Berlin Diary (14 page)

B
ERLIN
,
April
14

Have bought a sailboat for four hundred marks from a broken-down boxer who needed the cash.
It has a cabin with two bunks and Tess and I can week-end on it, if we ever get a week-end free. Know nothing about sailing, but with the help of some hastily scrawled diagrams on the back of an envelope telling what to do with the wind behind you or against you or from the side which one of the Germans at the office did for me, and with much luck, we managed to sail ten miles down the Wannsee to where the Barneses have taken a house for the summer. Had some difficulty in docking it there, as the wind was blowing towards shore and I didn’t know what to do. The little boat-house owner raised an awful howl, claiming I’d damaged his dock, but a five-mark piece quieted him.

B
ERLIN
,
April
20

Hitler’s birthday. He gets more and more like a Caesar. Today a public holiday with sickening adulation from all the party hacks, delegations from all over the Reich bearing gifts, and a great military parade. The Reichswehr revealed a little of what it has: heavy artillery, tanks, and magnificently trained men. Hitler stood on the reviewing stand in front of the Technische Hochschule, as happy as a child with tin soldiers, standing there more than two hours and saluting every tank and gun. The military attachés of France, Britain, and Russia, I hear, were impressed. So were ours.

B
ERLIN
,
May
3

Gordon Young of Reuter’s and I ran into Lord Lothian about midnight in the lobby of the Adlon. He arrived here suddenly yesterday to confer with Nazi leaders. Young asked him why he had come. “Oh,
Göring asked me to,” he replied. He is probably the most intelligent of the Tories taken in by Hitler, Göring, and Ribbentrop. We wanted to ask him since when he was under orders from Göring, but refrained.

B
ERLIN
,
May
7

Hillman awakened me with a phone call from London about four a.m. today to inform me that the Zeppelin
Hindenburg
had crashed at Lakehurst with the loss of several lives. I immediately phoned one of the men who designed it, at Friedrichshafen. He refused to believe my words. I telephoned London and gave them a little story for the late editions. I had hardly gone back to sleep when Claire Trask of the Columbia Broadcasting System phoned to ask me to do a broadcast on the German reaction to the disaster. I was a bit ill-tempered, I’m afraid, at being awakened so early. I told her I couldn’t do it and suggested two or three other correspondents. About ten she called back again and insisted I do it. I finally agreed, though I had never broadcast in my life.

Kept thinking all morning of how first I and then Tess were invited to make
this
trip on the
Hindenburg
, and almost accepted. For some reason there were several places they could not sell, so about ten days before it was due to leave, the press agent of the Zeppelin
Reederei
phoned me and offered a free passage to New York. It was impossible for me, as I was holding down the office alone. The next day he called up and asked if Tess would like to go. For reasons which are a little obscure—or maybe not so obscure, though I do not think it is honest to say I had a
feeling
that something might happen—I did not mention the matter to Tess and politely declined on her behalf the next day.

Wrote out my broadcast this afternoon between dispatches to New York, Claire Trask taking it page by page to the Air Ministry for censorship. Was a little surprised to find that there was Nazi censorship of radio, as we have none as newspaper correspondents, but Miss Trask explained it was just for this time. I arrived at the studio a quarter of an hour before the time set to begin, as nervous as an old hen. With about five minutes to go, Miss Trask arrived with the script. The censors had cut out my references to Nazi suspicion that there had been sabotage, though I had cabled this early in the afternoon in a dispatch. So nervous when I began my broadcast that my voice skipped up and down the scale and my lips and throat grew parched, but after the first page gradually lost my fright. Fear I will never make a broadcaster, but felt relieved I did not have microphone fright, which I understand makes some people speechless before a microphone.

B
ERLIN
,
May
10

Finished the Indian novel, or at least the first draft. A great load off my mind.

B
ERLIN
,
May
30

I have rarely seen such indignation in the Wilhelmstrasse as today. Every official I saw was fuming. The Spanish republicans yesterday bombed the pocket-battleship
Deutschland
at Ibitza with good result, killing, according to the Germans, some twenty officers and men and wounding eighty. One informant tells me Hitler has been screaming with rage all day and wants to declare war on Spain. The army and navy are trying to restrain him.

B
ERLIN
,
May
31

I feel like screaming with rage myself. The Germans this day have done a typical thing. They have bombarded the Spanish town of Almería with their warships as reprisal for the bombing of the
Deutschland
. Thus Hitler has his cheap revenge and a few more Spanish women and children are dead. The Wilhelmstrasse also announced Germany’s (and Italy’s) withdrawal from the Spanish naval patrol and from the non-intervention talks. Dr. Aschmann called us to the Foreign Office about ten a.m. to give us the news. He was very pious about it all. I was too outraged to ask questions, but Enderis and Lochner asked a few. Perhaps today’s action will end the farce of “non-intervention,” a trick by which Britain and France, for some strange reason, are allowing Hitler and Mussolini to triumph in Spain.

B
ERLIN
,
June
4

Helmut Hirsch, a Jewish youth of twenty who was technically an American citizen though he had never been to America, was axed at dawn this morning. Ambassador Dodd fought for a month to save his life, but to no avail. It was a sad case, a typical tragedy of these days. He was convicted by the dreaded People’s Court, a court of inquisition set up by the Nazis a couple of years ago, of planning to murder Julius Streicher, the Nuremberger Jew-baiter. What kind of trial it was—no American or outside representatives were present—can only be imagined. I’ve seen a few trials before this court, though most of them are
in camera
, and a man scarcely has a chance, four of the five judges being
Nazi party boys (the fifth is a regular judge) who do what they’re expected to do.

Actually, the Nazis had something on poor Hirsch. A student at Prague University, he was put up to the job either by Otto Strasser or some of Strasser’s followers or supposed followers in Prague. Among Strasser’s “followers” there was certainly a Gestapo agent, and Hirsch was doomed from the outset. As far as I can piece the story together, Hirsch was provided with a suitcase full of bombs and a revolver and dispatched to Germany to get someone. The Nazis claim it was Streicher. Hirsch himself never seems to have admitted who. The Gestapo agent in Prague tipped off Himmler’s people here, and Hirsch, with his incriminating suitcase, was nabbed as soon as he set foot in Germany. It may well be, as Hirsch’s lawyer in Prague suggests, that the young man was merely bringing the weapons to Germany for someone else, already here, to do the job, and that he may not have known, even, of the contents of his luggage. We shall never know. Perhaps he was simply framed by the Gestapo. He was arrested, tried, and, this morning, executed. I had a long talk with Dodd this morning about the case. He told me he had appealed to Hitler himself to commute the sentence and read me the text of his moving letter. The Fiihrer’s reply was a flat negative. When Dodd tried to get a personal interview with Hitler to plead the case in person, he was rebuffed.