visitor was gone, the couple decided to prepare for bed since nothing more appeared to be happening. But just before 1 a.m., the doorbell rang. Hilde opened the door, and two men stepped in asking for Lochner.
“Here I am,” Lochner called out from the corridor, which was dimly lit because of blackout regulations. The men pointed their flashlights at him and showed their Gestapo badges, ordering him to come with them. Lochner picked up his packed bag. “But how did you know that we were coming?” one of the men asked. Lochner shot back: “Why do you think I’m a newsman?”
Thuermer was even more determined to show he wasn’t surprised when the same two officers knocked sharply on his door and announced: “
Lochner and Thuermer were taken to the third floor of the Alexanderplatz police station, which was the Gestapo’s section. After they entered through a door with steel bars and a huge lock, they were put into a large room that was adorned with stern portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. They then waited as more American reporters were brought in, until they numbered fifteen in all. Ed Shanke, another AP correspondent, arrived feeling particularly stiff after his long wait in a small car. Carefully spreading out a newspaper on a table, he stretched out his legs and put them on it. A guard immediately jumped up. “We still have
The guards didn’t seem to know what to do with their captives. In fact, the journalists learned later that the Gestapo hadn’t received the instructions from the Foreign Ministry to wait until the following day—Thursday, December 11—to round them up. “The Gestapo had decided to grab us in the middle of the night, as they were wont to grab Jews, republicans, and nonconformist clergymen,” Lochner wrote later. “So here we were, fifteen marooned and forgotten newsmen.” But any doubts that the Americans were in a very different situation than the Nazis’ other prisoners were erased the next day when they started complaining they were hungry. The Gestapo hadn’t made any arrangements to feed them, but a guard offered to get them food if they would pay for it. The result was a meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes, along with a salami “wurst.” As Lochner noted, the total cost for everyone was 60 cents.
At the embassy that Thursday, the diplomats watched the preparations for Hitler’s Reichstag speech, which included the arrival of sound trucks and large groups of people right outside the embassy building. The diplomats nervously closed the metal blinds, but, as Kennan recorded, no action was taken against them. Instead, while Hitler was announcing his declaration of war on the United States, denouncing Roosevelt and the “entire satanic insidiousness” of the Jews who were backing him, the phone suddenly rang in the embassy for the first time since service had been cut off. It was a summons for Morris to the Foreign Ministry. There, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop kept him standing as he read out the declaration of war and screamed, “Your President has wanted this war; now he has it.”
At about the same time, the American correspondents were transferred to an unheated summer hotel annex in Gruenau, a Berlin suburb. But they soon received cheering news: the State Department had declared it would consider the arrested German newsmen to have diplomatic standing, which meant that would be the case for the arrested American journalists as well. The next day, a surprise visitor showed up.
An anonymous caller had tipped off Hilde Lochner about where her husband and the others were taken, and she had managed to talk her way past the guards to deliver apples, cigarettes, canned food and American magazines. The spirits of the journalists soared.
Hitler had ordered that the Americans had to be out of Berlin by the end of the week. On Saturday, Kennan was the one who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was instructed that all the American staffers had to vacate their apartments and report to the embassy with their luggage the following morning. That same day the American journalists were released with the same orders. Returning to their homes to gather up their belongings, several journalists discovered that intruders had already helped themselves to their possessions during their time in detention—everything from canned meat and cigarettes to clothing and silverware.
When everyone dutifully showed up on Sunday morning, they found the embassy surrounded by troops and occupied by the Gestapo. The Americans were then bussed to the Potsdamer train station, where they boarded a special train. Their destination: Bad Nauheim, a spa town near Frankfurt. They were told they would be held there until an exchange could be arranged for the German diplomats and journalists who were being held in the United States. So began the last act for the Americans in Germany, which, in keeping with many of their earlier experiences, demonstrated that they still maintained a privileged status.
The detained Germans in the United States fared very well. They did their time, as it were, at the Greenbrier, the plush spa hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which had no problem accommodating them. By contrast, Jeschke’s Grand Hotel in Bad Nauheim, which eventually accommodated a total of 132 Americans after a few more were added from occupied Europe, was hardly prepared for the sudden influx of boarders. It had been closed at the start of the war in September 1939, and basic services like heat, water and electricity had been cut off. In the interim, heating pipes had burst during the winter months. In January and February 1942, as temperatures dropped, the Americans would keep their overcoats on when they went to the dining room and then rush back to their beds to keep warm. Of course, these were hardly hardships compared to what was happening elsewhere in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, the Americans had been promised special treatment, and they were quick to complain whenever they felt it came up short.
The most constant complaints were about food. German officials maintained that the detainees were receiving 150 percent of the normal German civilian rations, and the Americans didn’t doubt it. But even that preferential diet was a far cry from what most of the detainees had been used to in Berlin. “This showed us how tightly the Germans had pulled in their belts,” Lochner wrote in an AP dispatch after he returned home. He added that, during the five months they ended up spending in Bad Nauheim, American men on average lost 10 pounds and women 6.7 pounds; in extreme cases, he added, there were losses of 35 pounds. All of which hardly constituted evidence of genuine hardship.
After they returned home, many of the Americans were reluctant to talk too much about their complaints at the time, recognizing how petty they sounded—particularly as they learned more about how Germans were treating most of their captives. SS Captain Valentin Patzak, who was in charge from the German side, worked closely with Kennan, who became the real leader of the Americans on a day-to-day basis, while Morris took a more passive role. To deal with the constant problems in the accommodations, the Germans simply went out and arrested whoever they needed—an electrician or plumber—assigning them to make repairs at the hotel before releasing them. Occasionally, food supplies from the abandoned U.S. Embassy in Berlin were delivered to the hotel.
Patzak also allowed the Americans to write letters, although they were subject to censorship. The detainees could not send telegrams, but they could receive them. Kennan and Morris were allowed to call the Swiss officials who represented U.S. interests in Berlin, which was the only permitted use of the phone. Much of the day-to-day handling of the Americans and their complaints was left to the two senior Americans, which minimized direct interactions between the Germans and most of their detainees. Kennan promptly organized a secretariat, which issued a variety of regulations. Morris insisted, for instance, that men had to wear coats and ties in the public rooms of the hotel, and that everyone had to assume responsibility for keeping their rooms clean. Another order read: “It is in the general interest not to listen to or pass on rumors.”
Rumors flew all the time, of course, especially about how long the detention would drag on. As weeks turned into months, the real challenge was in dealing with what Lochner called “a rather unique American experience in the art of fighting boredom.” But the detainees did pretty well in that department. The AP’s Ed Shanke had smuggled in a small RCA battery-operated shortwave radio, and he invited his friends to “choir practice” in his room at nine in the evenings to listen to the BBC news from London.
Alvin Steinkopf, another AP reporter, was a source of entertainment one day when he received a surprise
