he was when he talked with Germans. He was pleased to see that most people still spoke freely to American reporters, and he could travel almost anywhere he wanted and file stories. Official Germans didn’t seem particularly secretive either, even when it came to subjects like concentration camps for political prisoners and Jews. Looking back at that period in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, Harsch observed: “The label concentration camp had not then acquired the sinister connotation it has today… There was nothing sufficiently unusual about the internment camps in Germany to attract the special attention of American correspondents in Berlin in 1939 and 1940.”

Harsch encountered difficulties with the authorities only when he began doing occasional radio broadcasts for CBS, subbing for Shirer when he was out of town. The rules for broadcasters were far tougher than anything print journalists faced. As Harsch noted, all scripts had to be approved by a group of censors, with one representative each from the Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry and the Military High Command. A censor also carefully monitored the reading of the approved scripts on air and could cut the correspondent off instantly if he deviated from it.

Oddly, there was often less of a sense of danger than when other American correspondents, like Edgar Mowrer, had reported on the Nazis coming to power. Richard Hottelet, a recent Brooklyn College graduate who was an aggressive United Press reporter in Berlin, didn’t hesitate to board a train full of Polish Jews who were being expelled from Germany. While he found the conditions in the third-class cars “pretty awful, pretty depressing,” they were still mild compared to the cattle car deportations that would soon follow. And Hottelet wasn’t worried about his personal safety as he pursued such stories. “I was an American, I was working for an American organization, I didn’t feel threatened,” he declared. “I knew the situation was odd but not menacing.” In fact, Hottelet would later experience the inside of a German prison, but he still vividly recalled that sense of invulnerability during an interview seventy years later.

The conflict Hitler had unleashed quickly lapsed into its “phony war” stage, with the Germans biding their time for their spring 1940 new offensives and the French sitting quietly behind their Maginot Line. On October 10, 1939, Shirer traveled to Geneva, and as his train ran along the Rhine, he could see French and German soldiers building up fortifications on their respective sides. “The troops seemed to be observing an armistice,” he wrote in his diary. “They went about their business in full sight and range of each other… Queer kind of war.”

The Royal Air Force attacked German naval targets, only to suffer serious losses and inflict little damage. On October 2, the RAF made its first night raid on Berlin, dropping only propaganda leaflets “in the vain hope that people reading them would be incited to revolt,” consular clerk Russell scoffed. “They might as well have saved their gasoline.” During this early stage of the conflict, there was no air war to speak of, and the blackout in Berlin felt more like a precaution than a necessity. Britain and France rejected Hitler’s “peace proposals” after his victory over Poland, and the British naval blockade meant that rationing was tightened further. But many Germans still held out “the hope of an early victory and peace,” as Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, wrote. Whatever sacrifices they had to make were justified, he added, by the regime’s slogan: “It is better to live safely than to live well.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Polish campaign, Americans in Berlin could see one indication of the early cost of the war: the death notices that appeared in local newspapers. “One Breslau daily, especially, is just filled every day with casualty notices—old, established names where the young man, the hope of the family, fell,” the AP’s Lochner wrote to his children in Chicago on October 8. “Right among our own friends and in one case even relatives…” He added that social life was disappearing “because everyone lives on bread cards, meat cards, fat cards, etc., hence has no accumulated reserves with which to entertain guests.”

Lochner noted that people were reluctant to go to unfamiliar places in the evening because of the blackout, and accidents were frequent. As the nights grew longer, the young diplomat Russell observed that this was at least to one group’s advantage. “In the darkness, certain girls made easy pickups,” he pointed out. While prostitution was technically illegal in Nazi Germany, the blackouts made it a lot easier. “Even the old girls, the wrinkled ones, stood on corners with their ugly features safely hidden in the darkness and shone their flashlights on their legs in invitation.”

George Kennan, a Russian specialist who had volunteered to go to Berlin to help charge d’affaires Alexander Kirk with his administrative duties, arrived in the German capital shortly after the war began. One of his strongest memories of that period was of returning home after work in the evenings: “the groping in pitch blackness from column to column of the Brandenburg gate, feeling my way by hand after this fashion to the bus stop… the wonder as to how the driver ever found his way over the vast expanse of unmarked, often snow-covered asphalt… the eerie walk home at the other end, again with much groping and feeling for curbstones.”

Despite all those daily inconveniences, it was still relatively easy to overlook the fact that the war was on since the fighting was taking place elsewhere. On a visit to Hamburg about a month into the war, Kennan was making his way back to his lodgings one evening when a woman emerged from a street corner and said cheerfully: “Shan’t we go somewhere?” Kennan indicated he wasn’t interested in her services but he’d buy her a drink—and pay her what she normally charged for more than that. At her favorite bar, she told him her story: that she had a daytime job packing parcels, where the pay was bad but it was her way of avoiding the roundups of street girls who were sent to labor camps; that she was engaged to an army flyer who was on duty in Poland, “a complete egoist” who treated her badly; and that she made her real money on the streets at night—of course, unbeknownst to him.

There was nothing all that extraordinary in her story, and nothing all that unusual that Kennan would find it intriguing to talk to a fairly sophisticated streetwalker. He may have been destined for a distinguished career as a diplomat and scholar, but he was still a young man at the time. The most memorable part of his encounter, though, was what was left unsaid. “It was only after I got home it occurred to me that neither of us had mentioned the war,” he wrote.

Among top Nazi leaders, the mood was one of growing confidence that events were moving their way. At the Soviet Embassy’s November 7 reception to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of American correspondents chatted with Goering as he stood at the buffet drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. Shirer, who was part of this group, had thought the Luftwaffe commander might be upset with America’s increasingly open support for Britain and growing talk of supplying that country with large numbers of airplanes.

But Goering was in an expansive, jovial mood. “If we could only make planes at your rate of production we should be very weak,” he declared. “I mean that seriously. Your planes are good, but you don’t make enough of them fast enough.” He added that “one day you’ll see who has been building the best and the most planes.”

When the Americans asked why German planes had only attacked British warships, he replied that they were important targets and “give us good practice.”

“Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?” the Americans persisted.

“We’re humane,” Goering responded. Shirer and the others couldn’t help laughing. “You shouldn’t laugh,” he admonished them. “I’m serious. I am humane.”

In less official settings, Americans in Berlin were surprised to discover occasional flashes of genuine wartime humor. Harsch, the newcomer from the Christian Science Monitor, heard one story that was making the rounds of a working-class neighborhood. According to the joke, a disguised Hitler goes to a beer hall and asks the proprietor what people really think of Der Fuhrer. The proprietor leans forward and whispers to him: “I couldn’t afford to have any of my customers hear me say it, but I, personally, don’t think he’s so bad.”

As the American reporters and diplomats learned, many Germans were also listening to foreign radio stations, despite the fact that this was strictly forbidden. Russell estimated that 60 to 70 percent did so in secret, and he noticed that the stores sold out all their old-fashioned radio headphones during the first week of the war. While his estimate was probably high, he encountered enough Germans who signaled their reservations about Hitler and the war, however obliquely, that he was hesitant to make sweeping judgments about the national mood.

“If the United States goes into this war, there is one thing I do not want to forget,” he wrote. “There are millions of people in Germany who do not agree with the policies of their leaders. And there are other millions, simple people, who believe exactly what their leaders tell them—especially when they tell them the same thing day after day. I do not want to go blind with hatred and forget that.” Kennan echoed those sentiments. “It was hard to associate oneself with much of the American press and of Washington officialdom in picturing the German people

Вы читаете Hitlerland
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату