as a mass of inhuman monsters, solidly behind Hitler and consumed with a demonic enthusiasm for the ruin and enslavement of the rest of Europe,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Even Shirer, who was far less forgiving, was encouraged by the occasional encounter with a German who represented the kind of free thinking that had until recently flourished in that country. In January 1940, he met with a woman in Berlin to give her some provisions he had brought for her from her relatives abroad. He described her as “the most intelligent German female I have met in ages.” She bemoaned her countrymen’s slavish obedience to authority, and their willingness to follow its Nazi leaders, who represented the barbarian impulses that always lurked below the surface. She saw those rulers as intent on destroying Western civilization and its values, despite the contribution of so many Germans to the development of that civilization.
It was a recipe for self-destruction, she explained to Shirer, the result of an unwillingness or inability of her countrymen to think and act for themselves. “A German will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”
The American diplomats and correspondents continued to live, as the consular clerk Russell put it, “isolated on our island in the middle of Berlin.” He attributed the gas rationing for embassy employees less to wartime shortages than to the desire of the Nazis to limit the mobility of the Americans in their midst. The authorities also tapped their phones and didn’t mind that the Americans realized it, since this was meant to make them cautious in contacts with Germans.
Rationing for the general population kept getting stricter, with everything from toilet paper to shoelaces disappearing, and stores began putting up small signs proclaiming GOODS DISPLAYED IN THE WINDOWS ARE NOT FOR SALE. But most Americans lived in a parallel universe. On Thanksgiving Day 1939, when the war was into its third month, Kirk, the embassy’s senior diplomat, invited a contingent of his countrymen in Berlin for the customary afternoon meal. “A hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table,” Shirer noted in his diary.
The CBS correspondent then went on to a dinner at the home of Dorothy and Fred Oechsner, the United Press manager in Berlin, where Shirer tucked into another turkey. He was so thrilled by the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie that he talked Dorothy into going to the broadcast studio at midnight to explain to listeners back home how she had used “a new-fangled machine” to extract the cream from butter.
Despite their unique circumstances, the Americans did get around, and the diplomats in particular were constantly contacted by those seeking their help. As Christmas approached, Russell reported, “embarrassingly large baskets of food, wine, champagne and delicacies of all sorts in Berlin were delivered to our residences.” Those who still had the means to put together those kinds of packages never included a card identifying themselves, but usually in a short time they would send a letter to the recipient asking for help. At the end of the letter, the supplicant would inquire whether the Christmas present had arrived safely—and then would sign with his or her full name and address. Other visa applicants offered bribes of money to the Americans right in the consulate, although trying to do so secretly and using “veiled language.”
In January 1940, as a bitter cold winter set in, the Americans flooded the tennis court in the back of the embassy, turning it into an ice-skating rink. But for all their amenities, including shipments of warm winter clothes from Denmark, they were in close enough contact with life around them to dismiss reports back home about the desperate conditions of most Germans and the possibility that this could bring down the Nazi regime.
To be sure, the privations of the war were making themselves felt, and Kennan was struck by the “unmistakable inner detachment of the people from the pretentious purposes of the regime.” But he also remarked on “the way life went on, as best it could, under the growing difficulties of wartime discipline.” Russell reported a similar lack of enthusiasm for the war, adding: “But here Germany was, right before my eyes, working and living and going strong.” In other words, the speculation back in the United States that the Germans were prepared to rise up in revolt was nothing more than wishful thinking.
As the embassy staffers arranged the paperwork for numerous Americans who had surfaced to make arrangements to return home in those first months of the war, their island felt lonelier than before. And they weren’t completely immune to the deteriorating living conditions. By January, hot water was usually no longer available in their apartments, prompting the embassy to put in two tin bathtubs on the building’s upper floor, one for women and one for men.
Late in January, Russell was invited to lunch at the apartment of Consul Richard Stratton, where he met Jane Dyer, whose brother was also working at the embassy. She was up for a visit from Rome, where she was studying music, but her real home was Alabama. “I never expected to be so far away from home in my life,” she proclaimed in a husky voice with a thick southern accent that instantly charmed Russell, who had grown up in neighboring Mississippi. After lunch, they played records, and Russell danced with her. All of which made for a lovely afternoon. Toward the end of it, Dyer asked: “Is Germany really at war? I mean, I haven’t seen anything to remind me of war. Everything is the same as it always was.”
It was Stratton who replied. “You don’t feel anything yet. Just like those children playing out in the street. They don’t feel the war either—yet. But the time will come when war will come home to all of us—to Americans, Russians, Africans, children and unborn babies. I think so, anyway.”
The party was over, and Dyer and Russell pondered his words in silence.
Feeding the Squirrels
William Russell had announced his plans to leave Berlin during that first winter of the war. His supervisors in the consular section offered to try to get him a raise and a new title, but he knew that he was at a disadvantage because he had been hired directly by the embassy after he had studied German at the University of Berlin. The foreign service liked to reward those who rose through the normal channels, starting in Washington and then going to their first assignments abroad. Besides, he wanted to try his luck as a writer, and he already had penned much of the manuscript of the book that he would publish in 1941 with the title
On April 10, 1940, three days before his scheduled departure, Russell was sitting in his parked car in the back of the embassy with a German girlfriend. “We had not gone there to spoon, but to listen to the automobile radio,” the young clerk recalled somewhat defensively. The morning newspapers had been filled with what he called the “sickening news” that German troops had moved into Denmark and Norway. On the radio, Goebbels was reading the ultimatums that were delivered to the Nazis’ next victims, claiming that Germany had “no territorial ambitions” against them and that “neither of these two countries will be used as a base for operations against the enemy.”
Russell started to make a sarcastic comment, but then he saw that his girlfriend had tears in her eyes. “That hateful damn liar!” she exclaimed. “That hateful damn liar!”
For Russell, this was one of the final reminders that not all Germans were marching in lockstep behind Hitler. Before driving off three days later, he said good-bye to a long list of acquaintances from his three-year sojourn in Berlin—“Americans, Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis, rich, poor, intellectuals, bums,” as he put it. Reaching Innsbruck, he was summoned to Gestapo headquarters ostensibly for questioning about his car’s papers. They also searched his car, leaving his manuscript strewn about—but still intact.
He drove on to Italy. At the border, a fat customs official couldn’t have been friendlier as he stamped his passport. “Now, why do you want to leave Germany, young man? You liked our country, didn’t you?” When Russell reflexively assented, he added: “You come back when we have peace, eh?”
Germany had been exciting, even pleasant at times, for the young man from Mississippi, but Russell found it hard to imagine a peaceful continent anytime soon. When he was sitting in his car with his girlfriend in Berlin, he had concluded that Hitler “had embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.” Looking back at the steep hills behind him as he crossed into Italy, he was stripped of all illusions. “Not a gun to be seen, not a
