world,” an explanation Shirer found bizarre. There were three Americans working for the Propaganda Ministry—more would come later—and Shirer wrote their names down in his diary as if he were indicting them himself for high treason.
* * *
By mid-October, after weeks of unrelenting bombings of Berlin, Shirer made up his mind to return to Geneva to help Tess pack for the long bus trip across France to Spain and then Portugal. It was now or never, and his many hours spent thinking up scenarios by which, if the war worsened, his family could still get out had brought him nowhere. While Tess preferred to stay in Switzerland, Shirer worried that the Germans would refuse to sell the country coal to keep their homes warm. Food supplies had also been greatly restricted.
“Life in Switzerland this winter will be hard,” he wrote.
As he planned for his family’s leaving Geneva, he also solidified his own plans. “I shall follow in December,” he wrote in his diary.
I think my usefulness here is about over. Until recently, despite the censorship, I think I’ve been able to do an honest job of reporting from Germany. But it has become increasingly difficult and at present it has become impossible … . You cannot call the Nazis ‘Nazis’ or an invasion an ‘invasion.’ You are reduced to re-broadcasting the official communiqués, which are lies, and which any automaton can do. Even the more intelligent and decent of my censors ask me, in confidence, why I stay … . With my deep, burning hatred of all that Nazism stands for, it has never been pleasant working and living here. But that was secondary as long as there was a job to do. No one’s personal life in Europe counts any more, and I have had none since the war began.
On the morning of October 18, Shirer boarded a plane in Berlin that took him to Munich. From there he boarded a second plane that took off under thick clouds across the high, snow-covered Alps for Zurich. Once airborne, the passenger plane was approached by two German fighters, which flew close enough that Shirer was convinced they would touch the wings. He knew he would feel better, physically and emotionally, once he was out of German airspace, but getting there on this day was another matter.
Once the fighters had flown off, Shirer allowed himself a moment to breath a sigh of relief until, looking out the windows, he noticed that the plane had flown into thick clouds that obscured the sky above them and the high mountains below. How would the pilot find the Zurich airport? As the passengers held on for dear life, the pilot put the plane into a steep dive as he looked for a break in the clouds so he could determine where they were. Confused and lost, the pilot just as quickly put the plane into a steep climb, and all Shirer could imagine was the plane plowing into a mountain peak and exploding into flames.
When the plane seemed to turn back toward Munich, Shirer sank into his seat and tried to shake off feelings of deep gloom. “Then another plunge, this time a deep one, and suddenly it was dark and the thought that we were probably going to make an emergency landing in Germany depressed me, for a few minutes before, I had felt free of the Reich at last,” he wrote in his diary. “Now we were diving at a steep angle. The pilot signaled to adjust the safety belt. I gripped the seat hard.”
And then, just as suddenly, Shirer could see fog lights flashing on the ground, “and the familiar roof tops, and the city lights sparkling—this could be no city of blacked-out Germany, this could only be Zurich—and in a minute we were on hard ground,” he wrote.
* * *
Five days after arriving home in Geneva, Shirer drove Tess and Eileen to a bus depot in the city. The morning was cold and clear. The people waiting to board were quiet, standing by their bags, emotional and frightened by what lay ahead in occupied France. Shirer had worked it out in his head that the bus would take two days and two nights to reach Barcelona. Once in Barcelona, Tess and Eileen would board a train to Madrid, where they would change trains and proceed to Lisbon.
As they waited, the depot began to fill up with people clutching their belongings. Soon, by Shirer’s estimate, a thousand men, women, and children waited anxiously to board two buses. At most perhaps one hundred would board. It would be another week before a bus was scheduled to leave Geneva for Spain. He overheard anxious conversations about flooding in the Pyrenees that had swept away roads. Would the buses leave at all? Shirer knew Tess should bring only a few belongings, but also food and water. There would be no stopping for food in France, no chancing encounters with German authorities demanding to look at identity papers. These were refugees, not tourists. The goal was to bring along enough gas—extra tanks were strapped to the sides of both buses—and to proceed as quickly as possible to the Spanish border.
Listening to the accents, Shirer discerned that hundreds of the people hoping to board the two small buses were German Jews. He was reminded of the Vienna airport on the night he flew to London to broadcast news of the Anschluss. Anxious, frightened Jews desperate to flee Austria had packed the terminal. Now, here in Geneva, he was seeing it all over again.
As Tess and Eileen and others began to board the buses, the mood in the vast crowd rose to near hysteria. People begged for seats. Please! We need seats on the bus! Please! Tess told her husband there were reports in Geneva that the French were turning over German Jews who had fled to France to the Gestapo—without even being asked. As he stood with his wife, holding his daughter in his arms, Shirer overheard a number of the Jews expressing great fear that, if they managed to get seats, the French might pull them off the buses and turn them over to the Germans. And what if they got through France, all the way south to the Spanish border, and the guards there removed the Jews and turned them over to the Germans?
If you get into Spain, you will be fine, Shirer told Tess. I will join you by Christmas, he reassured her.