Berlin Diary (20 page)

I
N A
D
UTCH
P
LANE BETWEEN
A
MSTERDAM AND
L
ONDON
,
March
12

Have just finished scrawling out a script. Can go on the air as soon as we get into London. Went to work on it just after we took off from Tempelhof in Berlin, Amsterdam being the next stop and so no danger of a Nazi censor. I’ve had luck today. I was at the Aspern airport at seven a.m. The Gestapo had taken over. At first they said no planes would be allowed to take off. Then they cleared the London plane. But I could not get on. I offered fantastic sums to several passengers for their places. Most of them were Jews and I could not blame them for turning me down. Next was the plane to Berlin. I got on that.

Vienna was scarcely recognizable this morning. Swastika flags flying from nearly every house. Where did they get them so fast? Another piece of news at Aspern from a police official I had known slightly. Schuschnigg has not fled, he insisted. Refused, though they kept an airplane waiting until midnight for him. Guts. The airfield at Aspern already crowded with German war planes when we took off. We came down at Prague and Dresden and it was noon before we arrived in Berlin. More luck. A seat on a Dutch plane straight through to London. I had an hour for lunch. I bought the morning Berlin newspapers. Amazing! Goebbels at his best, or worst! Hitler’s own newspaper, the
Völkische Beobachter
, on my lap here. Its screaming banner-line across page one:
GERMAN-AUSTRIA SAVED FROM CHAOS
. And an incredible story out of Goebbels’s evil but fertile brain describing violent Red disorders in the main streets of Vienna yesterday, fighting, shooting, pillaging. It is a complete
lie
. But how will the German people know it’s a lie? The DNB also has a story today that sounds phony. It claims Seyss-Inquart last night telegraphed to Hitler to send troops to protect Austria from armed Socialists and Communists. Since there were no “armed Socialists and Communists” in Vienna last night, this obviously is also a lie. But interesting to note Hitler’s technique, The same which was used to justify the June SO purge. Any lie will do. Croydon now just ahead of us.

L
ATER
,
London
.—Broadcast at eleven thirty p.m. And now for some sleep.

L
ONDON
,
March
14

At one a.m. this morning (eight p.m. yesterday, New York time) we did our first European radio round-up. It came off like this.

About five o’clock yesterday afternoon my telephone rang. Paul W. White, Columbia’s director of public affairs, was calling from New York. He said: “We want a European round-up tonight. One a.m. your time. We want you and some member of Parliament from London, Ed Murrow of course from Vienna, and American newspaper correspondents from Berlin, Paris, and Rome. A half-hour show, and I’ll telephone you the exact time for each capital in about an hour. Can you and Murrow do it?”

I said yes, and we hung up. The truth is I didn’t
have the faintest idea how to do it—in eight hours, anyway. We had done one or two of these, but there had been
months
of fussing over technical arrangements before each one. I put in a long-distance call to Murrow in Vienna. And as valuable minutes ticked away I considered what to do. The more I thought about it, the simpler it became. Murrow and I have newspaper friends, American correspondents, in every capital in Europe. We also know personally the directors and chief engineers of the various European broadcasting systems whose technical facilities we must use. I called Edgar Mowrer in Paris, Frank Gervasi in Rome, Pierre Huss in Berlin, and the directors and chief engineers of PTT in Paris, EIAR in Turin, and the RRG in Berlin.

Murrow came through from Vienna; he undertook to arrange the Berlin as well as the Vienna end and gave me a badly needed technical lesson as to how the entire job could be done. For each capital we needed a powerful short-wave transmitter that would carry a voice clearly to New York. Rome had one, but its availability was doubtful. Paris had none. In that case we must order telephone lines to the nearest short-wave transmitting station. Before long my three telephones were buzzing, and in four languages: English, German, French, and Italian. The first three I know fairly well, but my Italian scarcely exists. Still, I understood enough from Turin to get the idea that no executives of the Italian Broadcasting Company could be reached at the moment. Alas, it was Sunday. I still had Rome coming in. Perhaps I could arrange matters with the branch office there. Berlin came through. The Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft would do its best. Only, they explained, the one line to Vienna was in the hands of the army and therefore doubtful.

As the evening wore on, the broadcast began to take shape. New York telephoned again with the exact times scheduled for each capital. New York’s brazen serenity, its confidence that the broadcast would come off all right, encouraged me. My newspaper friends started to come through. Edgar Mowrer, Paris correspondent of the Chicago
Daily News
, was spending Sunday in the country. Much urging to persuade him to return to town to broadcast. But Edgar couldn’t fool me. No man, I knew, felt more intensely than he what had happened in Austria. Gervasi in Rome and Huss in Berlin came through. They would broadcast if their New York office agreed. Not much time to inquire at the New York newspaper offices, especially on Sunday afternoon. Another call to Columbia in New York: Get permission for Gervasi and Huss to talk. And by the way, New York said, what transmitters and wave-lengths are Berlin and Rome using? I had forgotten about that. Another call to Berlin. The station would be DJZ, 25.2 metres, 11,870 kilocycles. An urgent cable carried the information to the CBS control room in New York.

Time was getting short. I remembered that I roust also write out a talk for the London end of the show. What was Britain going to do about Hitler’s invasion of Austria? I telephoned around town for material. Britain wasn’t going to do anything. New York also wanted a member of Parliament, I suddenly recalled, to discuss British official reaction to the
Anschluss
. I called two or three M.P. friends. They were all enjoying the English week-end. I called Ellen Wilkinson, Labour M.P. So was she.

“How long will it take you to drive to the BBC?” I asked her.

“About an hour,” she said.

I looked at my watch. We had a little more than two hours to go. She agreed to talk.

Gervasi’s voice from Rome was on the line. “The Italians can’t arrange it on such short notice,” he said. “What shall I do?”

I wondered myself. “We’ll take you over Geneva,” I finally said. “And if that’s impossible, phone me back in an hour with your story and I’ll read it from here.”

Sitting alone in a small studio in Broadcasting House, I had a final check-up with New York three minutes before one a.m. We went over the exact timings of each talk and checked the cues which would be the signals for the speakers in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London to begin and end their talks. Rome was out, I told our control room in New York, but Gervasi was on the telephone this minute, dictating his story to a stenographer. We agreed upon a second switchback to London from New York so that I could read it. One a.m. came, and through my earphones I could hear on our transatlantic “feedback” the smooth voice of Bob Trout announcing the broadcast from our New York studio. Our part went off all right, I think. Edgar and Ed were especially good. Ellen Wilkinson, flaunting her red hair, arrived in good time. New York said on the “feedback” afterwards that it was a success. They want another one tonight.

Hitler, say the dispatches, entered Vienna in triumph this afternoon. Nobody fired. Chamberlain has just spoken in the House. He is not going to do anything. “The hard fact is,” he says, “that nothing could have arrested what has actually happened—unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.” There will be no war. Britain and France have retreated one step more before the rising Nazi power.

L
ATER.—
Albion Ross of the New York
Times
staff in Berlin had an interesting line in his talk on our round-up tonight. He said the Berliners had taken the
Anschluss
with “phlegmatic calm.”

L
ONDON
,
March
15

Hitler, speaking in Vienna
from the balcony of the Hofburg, palace of the once mighty Habsburgs, today proclaimed the incorporation of Austria in the German Reich. Still another promise broken. He could not even wait for the plebiscite, scheduled for April 10. Talked with Winston Churchill on the phone this morning. He will do a fifteen-minute broadcast, but wants five hundred dollars.

L
ONDON
,
March
16

Ed telephoned from Vienna. He said Major Emil Fey has committed suicide after putting bullets through his wife and nineteen-year-old son. He was a sinister man. Undoubtedly he feared the Nazis would murder him for having double-crossed them in 1934 when Dollfuss was shot. I return to Vienna day after tomorrow. The crisis is over. I think we’ve found something, though, for radio with these round-ups.

V
IENNA
,
March
19

Ed met me at Aspern airport last evening. When we arrived at dusk before my house in the Ploesslgasse, S.S. guards in steel helmets and with fixed bayonets were standing before my door. A glance up the street showed they were guarding all doors, especially that of the Rothschild palace next to us. Ed and I
started into our place, but the Nazi guards prodded us back.

“I live here,” I said, suddenly angry.

“Makes no difference. You can’t go in,” one of the guards countered.

“I said I
lived
here!”

“Sorry. Strict orders. No one can enter or leave.” He was an Austrian lad, his accent showed, and polite, and my anger subsided.

“Where can I find your commandant?” I asked.

“In the Rothschild palace.”

He gave us a towering S.S. man, who escorted us into the gardener’s house which adjoined our building and where Rothschild had actually resided the last year. As we entered we almost collided with some S.S. officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed. I explained my business and our nationality. He chuckled and told the guard to escort us to my door.