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Cologne Revisited
In September and October [1940] I visited Cologne to see how Charles Broy was progressing in a hospital near there and to write certain confidential despatches to the State Department, which I could leave in the safe at our consulate to await a diplomatic courier. I also picked up some confidential pouch matter for my own office and for our consular offices at Brussels and Antwerp. The German Government by this time was refusing to allow any diplomatic courier or member of the embassy at Berlin to enter Luxembourg or Belgium. On both these occasions minor air raids took place, but I was not greatly impressed by them and considered them not particularly serious.
Toward the end of December I found it necessary to confer with a representative of the embassy. The chargé d’affaires, Mr. Morris, very kindly sent a secretary of embassy to Cologne to meet me and to discuss with me the things that were on my mind.1 After this time, and until my departure from Europe, I motored to Cologne two or three times a month, taking confidential dispatches from Brussels, Antwerp, and my own office, and receiving at Cologne confidential matter for myself and our other two offices. It was later found practicable to send by post from Berlin to Luxembourg locked diplomatic pouches for the three offices, containing matter which, while important and valuable, was not of a supremely confidential nature. I took these to Brussels and Antwerp, bringing back corresponding pouches as far as Cologne, where they were picked up by the diplomatic courier on his scheduled trips. For some eight months I was the only channel of communication the Department of State, through its embassy at Berlin, had for the transmission of documents, instructions, or any of its mail.2
During this period my colleague, the Honorable Alfred Klieforth, then our consul general at Cologne, gave me hospitality and moral comfort. His wise and serene attitude was admirable and exemplary. Extremely well-posted in all that concerned his district and doing invaluable work under difficulties that would have broken officers of less strength of character, he never, even in the darkest hours, faltered in his absolute conviction of Allied victory and the annihilation of Nazism.
Just at noon of a glorious spring day early in March [1941], Alfred telephoned me from Cologne. We both knew that all our conversations were recorded, and we therefore avoided the mention of things that were of the most importance.3 He said, “You don’t seem to have received the last passport instructions. The applications of Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown will therefore have to be submitted on a different form. Can you come to Cologne this afternoon and discuss the new regulations with me?”
I knew perfectly well that this was only a means of telling me that I should come at once, so I said, “I could come tomorrow, leaving here early in the morning, but it would be inconvenient to leave this afternoon.” “Well, you will do as you please, of course, but I may not be able to see you tomorrow, and I am sure that you ought to avail yourself of this splendid weather.”
“Can I return tonight, or shall I bring an overnight bag?”
“No, no. You should be prepared to stay for a day or two, at least.”
This conversation filled me with the most varied forebodings. Klieforth and I had promised each other to get word through at the earliest possible moment and by any human means when the break came between the United States and Germany. Such information might well mean the difference between returning to the United States, there to continue the fight, or being interned in Germany for the duration. This cryptic message—was it the warning, so long looked for, or did Klieforth have sad family news for me that he wished to break gently in person?
After a hasty lunch, I packed a bag and made up a parcel of dispatches and other matter from Brussels and Antwerp that I had fetched thence a few days before and was keeping for my next trip to Cologne. Then in my car, with Ernest at the wheel, I sped through the burgeoning forests of Luxembourg to Echternach and crossed the border into Germany there. Then on through the spring sunshine through Bitburg, Prüm, over Eifel, and down through Euskirchen into Cologne, two hundred kilometers away.
I found Alfred Klieforth in the consulate. He took me to his home for tea, where he explained the matter concerning which he wanted to consult with me. It had nothing to do with my family, nor did it touch my speedy departure from Luxembourg. It did involve my possible accomplishment of a difficult task, which under the circumstances only I could do.4 It also necessarily involved my remaining overnight in Cologne. I eagerly accepted the task, but felt very dubious about staying in Cologne. Had I been stationed there permanently I would have gone through air raids without a murmur, but I did loath going through raids elsewhere than within my own bailiwick and when such experiences could be avoided.
After a pleasant dinner Alfred and I were having coffee. We had just tuned in on the ten o’clock news from London, when the air raid sirens sounded.
“Well, are we going down to an air-raid shelter?” I asked my host.
“No,” he responded. “They are too dangerous now-a-days. We stay here, which is as safe as anywhere else. We are three stories from the ground in one direction, and two floors from the roof in the other. Of course, a direct hit from a “block buster” will destroy everything. But, short of a direct hit, we are well enough off here. Let’s go out on the terrace and see what is to be seen while we can.”
No sooner said than done. Hardly had we reached the terrace when the erstwhile solidly blacked-out Cologne became as light as day. Million candle-power magnesium flares each in its own parachute, launched by the first Royal Air Force planes to reach the city, illumined everything with a blue-white blinding glare. The mask of darkness had been snatched away, and in its nakedness Cologne shivered and sought to hide. But there was no hiding. One saw fat German men actually running down the streets, searching for shelters, their women and children following far behind or not all. “Every man for himself, let the devil take the women and children” seemed the motto. In the blinding shelterlessness I understood the meaning of the cry in holy writ: “O Rocks hide me.”5 And I could realize better than ever before the meaning of the “terror that flyeth by night.”6
But if I am to give you even the faintest idea of what a good raid on Cologne is like, I must ask you to keep in mind simultaneously all the things I am describing. While the flares are burning, tracer-bullets—red, blue, green, yellow, violet, orange—are going up from every part of the city, like the most gorgeous fireworks, on a scale of unimaginable prodigality, and the continuous thunder of the flak, or anti-aircraft guns, is so rapid as almost to blend its vibrations into a musical note. Hundreds of silver javelins of light are sweeping the heavens in every direction, seeking to impale the tiny silver fish high up in the blue-black firmament. The magnesium flares have burned out now; they are no longer necessary or useful. Burning factories send beacon flames aloft to guide successive waves of British planes to drop punishment on those who believed Goering’s assertion that never, never, could an enemy plane cross the frontier of Germany.7 And now, like infrequent snowflakes, tiny, paper-thin metal particles, flutter down. They are no bigger than confetti, and seemingly as harmless, but they mean we must go inside, quickly. That confetti of the devil’s carnival is made up of burned out flakes of flak, exploded miles aloft. Among those little pieces are small meteors the size of a hazelnut or larger, which have not been burned up and fall at almost the speed and with very nearly the force with which they left their anti-aircraft gun a couple of minutes before.
We went in. With lights turned out we raised the blinds in the big windows of the drawing room and watched action on the Rhein-Ufer and across the Rhein. We could not hear the impact and explosion of individual bombs. The thunder of the flak took care of that. Cynically, I thought that perhaps that was the chief benefit of the anti-aircraft guns in Cologne, at least. But then, too, the diapason of the flak also comforted the wretched natives of Cologne, in letting them know that their Nazi “protectors” were doing all they could.
You are not to think that all during this time I was cool and calm and at ease. Outwardly, Alfred and I did not manifest any uneasiness. But, speaking solely for myself, I do not believe anyone can go through an air raid without terrific tension. Down in the deepest part of one’s being there is FEAR in Excelsis during a real air raid. Cold, hopeless fear. Had Edgar Allan Poe lived through an air raid, perhaps he could have described it within a faint measure of success. I cannot. To those who have been through air raids, my words are unnecessary. To those who have not had the experience any words of mine are almost useless. They don’t mean a thing. They seem counterfeit, so thin and colorless are they in comparison with the splendor, the horror, the glory, and the cosmic quality of a big raid.8
After an hour I went to bed. Despite the infernal din as if the universe were in labor to produce amid earthquake, volcanic eruption, tidal wave, and typhoon, a monster anti-Christ—I sought to sleep. Commending my soul to God and invoking all kindly saints, I frequently sank down the poppied ways of sleep, to be snatched back to vivid hyper-consciousness by some unusually violent explosion in the course of which the very earth rocked. Later, the thunders died away, and I slept, while Cologne lay shivering and exhausted beneath the mocking light of a bomber’s moon.9
The next day I saw much of the damage that had been done, and it was very considerable. The Oppenheim Palais and many other edifices on the Rhein-Ufer had been destroyed; much devastation had been visited upon the industrial area; loss of life had been unusually large. The Germans do not allow any death notices to be published after a raid, but this time there were no less than twenty-six notices of public funerals of important party officials. The Kölnische Zeitung merely stated that “Mr. Assistant Kreisleiter so-and-so, or Herr Blockleiter Kraus, having died suddenly during the night, his funeral would be held from Kreis, or Block Headquarters at 3:30 in the afternoon. Heil Hitler!”
After this raid very few Nazi officials remained in Cologne at all. They got themselves transferred to Vienna, Prague, Luxembourg—any place, in short, where they would be out of danger.10 It may be said with a high degree of accuracy that nearly anyone wearing the brown shirt is an arrant coward. Brought up as bullies, torturers of the weak and helpless, they are most abject in the presence of danger or possible suffering for themselves. Those who were unable to be transferred from Cologne to safety, took houses twenty to thirty miles outside the city, only coming during the forenoon. I was informed that all school children were taken away from Cologne to safer localities in April 1941. Nearly a hundred were taken to Switzerland alone.
In the afternoon I returned to Luxembourg, to come back to Cologne some ten days later. During April, May, and June I visited Cologne two or three times a month, and could note progressive destruction and a rapid lowering of morale. By the first half of July, the morale of the miserable population of Cologne was, for all practical purposes, at zero.
The Germans can joyously administer destruction and deal out suffering, but I have no reason to believe that they can bear it with fortitude or courage. Their whole history shows this. Leaving the Army out of consideration for many good and sufficient reasons, the civil population has shown for two thousand years a higher proportion of arrant poltroonery, cowardice, and treachery than can be assembled from the annals of the rest of the world put together!
Switzerland had its William Tell; Austria its Andreas Hofer. Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell. The history of England, Scotland, France, the United States, is illustrated by hundreds of cases of loyalty to a hopeless cause—self-sacrifice on the part of civilians; deliberate choice of imprisonment or death rather than betray a sovereign or an idea. But I challenge any German apologist to cite me one single case in history where a German civilian has deliberately, with open eyes, chosen imprisonment for duty’s sake, or loyalty’s sake, still less for his emperor.
Germans outside the officer caste simply have no conception of the nature of an oath. Officers did have some glimmering, twisted idea of their allegiance when during the weeks following the Kaiser’s departure from Germany in 1918, they besought him to absolve them from their oaths. The glaring blot on each officer’s escutcheon, however, which can never be erased, is that, while they whined to be released, not one of them did anything about it while still bound. If allegiance means anything at all, it means loyalty when it is no longer convenient or profitable to be loyal.
The German civilian’s inability to understand the nature of loyalty was brought home to me vividly by the untiring but unsuccessful effort of Nazi administrators to cajole, wheedle, bribe, and force officers of the Grand Ducal Army of Luxembourg to take oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The German Army officers had never for a moment attempted this or even suggested it during the time when they were in control of Luxembourg, and when the Luxembourg armed forces under their protection enjoyed a strange sort of status as semi-prisoners of war. The instant that Gustav Simon came to Luxembourg as Gauleiter, however, he and his henchmen took a morbid and intimate interest in the Luxembourg armed forces, spending time and energy all out of proportion to seduce them from their allegiance. For many reasons it is not expedient that I describe in detail this sorry and hopeless failure. Suffice it to say, I knew at all times of all efforts and conversations to the last jot or tittle.
“Come now, be sensible. France has fallen, England is helpless and must capitulate. The fighting is over. You have an opportunity to become a great man and to have a splendid career with the SA or the SS of the Gestapo. Take the oath to the Führer and your fortune is made. You can even live in Luxembourg with your own people and help to bring them to their senses. Take the oath!”
“I cannot take the oath to anyone, as my allegiance is pledged to my Sovereign and constitution.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” is the rejoinder. “We absolve you from that.”11
To this amazing revelation of German mentality, there was nothing possible to say but “You do not understand the allegiance an officer holds to his Sovereign, and I do not think you understand the nature of an oath.”
This oath to Hitler was the one thing that could not be forced upon a single Luxembourger, so far as I was able to learn. Joining the Volksdeutsche Bewegung later came to be considered as little more than momentarily expedient—as you might sign a check if a burglar’s pistol were pressed against your temple, at the same moment as you planned to stop its payment by the time the bank opened. People even joked about it, it was such a patent farce. “Sind Sie schon bewegt?” they would ask each other with a twinkle of the eye. (Have you been moved, or touched yet?) But except from such few Germans as had taken out Luxembourg citizenship and a handful of pariahs, who really wished to pledge themselves to Hitler, I am fairly certain that not one could be forced to swear allegiance. This was the limit, the one thing which they would not accept. I think that on this basis they would have died rather than surrender, and during my stay, at least the Germans did not dare force the issue of an oath to the “Führer.”
1. There surely was a great deal on Waller’s mind, seemingly unresolvable from the State Department. This was a period of great turmoil about the fate of Jewish refugees stranded on the Spanish border, as well as those on the verge of expulsion from Luxembourg. Many of the dossiers were in Antwerp, an office no longer issuing visas, while others were out of their owner’s reach across the German border. From Waller’s flurry of exchanges with the Department, the consuls in Antwerp, Cologne, and Stuttgart, recorded in File 811.11 RG84 at NARA, it is evident that this was a serious concern. See Waller, Diplomatic Activity, 16–17.
2. Although the Germans had forbidden diplomatic couriers to enter the occupied countries, earlier on Waller had, with great prescience, procured from the military authorities authorization to travel at will through Belgium, France, and Germany, allowing himself and his American clerk Senden, considerable latitude. Ibid., 18.
3. “From the entry of the Nazis into Luxembourg . . . my telephone was tapped. I took pleasure from time to time in expressing myself freely . . . believing that the Nazi authorities were recording or listening to what I said.” Ibid., 16.
4. This cryptic statement presents a conundrum. In this editor’s experience while attempting to be repatriated to the United States, he was tutored with much economic information deemed to be of interest to the Allies. Because of his many contacts Waller was likely to have been assigned the collection of data about steel production, etc. However, no hint can be found in his papers pertaining to this unique assignment.
5. Maybe he was thinking of the hymn Rock of Ages, “cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee,” or the Psalm 27:5.
6. Psalm 91:5.
7. Göring had boasted—“If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring, you can call me Meier.”—a German expression declaring that something is impossible. See New World Encyclopedia contributors, "Hermann Goering," New World Encyclopedia. Available online at http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hermann_Goering?oldid=910094.
8 . There were three heavy raids and a smaller one on Cologne in the first three weeks of March 1941. “Royal Air Force (raids, Berlin and Cologne).” Hansard 1803–2005 HC Deb 26 March 1941 vol. 370 c597W. Available online at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1941/mar/26/royal-air-force-raids-berlin-and-cologne.
9 . A full bright moon referred to as a bomber’s moon occurred on 13 March 1941. R. S. Zug, “Planet Notes for March 1941,” Popular Astronomy, 49 (1941): 90.
10. Little knowing what lay in store: within the year the RAF launched the first of many thousand-bomber raids on Cologne, making it one of the most devastated cities of World War II.
11. Aloyse Raths and Paul Dostert, “Chronologie 1939–1945,” in Lëtzebuerg 40 Joër fräi (Luxembourg: Ministère des affaires culturelles, 1985), 60, records for 15 August 1940 that all civil servants are relieved of their oath of loyalty to the grand duchess, and obedience is now due to CdZ Gustav Simon “qui proclame que l’État luxembourgeois a cessé d’existe.” See also Pierre Majerus, Le Luxembourg pendant la seconde guerre mondiale: Extrait de l’ouvrage “le Luxembourg indépendant,” essai d’histoire politique contemporaine et de droit international public (1945) (Luxembourg: Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1980), 33–44.