Berlin Diary (34 page)

W
ARSAW
,
August
20

Broadcast to America at four a.m. today. Walking home to the hotel at dawn, the air was soft and fresh and the quiet soothing. Getting off to Berlin tonight on orders from New York—my fate always to get caught, I fear, on the wrong side. All in all, the Poles are calm and confident and Berlin’s gibes and Goebbels’s terrific press campaign of lies and invented incidents leave them cold. But they are too romantic,
too confident. You ask them, as I’ve asked a score of officials in the Foreign Office and the army this past week, about Russia and they shrug their shoulders. Russia does not count for them. But it ought to. I think the Poles will fight. I know I said that, wrongly, about the Czechs a year ago. But I say it again about the Poles. Our Embassy is divided. Most think Poland
will give a good account of itself. Our military attaché thinks the Poles can hold out alone against Germany for six months. Harrison, on the other hand, thinks the country will crack up. Major Eliot here. Thinks the Polish army is pretty good, but not sufficiently armed nor fully aware of its awful strategic position. To record: a riotous dinner John [Gunther] gave—much vodka, smoked salmon, and talk; lunch today with young Richard Mowrer, the very image of his father, Paul Scott Mowrer, and with his bride, who is most attractive. And last night before my broadcast a tramp through Warsaw with Maurice Hindus.
Polskie Radio
new short-wave transmitter not yet ready, which worries me.

B
ERLIN
,
August
23

Hans Kaltenborn, our star foreign-news commentator, was turned back by the secret police when he arrived at Tempelhof from London this afternoon. We have been nicely double-crossed by the Nazis. On orders from New York, I had inquired in official circles about his coming and had been told that there was no objection to his visiting here though he could not broadcast from Germany nor see any officials. I became suspicious when the passport officials continued to hold him after all the other passengers had been cleared. His wife, several German relatives of hers, and I waited patiently
beyond the brass railing which separated us from him. It was sultry and hot, and as it became evident what was up, we all perspired profusely. The German relatives, who were exposing themselves to possible arrest by merely being there, remained bravely at the rail. I finally complained to a Gestapo man about keeping us standing so long, and after much heated argument he allowed Hans to accompany us all to the terrace of the airport café, where we ordered beer. Hans had arrived at three forty-five p.m. At quarter to six a Gestapo officer came up and announced that Hans would be taking the six o’clock plane back to London.

“Why, he’s just come from there,” I spoke up.

“And he’s returning there now,” the officer said.

“May I ask why?” Hans said, boiling inside but cool outside, though beads of sweat bubbled out on his forehead.

The officer had a ready answer. Looking in his notebook, he said with tremendous seriousness: “Herr Kaltenborn, on such and such a date in Oklahoma City you made a speech insulting the Führer.”

“Let me see the text of that, please,” Hans spoke up. But you do not argue with the Gestapo. There was no answer. Hans rushed out to get in the plane, but there was no room after all, and he came back and joined our table. I asked the Gestapo if he couldn’t take the night train to Poland. By now I was afraid he might have to spend the night in jail. I said I would get the American Embassy to guarantee that he wouldn’t jump off the train in Germany. Finally, reluctantly, they consented. I called Consul Geist. He would play the game. We adjourned again to our beers. Then the Gestapo man came running up out of breath. There was
doch
a place on the plane for the culprit. They had thrown someone off. And Hans was hustled out. As he got
beyond the railing he remembered his pockets stuffed with American tobacco for me. He started to toss some of it to me, but a Gestapo agent stopped him.
Verboten
. Then he disappeared.

L
ATER
(
Four hours after midnight
).—Great excitement at the Taverne tonight. About two a.m. we get the terms of the Russian-German pact. It goes much further than anyone dreamed. It’s a virtual alliance and Stalin, the supposed arch-enemy of Nazism and aggression, by its terms invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland. The friends of the Bolos are consternated. Several German editors—Halfeld, Kriegk, Silex—who only day before yesterday were writing hysterically about the Bolo peril, now come in, order champagne, and reveal themselves as old friends of the Soviets! That Stalin would play such crude power politics and also play into the hands of the Nazis overwhelms the rest of us. The correspondents, especially the British, take to champagne or cognac to drown their feelings. Stalin’s step should kill world Communism. Will a French Communist, say, who has been taught for six years to hate Nazism above all else, swallow Moscow’s embracing of Hitler? Maybe, though, Stalin is smart. His aim: to bring on a war between Germany and the West which will result in chaos, after which the Bolsheviks step in and Communism comes to these countries or what is left of them. Maybe, too, he’s not smart. Hitler has broken every international agreement he ever made. When he has used Russia, as he once used Poland, with whom in 1934 he made a similar agreement, then good-bye Russia. Joe [Barnes], who is shaken by the news though he is the only one here who really knows Russia, and I argue the points. We sit down with the German editors. They are gloating,
boasting, sputtering that Britain won’t dare to fight now, denying everything they have been told to say these last six years by their Nazi lords. We throw it into their faces, Joe and I. The argument gets nasty. Joe is nervous, depressed. So am I. Pretty soon we get nauseated. Something will happen if we don’t get out…. Mrs. Kaltenborn comes in. I had made a date with her here for three a.m. I apologize. I have to go. Joe has to go. Sorry. We wander through the Tiergarten until we cool off and the night starts to fade.

B
ERLIN
,
August
24,
seven p.m
.

It looks like war tonight. Across the street from my room they’re installing an anti-aircraft gun on the roof of I. G. Farben. I suppose it’s the same one I saw there last September. German bombers have been flying over the city all day. It may well be that Hitler will go into Poland tonight. Many think so. But I think that depends upon Britain and France. If they emphasize they will honour their word with Poland, Hitler may wait. And get what he wants without war. Went over to INS to get the text of Chamberlain’s statement to the house. It sounds firm. Ed telephoned from London an hour ago and said he was in Commons and it was firm. Hitler certainly seems to be standing firm. Yesterday the British Ambassador, Henderson, flew down to Berchtesgaden to see him. He told him the British would honour their pledge to help Poland if Germany attacked, regardless of the Russo-German treaty. Hitler replied no British guarantee could make Germany “forsake her
Lebensrecht
.”

With Russia in his bag, Hitler is not compromising, apparently. Russia in his bag! What a
turn
events have taken in the last forty-eight hours. Bolshevik Russia
and Nazi Germany, the arch-enemies of this earth, suddenly turning the other cheek and becoming friends and concluding what, to one’s consternation, looks like an alliance.

It all broke Monday night (August 21) at eleven p.m. The German radio suddenly stopped in the middle of a musical program and a voice announced that Germany and Russia had decided to conclude a non-aggression pact. I missed it. I was at the
Herald Tribune
office chewing the rag with Joe [Barnes] until five minutes to eleven. No inkling of it then, except—I remembered later—a vague hint from the Wilhelmstrasse that there might be a story later that evening. Fatty, a German newspaperman, I think, mentioned it. Actually I got the news from London when Ed Murrow called at midnight. The RRG would not let me broadcast that night. Apparently they were waiting for “editorial” orders. The day before, on Sunday, there had been a hint of something with the announcement of a new trade agreement between Russia and Germany. The friendly words about this in the local press, which until then had been violent in its denunciation of Russia and Bolshevism
, should have warned me, but didn’t. The announcement was as much of a bomb-shell for most of the big Nazis as for the rest of the world. Not more than a dozen, persons were in on Hitler’s secret.

The German press the next day (Tuesday, August 22) was wonderful to behold. Dr. Goebbels’s
Angriff
, the most ferocious Red-baiter of them all, wrote: “The world stands before a towering fact: two peoples have placed themselves on the basis of a common foreign policy which during a long and traditional friendship produced a foundation for a common understanding”! (Exclamation point mine, not
Angriff’s
.) And Dr. Karl Silex, once an honest foreign correspondent and
now cringing editor of the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, in a front-page editorial called the new agreement a “natural partnership.” For years—since he became a Nazi slave—he has been violently attacking Bolshevism and Soviet Russia.

There’s no doubt that Hitler’s amazing move is popular
among
the masses. On Tuesday I made a point of riding around on the subway, elevated, street-cars, and buses. Everyone was reading the story in his newspaper. From their faces, from their talk, you could see they liked the news. Why? Because it means to them that the dreaded nightmare of encirclement—war on two fronts—apparently has been destroyed. Yesterday it was there. Today it is gone. There will be no long front against Russia to hold this time.

The last of the English correspondents left tonight for the nearest frontier—the Danish—on orders from their Embassy. Selkirk Panton of the
Daily Express
rushed in to ask me if I would take over his car until the scare was over and he came back.
⁵
He thought he would be back in ten days, he said. Another Munich, you know. The Adlon bar very lonely tonight with the English gone. Much talk that Hitler has ordered the Germans to march into Poland at dawn. I doubt it. The German people haven’t yet been sufficiently worked up for war. No “cause” yet. No slogan. The papers haven’t yet written a word that war is imminent. The people in the streets are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war. I cannot see war being popular among the masses as in 1914.

B
ERLIN
,
August
25

Someone in New York insisting we go ahead with a program planned several weeks ago to be called “Europe Dances”—pick-ups from night-clubs in London, Paris, Berlin. I’m arranging one from St. Pauli’s, a so-called “
Hamburger Lokal
,” but wired Murrow today suggesting we call it off. War’s too imminent for that sort of thing. Much uneasiness tonight because all afternoon and evening telephones and telegraph communications with the outside world were cut. When I arrived at the
Rundfunk
to do my broadcast tonight at one a.m., I had little hope of getting through, but the officials said nothing and I went ahead. Apparently it was the first word America had had from Berlin all day, and judging from what we heard on the feedback, there was some relief in New York when I reported all calm here and no war yet. Radio has a role to play, I think. Henderson saw Hitler twice today, and early this morning is flying to London. As long as they find something to negotiate about, there will be no war.