A WARNING FROM A FRIEND
With Tess and Eileen gone, Shirer’s mood sank. He was overwhelmed with questions: What if the Germans stopped the buses and wouldn’t let all the passengers proceed? What if they seized everyone on board and detained them indefinitely? Or sent all the passengers to Germany? Two buses overflowing with refugees—running away from the Germans—seemed like a set-up for problems. What he hoped for was that the buses would proceed across France to the frontier with Spain without any German or French officials demanding to know who was on board. That seemed an impossible wish. Surely a moral issue lay at the heart of Shirer’s worries, one that had an echo to Shirer and the other correspondents living and working in Berlin and watching the government harass and disenfranchise the country’s Jews, seeing it all happen in front of them: that Tess and Eileen would get through, but that all the Jews on the buses would be seized and, in front of them, removed and taken away.
Shirer’s friend Joe Harsch joined him in Geneva the day after the buses departed, and the two took the train to Bern, where they hoped to catch a flight to Berlin, a city of gloom and darkness and everything Shirer loathed. Shirer stared out the windows, enjoying the sunlight and the snow-covered mountains, knowing the landscape would turn dark when he crossed into Nazi Germany, as if a black curtain dropped at the frontier. In Bern he and Harsch boarded a flight that, to their horror, landed in a thick fog in Munich and was ordered grounded, unable to proceed to Berlin. Shirer, frustrated and impatient, decided not to wait for authorities to clear the plane for takeoff, so the two men bought seats on the night train for Berlin, risking, once again, attacks by British fighters.
With hours to kill before the train left, the two men wandered the city’s beer halls, where National Socialism had taken root and where it had staged the failed coup in November 1923. Three days later, in Berlin on October 28, Shirer made two diary entries. The first, “No word from Tess,” revealed his worry five days after his wife’s and daughter’s departure from Switzerland. The second showed his great relief: “Cable from Tess from Barcelona. Arrived there all well. She wired in German. Suppose that’s the most politic foreign language to use there now.”
The trip had gone smoothly across France until the buses tried to cross the Pyrenees into Spain. There, French authorities removed the German Jews from the two buses and prevented them from entering Spain. Everyone else on the buses sat in their seats and watched it transpire. If Shirer was horrified at the news of passengers being questioned and the Jews removed, he did not note it in his diary.
* * *
In Berlin, Shirer bided his time. There was no need to rock the boat, to push a grievance with the censors. It was time to bite his tongue. He hoped to be gone in early December, and the very last thing he wanted was to draw the scrutiny of the authorities. He did not want to be questioned at the broadcast center or stopped on a street corner or while walking in the Tiergarten. Worse would be to have his room at the Adlon Hotel searched. What’s this, Mr. Shirer? You met with someone you called X in your hotel room? It’s right here in your diary. Suspicions would lead to delays in his departure. As the days passed, he felt more and more anxious that something would trip him up.
Before he had left for Geneva to see Tess and Eileen off, a “close friend” who worked at the RRG had pulled him aside and whispered that he was being watched. Even before this Shirer had felt that he was under surveillance. After his return from Switzerland, the same person, a woman, told him of the contents of highly confidential cables sent from the German consulate in Washington to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin that mentioned Shirer’s name. She was sufficiently high up in the ministry, or on the staff at the broadcast house, that she had read them. She explained what was in them and went further to detail the reaction to them in Berlin.
“She was worried,” Shirer wrote more than forty years later in the third installment of his memoirs. “The Gestapo, the Propaganda Ministry, the Foreign Office and even the military, she said, were beginning to build a case of espionage against me.”
While she had been somewhat circumspect in their previous conversations, she now told him that he should leave Berlin “soon—while there was still time. Specifically, she said, the German embassy in Washington and especially the military attaché there, were cabling that they were convinced I was a spy and that I was getting out secret intelligence by use of code words in my broadcasts. She also told me the Gestapo was increasing its surveillance of me, and that I should be careful whom I saw, including her. I trusted her—one of the few Germans I did. All the more reason I dared not confide her warnings to my New York office or even to my diary, for fear of jeopardizing her very life … . I had no intention of letting the Nazis frame me as a spy.”
By early November, Shirer’s plans to leave the country in a month had firmed up to the point that his mood shifted dramatically. He confidently wrote in his diary on November 5: “If all goes well, I shall leave here a month from today, flying all the way to New York—by Lufthansa plane from here to Lisbon, by Clipper from there to New York. The very prospect of leaving here takes a terrible load off your heart and mind. I feel swell. It will be my first Christmas at home in sixteen years.”
To relax, Shirer went to whatever musical venues he could find in the city, including a performance of a Bach concerto conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. When he returned to his room at the Adlon, before writing in his diary about the day’s events, Shirer played an accordion he kept with him until someone banged on the wall for him to stop. He followed the news in the United States as best he could, feeling a great sense of relief when President Roosevelt was elected to a third term. Shirer knew from Nazi officials that the Berlin government was hoping Wendell Willkie would win.
Nearly every night, the British bombed in and around Berlin, or in other German cities. Late in November, Shirer went to a dinner in a suburb in southwest Berlin. Two “well-known German figures” were there, one of them a “high Nazi official,” presumably from the German broadcast system. The two officials told jokes about Goebbels, “whom they both appeared to loathe.” Later in the evening, British bombers appeared overhead, and a wave of explosions rocked the city. One landed close by, and Shirer and other guests dived into a bedroom in panic.
Soon his plans had solidified to the point that he marked a date on his calendar for his departure: December 5. To leave the country, he would need an exit visa, which had to be stamped by the Foreign Office, the Gestapo, and customs officials. He also needed entrance visas for Spain and Portugal. Providing he received all the approvals he needed, there was the issue of his diaries and papers. He had begun packing his personal documents in large trunks, along with books and other property, but knew the trunks would be inspected, first by the Gestapo and later by customs officials at Tempelhof.
In his room at the Adlon on nights after his broadcasts, Shirer carefully separated those papers he was unwilling to pack in the trunks and risk having seized. Some he burned in the fireplace, a task that pained him greatly. Others he took to friends in foreign embassies, asking them to pack the papers in diplomatic pouches for confidential shipment out of Germany. Shirer hoped he could get them later, but there were no guarantees. As far as he knew, the Gestapo might search these pouches too or might have spies in the embassies who read them. He knew for certain that taking a chance that his most important papers would be seized when he tried to fly out of the country was even riskier. Better to lose some than all of them.
Some days, before he went to the broadcast center he walked in the Tiergarten, a beautiful place he was certain he would miss and hoped one day he could return to in a different Germany. He looked at people’s faces and listened in on their conversations, hoping to take with him on his departure something that could help him remember the people themselves and how they lived under the Nazis. He walked by the building where he and Tess had first lived when they arrived in Berlin in 1934. Some nights after his work was completed, he went to the Taverne and sat by himself at the bar, looking at the corner of the restaurant where the foreign correspondents had once gathered to talk and drink and eat. Now it was empty, everyone he had worked with gone or expelled or reassigned back to the United States. Sigrid Schultz was still there, as were a few others, most of whom he had fallen out of favor with, and he alone knew he would be departing from Berlin soon. It was his secret, never to be divulged.
The nightly bombings concerned him. What if the runways at Tempelhof were destroyed? He calculated over and over in his head that he would take the train to Munich or another German city and fly out from there. It was all so iffy, though. All his plans depended on so many moving parts that a single night of bombings, a refusal from a government office, and the whole contraption could crash down. Hanging over all of it was the fear, growing each day, that he would be arrested and jailed until the Germans wanted to trade him for someone picked up in the United States. That could be months, or years. He shivered at the thought.
Through it all, he worked, reporting to the broadcast house daily, talking to officials, attending press conferences, speaking with Murrow on the phone and sending cables to Paul White in New York. Toward the end of November, when he hoped he would be gone in less than two weeks, he attended a dinner at a diplomat’s house. When the phone rang, the butler informed Shirer that the caller had asked for him. It was “one of the girls at the Rundfunk saying that the British bombers were ten minutes away and that I had better hurry if I wanted to broadcast that evening.”
He ran to his car and began the arduous drive toward central Berlin. He drove past air wardens wildly waving their arms for him to get off the street. Less than two miles from the broadcast center, he heard the air sirens sound. His first thought was to pull off, kill the lights in the car, and wait it out. But he continued. Driving by uniformed police officers waving their lamps at him, he negotiated the cars that had stopped in the road until he was blocks from the center. Then he abandoned the car and ran the final distance.
Before the end of November, Shirer reached out to whoever would speak to him and might know about what the source X had told him of “mercy killings” of the mentally and physically disabled. “How many have been executed probably only Himmler and a handful of Nazi chieftains know,” he wrote in his diary. “A conservative and trustworthy German tells me he estimates the number at a hundred thousand. I think that figure is too high. But certain it is that the figure runs into the thousands and is going up every day.”
Shirer said he was informed of the existence of “peculiar death notices” running in small-town newspapers across the country. The places of death in these notices were all the same—“the chief headquarters for the ‘mercy killings.’ I am also informed that the relatives of the unfortunate victims, when they get the ashes back—they are never given the bodies—receive a stern warning from the secret police not to demand explanations and not to ‘spread false rumors.’ ”
Another German—Shirer again labeled him X—told him “that relatives are rushing to get their kin out of private asylums and out of the clutches of the authorities.” As to why the Germans were doing the killings, Shirer ventured three guesses: to save food, to experiment on how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, and because the deaths fit Nazi philosophy. Shirer wrote that he doubted the second explanation but accepted the third. As he noted in a footnote to his published diaries, word of the “mercy killings” spread outside Germany, and, on December 6, 1940, the Vatican condemned them.
As December arrived, Shirer wrote longer and longer entries in his diaries that read more like essays, summing up his years in Germany and all that he had learned about the German people. He saw the Germans as deeply flawed—they wanted security and would give up their freedom to someone who provided it for them—and were willing and eager to go along with Nazi plans for conquest. Shirer did not buy the notion that Hitler had corrupted an entire nation but wrote that Hitler as the all-powerful leader of a police state made it all possible.
“It is not correct to say, as many of our liberals at home have said, that Nazism is a form of rule and life unnatural to the German people and forced upon them against their wish by a few fanatical derelicts of the last war. It is true that the Nazi party never polled a majority vote in Germany in a free election, though it came very close. But for the last three or four years the Nazi regime has expressed something very deep in the German nature and in that respect it has been representative of the people it rules.”
Of the German people, he wrote, “Almost joyfully, almost masochistically, they have turned to an authoritarianism which releases them from the strain of individual decision and choice and thought and allows them what to a German is a luxury—letting someone else make the decisions and take the risks, in return for which they gladly give their own obedience … . The German has two characters. As an individual he will give his rationed bread to feed the squirrels in the Tiergarten on a Sunday morning. He can be a kind and considerate person. But as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in concentration camps, massacre women and children by bombing and bombardment, overrun without the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest, and enslave them.”
* * *
Shirer counted the days and the hours until he would leave Germany. He went to several events and parties, some held in government offices with officials he had worked with since being hired by Murrow. He was there to say goodbye, even if he could not tell anyone. By December 3, the Foreign Ministry had still not approved his exit visa. He did his last broadcast that night, going home to the Adlon Hotel with a great feeling of anticipation that he was on the eve of his departure, but he also worried that something would come out of nowhere and ruin his plans. The thought of having to stay in Germany, with his family now en route to the United States, sickened him to the bone. A wave of nostalgia came over him as he waited for all the approvals he needed. Good luck and a strong sense of his own fate had followed his every step. He had been in Europe since he was twenty-one years old. He concluded that “it was here, on the old continent, through a decade and a half, that I had really grown up and come to feel at home.”
On the morning of December 4, word reached him that his paperwork was complete. His passport and exit visa had been stamped, and he was now free to leave the country. “Nothing to do now but pack,” he wrote in his diary with the joy of someone who saw his plans coming together just as he had hoped.
His pal from Chicago, Wally Deuel, had also received his official paperwork to leave the country. Deuel planned to fly out of Tempelhof on December 4, a day ahead of Shirer, but lost his nerve when the weather turned cold and icy. Further alarming Deuel, three passenger planes had crashed in as many weeks because of ice and snow, killing everyone aboard. Deuel could not bear the thought of climbing aboard a big plane at Tempelhof and risking his life, so when the weather turned for the worse, he left Berlin for Stuttgart by train, hoping to escape the weather and find a city from which it was safe to fly.
“Hope I have better luck,” Shirer wrote in his diary, the same day he learned that his paperwork had been approved. “I must leave all my books and most of my clothes here, as baggage accommodation on the plane is limited. Ed Murrow promises to meet me at Lisbon. My last night in a blackout. After tonight the lights … and civilization!”
Now that he had his exit visa, Shirer had one day to come up with a way to save his most precious paperwork—his diaries, his letters and correspondence, official and personal, along with clippings, postcards, cables, telegrams, pocket diaries, calendars, restaurant and hotel receipts, tourist brochures, and book reviews. He’d made carbons of so many letters that he needed boxes for all of them. Some pages of his diaries he had already burned, others he had given to friends in the Swedish and American embassies.
He worried most about the diaries. They were, of all his property, the most important to him. “There was enough in them to get me hanged—if the Gestapo ever discovered them,” he wrote.
In his room at the Adlon, Shirer came up with a plan to store all his papers in two big trunks. He placed the most important pages of his diaries at the bottom of each trunk. On top of them he stacked pages of his broadcast scripts, all marked with the distinctive stamps of the censors. They looked official, acceptable. Shirer hoped the Gestapo or customs authorities at the airport would see the stamps and not go any further. On top of the scripts he placed military maps he had acquired during the invasion of the Low Countries and France, all of which he had acquired from high-ranking officers. Like the stamped scripts, they were official and, Shirer hoped, would suggest to someone who opened the trunks that the owner had high-ranking friends.
When he was done packing, he picked up the phone in the room and called Gestapo headquarters on the Alexanderplatz. “I have a couple of suitcases full of my dispatches, broadcasts and notes that I am taking out of the country,” Shirer explained. “I am flying off at dawn tomorrow from Tempelhof. There will be no time for officials at the airport to go over the contents. Could you take a look now, if I brought them over? And put a seal on the trunks so I won’t be held up at the airport?”
“Bring them over and we’ll take a look,” the official said.
When Shirer hung up the phone, he felt a shiver of panic. He was certain that, by walking into Gestapo headquarters and asking them to approve his trunks for shipment out of the country, he was inviting his own demise. The Gestapo would surely find his diaries. “That would be the end of me,” Shirer wrote. “Maybe I had just better begin to flush them down the can.”
Rejecting that idea, Shirer hoped the Gestapo would take the military maps—Who do you think you are, trying to take these out of the country?—but stop when they saw the stamped broadcast scripts. “Nothing impressed German cops more than official stamps, especially by the military … . That would make a Gestapo official sit up and take notice. It would give me prestige in his eyes, or at least make me less suspect, foreigner though I was. I was going to gamble on their inspection ending there, before they dug deeper … . I was going to gamble too that they were not high enough up to be aware of exactly who I was, and that when they learned, I would be out of the country, out of their reach.”
On the afternoon of December 4, Shirer hailed a cab and lugged the two trunks to the Alexanderplatz. Inside Gestapo headquarters two men opened up the trunks and, as Shirer had hoped, were shocked by the sight of military maps that had been the property of the High Command. Having gone over the routine in his head a hundred times, Shirer apologized profusely, acting as though he had been caught off guard and shocked at his own stupidity. I am so sorry. I forgot they were in there. He explained his role covering the German Sixth Army’s great advance into France.
I shouldn’t be taking those out of the country, he explained, and handed them over to the two officials.
“What else you got in here?” one of the men asked, reaching deeper into the trunk.
“The texts of my broadcasts,” Shirer said, pointing out the official stamps from the High Command and the Foreign and Propaganda Ministries. He could see how impressed the officials were. It all looked so official and gave the contents of the trunk, at least the part the two men were looking over, the appearance of acceptability. Each man leaned over the suitcases examining the stamps on the scripts.
“I felt myself beginning to perspire,” Shirer wrote. “I had deliberately got myself into this jam. What a fool!”
“You reported on the German army?” one of the men inquired.
Smiling, embracing the German victories, Shirer said, “All the way to Paris and to the armistice at Compiègne. A great army it was, and a great story for me. It will go down in history!”
The two men were done. The officials wrapped the two trunks with tape and marked their own stamps on them. Shirer thanked them and carried the two trunks out to the street. Standing on the curb, he felt a wave of relief pass over him. When the cab came, he told the driver to go to Tempelhof, where he carried the trunks inside and checked them in at the luggage room, telling officials there that he would be back in the morning for a flight to Spain.
Shirer awoke before sun-up the next morning, December 5. His exhaustion was severe, as if he had not slept in weeks or maybe longer, maybe all the way back to August 1934 when he first arrived on the train in Berlin and was greeted by the Gestapo. Weeks of bombing attacks on the city, months of arguments with the censors, running through the streets to avoid falling shrapnel, riding with a triumphant army into France—it had drained him completely, as if the only things left in his body were old bones.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he could feel the fatigue and the stress in his body and the lingering effects of too many whiskeys over the previous nights. He’d lived too long like this and he wanted it to end, finally, on this day. Peering out his hotel window into the blackness of a Berlin night, he was shocked to see that a snowstorm had come up during the night, whipped by strong winds. It could only spell trouble at the airport. For a moment he felt his hopes, pinned on an easy exit, disappear. He was determined to make a go of it. So he cleaned up and changed his clothes and grabbed his suitcase. As he walked through the handsome lobby of the Adlon Hotel, he could not help but feel that it had been a welcoming place for a man doing the sort of work he did. When he reached the street, he stepped into a blizzard. A cab pulled up, and he told the driver to do his best to get to Tempelhof.
“As my taxi skidded through the familiar route to Tempelhof I wondered if my plane would take off in such weather,” Shirer wrote years later. “If the flight was canceled it might mean I would be stuck here for weeks. The plane to Madrid and Lisbon was booked weeks ahead.”
When he reached the airport, he saw that others were there to board planes out of Germany. Couples stood off by themselves whispering to each other. Some looked worried that the weather would not improve and the plane would be grounded and they’d be forced to return to their homes. That was all Shirer thought as he went to the luggage room to retrieve the two trunks he’d dropped off the day before. A porter threw them on a cart, along with Shirer’s suitcases, which held the few clothes he was leaving with and a handful of books. Now he had to pass through customs, and, once again, he needed a lucky break so the officials would not open up the two trunks, sealed with tape by the Gestapo, and take away his diaries and him along with them.
A customs official, wearing the insignia of the Gestapo, went through the luggage first, and then told Shirer to open the two trunks.
“I can’t,” Shirer said. “They’re sealed—by the Gestapo.”
“Where were those bags sealed?” the official asked.
“At Gestapo headquarters at the Alexanderplatz,” Shirer said.
While one official told Shirer to wait, a second picked up a phone. When the man hung up, he picked up a piece of chalk and marked both trunks as approved to leave the country. A porter helped Shirer get the luggage and two trunks to the Lufthansa counter.
“Where to?” the man at the counter asked.
“To Lisbon,” Shirer said.
Once the bags were weighed and checked, Shirer sat in the terminal with the others and waited out the weather. Soon the sun was up, revealing the white, windblown landscape. The runways were thick with fresh snow. He knew from years of travel that the tower would not clear his airplane to take off without some visibility. He recalled Wally Deuel refusing to fly out of Berlin in bad weather for fear of icing and the plane going down. Shirer couldn’t decide which was worse, taking off in a blizzard and risking a crash or having to stay behind in Germany for days or weeks or, God knows, maybe months.
Fighting off the tension, Shirer went to the cafeteria and ordered coffee and breakfast and sat in a corner, brooding. “I started to glance at the morning papers I had bought automatically on arriving at the airport,” Shirer wrote. “I usually picked up first Hitler’s own paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, full of propaganda though devoid of news. It gave the Nazi line, as the Führer himself probably determined it. I glanced at the front page. The usual bullshit. I tossed it down on the table.”
He thought: I don’t have to read this trash anymore. “I had only to hold out this one more day, and the whole nightmare for me would be over,” he wrote.
Worried, he watched the snow until finally, for no reason that seemed connected to any improvement in the weather, his flight was called. He walked to the windows and could see workers loading the baggage into the airplane. Bundling up against the cold and snow, he crossed the tarmac and found his seat on the plane, and in a few minutes the engine hummed and the propellers turned. As the plane lifted off the snowy runway, Shirer could make out the house where he and Tess had lived. He closed his eyes and hoped for the best.
As planned, the plane’s route was to be Berlin to Stuttgart, then on to Lyon, Marseille, and Barcelona. It was an all-day flight in a Junkers thirty-two-seat passenger plane in good weather. Shirer kept track of the day by writing diary updates on scraps of paper and on the pages of his datebook. En route to Stuttgart, Shirer stared out the cabin windows and watched as the wings iced over, along with both starboard engines. “The stewardess, though she tried to hide it bravely, got frightened, and when a stewardess on a plane gets frightened, so do I,” he wrote.
A Lufthansa official seated next to Shirer, staring out his window at the ice building on the wings, had sweat pouring down his face. “Clumps of ice breaking off from the motors hurled against the side of the cabin with a terrifying crack,” Shirer wrote. “The pilot, hardly able to control the plane, tried to climb, but the ice was too heavy.”
As the pilot tried to control his plane, he turned it around, dropping lower and lower in hopes of finding warmer air that would melt the ice coating the wings. The Lufthansa official, Shirer wrote, turned to him. “Can’t go any lower or we’ll hit a mountain,” he said. “Can’t use the radio because the blizzard blots it out.”
Stammering, Shirer said, “Perhaps we could land some place.”
“Not around here,” the man said. “Ground visibility is zero.”
With the weight of the ice only growing, the plane kept falling, and, as he looked out his window, Shirer could see a section of autobahn below them. Then, suddenly, the pilot dropped even farther and a runway came up under him, and he put the plane down on snowy asphalt. He had landed the Junkers at the Dresden airport. The passengers were escorted off the plane and into the terminal, where Shirer found a seat in a small cafeteria, his hands shaking and his stomach twisted into knots. Lowering his head almost to the table, he felt lucky to be alive. He pictured Tess receiving a telegram in America from the airline informing her that her husband, William L. Shirer, had been aboard a flight that iced over and crashed into a mountain, all passengers burned beyond recognition. Nothing could be found of his body or property, Mrs. Shirer.
The next day, December 6, the plane took off in significantly improved weather. Shirer’s mood brightened as he came to believe he would soon be out of German airspace and away from the Nazis. The plane flew from Stuttgart to Lyon, where it landed to refuel. The airfield was dotted with German military aircraft. On a far side of the field sat a row of French military airplanes, unused in the battle six months earlier.
Seated near Shirer, an official from the German Foreign Office who saw the German warplanes on the ground shouted, for all the passengers to hear, “La Belle France! And how we’ve destroyed her. For three hundred years at least!”
Airborne again, the plane flew over the Pyrenees and down the Spanish coast. From his seat, to his great joy, Shirer could see Lloret de Mar, the tiny fishing village where he and Tess had lived after he had been fired by the Chicago Tribune. The plane landed in Barcelona, and Shirer walked to the terminal to stretch his legs and look around. He had not been in the city since he and Tess lived on the Spanish coast, and he remembered it as a joyous place. Now, Fascism had brought nothing but misery. A horsedrawn wagon—there was no gas or oil for automobiles—took Shirer and other passengers to the Ritz Hotel, and along the way he saw frightened, hungry faces. A man he encountered told him that Barcelona and Spain had been crushed. “There is no food. There is no organization. The jails are jammed and overflowing. If we told you about the filth, the overcrowding, the lack of food in them, you would not believe us. But no one really eats any more. We merely keep alive.”
When Shirer returned to the airport after a brief meal at the hotel and after going to the Swedish embassy to collect the diaries he had entrusted to a friend who had flown with them from Berlin to Barcelona, he and the other passengers were met by Spanish officials who ordered them into a tiny, airless room. “The chief of police has not washed his hands for a week,” Shirer wrote. “His main preoccupation is our money. We count over and over for him our silver, our paper money, our travel checks. Finally, as darkness falls, he lets us go.”
As Shirer waited, Wally Deuel stepped off a plane from Stuttgart and joined him in the terminal. He told a horror story of being delayed in Stuttgart because his exit visa had run out. Believing he would not be able to leave Germany for weeks if not months, Deuel finally persuaded a police official to issue him a new exit visa. Deuel was exhausted, frustrated, and, like Shirer, desperate to get out of Germany, through Spain to Portugal, and onto a boat to the United States. The following day, December 7, Shirer, Deuel, and dozens of other passengers boarded a Lufthansa flight from Barcelona to Madrid. There they were met by chaos. It seemed as though the airport was run by a mob of uniformed idiots, bullies, and government hacks with their hands out. Nothing worked, nothing ran on time. Men shouted orders to each other, and no one did anything in response. Airport authorities grounded the flight to Lisbon, and Shirer sank into a chair, believing he had come all this way only to be stuck in the hell of Franco’s Spain.
“Then they decided one of three scheduled flights could be made to Lisbon,” Shirer wrote. “They told me I could go, then that I couldn’t go, then that I must catch the 4:00 P.M. train, then that the train had left. All the while shouting officials and passengers milled about the place. There was a restaurant but it had no food. In the end they called the passengers for the Lisbon plane. Only a group of Spanish officials and the German diplomat would be allowed to go. I asked for my baggage. No one knew where it was. Then an official came tearing up to me and tugged me towards a plane.”
The plane at last took off for Lisbon. There, Portuguese officials told Shirer he could go no further since he did not have a ticket to leave the country en route to the United States. After hours of argument, they relented, and Shirer proceeded to the Lufthansa counter, where to his relief he found his trunks had arrived from Berlin intact, the Gestapo tape and seals still affixed to them. It seemed like a final piece of good luck on the long night of his German journey. He was so happy that he did not care any longer if the Portuguese authorities told him he could not leave the country. He collected his belongings and took a cab into the heart of the city, where every hotel overflowed with refugees. They occupied hotel lobbies and bars and crowded the streets, speaking a host of languages from countries under German occupation.
The driver turned west to the resort town of Estoril, where Shirer, exhausted to the bone, found a room in an oceanfront hotel. “ I still felt so elated I would have gladly slept on the beach,” he wrote years later. “I washed up, changed my shirt, had a good dinner—a local wine the waiter recommended was excellent—and spent the evening strolling through the town and along the beach, staring at the lights. They seemed so blinding—and beautiful— after a year and a half in blacked-out Berlin.”
When he returned to his room, desperate for sleep, the phone rang. “It was Ed Murrow in London. He had been trying to get me in every hotel in Portugal. He had wangled a seat on a plane that would be arriving the next afternoon. ‘We need to talk,’ he said, ‘and toss down a few, before you go.’ ”
* * *
At midnight the next day, Murrow’s plane dropped out of the darkness over the ocean and landed in Lisbon. He had left London in spite of the war, pushing away fears that his plane would never get across open ocean to Portugal. Shirer knew it was a great compliment to him that Murrow would attempt such a trip. Waiting for him like an anxious older brother was Shirer, who’d arrived hours before to make sure he was there whenever the plane, on a route away from London and occupied France, landed safely. Murrow’s plane had left London after darkness had fallen, following night after night of heavy bombing, fires burning across the city like giant torches, so that Murrow could join his friend. Shirer could imagine Murrow gripping his seat as the plane lifted off and turned away from London to fly south, his colleague peering out the small cabin windows to see if German bombers were airborne over London.
They had grown exceptionally fond of one another. One had endured the bombings in Berlin, the other the all-out German assault on London. Shirer knew Murrow had thrown caution to the wind and broadcast live accounts of the attacks, something Shirer was not allowed to do in Berlin. During one broadcast from the street, Murrow’s office had been destroyed; soon after arriving in Portugal, a telegram brought word that his new office had been destroyed by bombs. Both men tempted fate, but it was Murrow who risked death each night the Germans appeared overhead.
As Murrow stepped off the plane, Shirer happily looked him over. Murrow wore an elegant English suit under an overcoat to ward off the chilly night air, his dark hair slicked back away from his handsome face, a cigarette in his fingers. Seeing his friend, perhaps Shirer was reminded of their first meeting, when Murrow summoned Shirer to the Adlon Hotel for martinis and dinner to talk about Shirer’s coming to work for CBS. Murrow had taken a chance on Shirer, and Shirer knew it. Despite the hour and the deep fatigue felt by both men, they stayed up the rest of the night, seated on the outside terrace of a seaside café, talking about their lives and the war. Shirer spoke about the remarkable French collapse, a subject he never tired of, and one that fascinated him nearly above all else. He spoke of being at Compiègne and broadcasting live to America as the surrender papers were signed, and of Paris, its streets empty, and the sight of Germans marching behind a drum corps in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. Hitler in Paris! When the sky brightened to the east, they got up and went to their rooms. They slept in. After a late breakfast, they visited one of the local casinos and gambled.
Murrow’s goal before Shirer boarded a ship for the United States was for both men to do a broadcast from Lisbon. During the day, they sat in Shirer’s hotel room and typed out drafts of scripts until they agreed on one. Murrow had spoken to Portuguese authorities prior to his arrival and believed they would approve the broadcast, but at the appointed time of 2:00 A.M., they had not given their consent. When 4:00 A.M. passed without official approval, it looked as if Murrow would have to cable CBS and tell him they could not go on the air.
As they waited impatiently for the government to okay the broadcast, Shirer tried to purchase a ticket on the Pan American Clipper but was told the seaplane could not take off because of bad weather. Unwilling to wait and eager to be home with Tess and Eileen by Christmas, he inquired about a berth on a passenger ship, the SS Excambion. It was scheduled to depart Lisbon on December 13. If all went well—if the weather improved, and if a German submarine did not order them to halt on the high seas—he would just make his Christmas deadline. But he had to get on board the ship first.
A large crowd of refugees—well-dressed men and women with their belongings in suitcases and trunks, families with young children, single men and women traveling by themselves, groups of unsupervised children—were hoping to board the ship for the United States. It could take only one hundred and fifty passengers, and Shirer was determined to be one of them. He went to the ship’s onshore offices to introduce himself to the local manager, who told him he would try to get him aboard but that Shirer might not have a bed to sleep on for the crossing. More than three thousand refugees were jostling for room on the boat. Some begged, others pleaded and offered bribes. Shirer knew that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he the former king of England, had left Lisbon a few months earlier on the Excambion’s sister ship, the Excalibur. Lisbon had become something of a stepping-off point for well-off refugees fleeing the Germans. In his own way, by his own actions, Shirer was one of them, and he vowed he would sleep on the ship’s deck if he had to.
Murrow and Shirer spent the next two nights dining together and visiting the casino. They found the gaming rooms “full of a weird assortment of human beings, German and British spies, male and female, wealthy refugees who had mysteriously managed to get a lot of money out and were throwing it about freely, other refugees who were obviously broke and were trying to win their passage money in a few desperate gambles with the fickle roulette wheel, and the usual international sharpsters you find at such places. Neither Ed nor I had any luck at roulette and we adjourned to the ballroom, where the same kind of people were trying to drown whatever feelings they had in drink and jazz.”
On the night of December 12, the two men sat up until well after midnight believing the authorities would let them do their joint broadcast. They sent their script over to the censor, who phoned them at midnight to say he was having a hard time translating it and perhaps he would be done next week. Angry and frustrated, the two men went back and forth with the censor and the CBS office in New York and, when nothing came of it, gave up and left the studio and went to bed in their hotel rooms.
December 13, a Friday, dawned cold and breezy, fitting weather for a gloomy man to board a ship that would take him across the ocean. The two men spent the day together, both quiet and sad, knowing Shirer would have to be at the dock by sundown to board the ship. In his diary, Shirer let out his emotions: “All day both of us depressed at leaving, for we have worked together very closely, Ed and I, during the last turbulent years over here and a bond grew that was very real, a kind you make only a few times in your life, and somehow, absurdly no doubt, sentimentally perhaps, we had a presentiment that the fortunes of war, maybe just a little bomb, would make this reunion the last.”
At the dock the ship sat at its berth, waiting to take its passengers to a world far different from the one it was about to leave. Walking through the crowd, Shirer counted fifty refugee children, mostly French, but some Austrians, Czechs, and Poles. They ranged in age from six to twelve and would be sleeping on mattresses or cots in an empty room on board. They were the face of Europe at war, and he could not help but think of Tess and Eileen fleeing the Continent and reaching safety in America. He wondered who these children were and what had happened to their families. “Their parents are either dead or left behind in a Europe shivering and half starving,” he wrote in his diary. “Probably most of them will never see father or mother again.”
There was also a group of young Norwegian women; a philosopher from Brussels on his way to a teaching position at the New School in New York City; an American recently released by the Gestapo in France; a group of Jews, “some still showing their suffering, some confident again”; and some American businessmen. Shirer and Murrow walked along the dock, talking, pausing at a dockside bar used by workers, where a woman poured strong drinks into cups.
When darkness settled over the port, and just as the gangway was being pulled up, Shirer paused, stared at Murrow for a long, sad moment, and reached out and hugged him tightly. “I climbed aboard and Ed disappeared into the night,” he wrote in his diary.
Under a full moon, the sea sparkled. Shirer stood at the rail of the ship and watched it pull away from the coastline, the lights of Lisbon slowly fading away. Seated in a chair on the deck, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the damp cold, he wrote a few parting thoughts in his diary. “Beyond Lisbon over almost all of Europe the lights were out. This little fringe on the southwest corner of the Continent kept them burning. Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitler’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?”
When he finished, he went to the ship’s bar, where five other American correspondents, including Wally Deuel, were celebrating their return home. They ordered a round of a favorite drink called an old-fashioned and toasted their good fortune that they would be in the United States for Christmas. But Shirer was restless, and the toasts felt awkward, out of place. Hoping he might see Europe in the distance, he went back up on the deck. It was there, he wrote, but “a long, dark, savage night had now settled over it.”