Berlin Diary (43 page)

“Not the kind of peace that Hitler offers,” he said. “Or the kind of peace we’ve been having the last five years.”

In the early evening, coming down the Rhine, the same unreal front. Soldiers on both sides looking but not shooting. Frankfurt station in the black-out was a bit of a nightmare. Hundreds of people, many of them soldiers, milling around on the almost pitch-dark
platform trying to get on the train, stumbling over baggage and into one another. I had a sleeping-car reservation but could not find the car in the darkness and went back to my coach, sitting through the night until Berlin. The corridor of the blacked-out train packed with people who stood up all night in the darkness.

At Anhalter station I bought the morning papers. Big news.
“GERMAN SUB SINKS BRITISH BATTLESHIP ‘ROYAL OAK’!”
British Admiralty admits it. That’s a blow. Wonder how it was done. And where?

L
ATER.—
Russell Hill, a very intelligent youth of twenty-one who divides his time between broadcasting for us and being assistant correspondent of the
Herald Tribune
, tells me that Wednesday (October 11) a false report of an armistice caused scenes of great rejoicing all over Berlin. Early in the morning, he says, a broadcast on the Berlin wave-length announced that the British government had fallen and that there would be an immediate armistice. The fat old women in the vegetable markets, Russell reports, tossed their cabbages into the air, wrecked their own stands in sheer joy, and made for the nearest pub to toast the peace with
Schnaps
. The awakening that afternoon when the Berlin radio denied the report was something terrific, it seems.

My room waiter tells me there was much loud anti-aircraft fire heard in Berlin last night, the first since the war began. Propaganda Ministry explains tonight a German plane got lost over the city and was shot down.

B
ERLIN
,
October
18

The place where the German U-boat sank the British battleship
Royal Oak
was none other than the middle of Scapa Flow, Britain’s greatest naval base! It sounds incredible. A World War submarine commander told me tonight that the Germans tried twice to get a U-boat into Scapa Flow during the last war, but both attempts failed and the submarines were lost.

Captain Prien, commander of the submarine, came tripping into our afternoon press conference at the Propaganda Ministry this afternoon, followed by his crew—boys of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Prien is thirty, clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi, and obviously capable. Introduced by Hitler’s press chief, Dr. Diettrich, who kept cursing the English and calling Churchill a liar, Prien told us little of how he did it. He said he had no trouble getting past the boom protecting the bay. I got the impression, though he said nothing to justify it, that he must have followed a British craft, perhaps a mine-sweeper, into the base. British negligence must have been something terrific.

B
ERLIN
,
October
19

Germans shut both NBC and us off the air this noon. I saw Hill’s script beforehand and approved it. The Nazi censor maintained it would create a bad impression abroad. In the afternoon I called on Dr. Boehmer and told him we would stop broadcasting altogether if today’s action meant we could only talk about matters which created a nice impression. He assured me it was all a mistake. Tonight for my broadcast the censor let me say what I wanted. The High Command tonight issues a detailed report of what has
been happening on that mysterious western front. Nothing much at all has happened, it says, and I’m inclined to believe it, though Paris has swamped America for weeks with wild tales of a great French offensive against the Westwall. High Command says German losses up to October 17 in the west have been 196 killed, 114 missing, 356 wounded. Which tends to prove how local the action there has been. I’m almost convinced that the German army tells the truth in regard to its actions. The navy exaggerates, the air force simply lies.

B
ERLIN
,
October
21

The Wilhelmstrasse furious at the Turks for signing a mutual-assistance pact with the British day before yesterday. Papen jerked back here hurriedly and was called before the master, my spies tell me, for a dressing-down. It’s the first diplomatic blow the Germans have taken in a long time. They don’t like blows.

B
ERLIN
,
October
22

Eintopf
—one-pot—day—this Sunday. Which means all you can get for lunch is a cheap stew. But you pay the price of a big meal for it, the difference going to the Winter Relief, or so they say. Actually it goes into the war chest. Suddenly and without warning at eight fifteen tonight Goebbels went on the air and blasted away at Churchill, accusing him of having sunk the
Athenia
. He called Churchill a liar a dozen times and kept shouting: “Your impudent lies, Herr Churchill! Your infernal lies!” From Goebbels!

B
ERLIN
,
October
24

The German people who have been hoping for peace until the bitter end were finally told tonight by Ribbentrop in a speech at Danzig that the war will now have to be fought to a finish. I suppose every government that has ever gone to war has tried to convince its people of three things: (1) that right is on its side; (2) that it is fighting purely in defence of the nation; (3) that it is sure to win. The Nazis are certainly trying to pound these three points into the skins of the people. Modern propaganda technique, especially the radio, certainly helps them.

Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady’s handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.

B
ERLIN
,
October
28

I hear in business circles that severe rationing of clothing will begin next month. The truth is that, having no cotton and almost no wool, the German people must get along with what clothing they have until the end of the war.

B
ERLIN
,
October
29

I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1)
Gone with the Wind
, translated as
Vom Winde Verweht
—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s
Citadel
; (3)
Beyond Sing the Woods
, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman.

Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1)
The
Coloured Front
, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2)
Look Up the Subject of England
, a propaganda book about England; (3)
Der totale Krieg
, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4)
Fifty Years of Germany
, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5)
So This is Poland
, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928.

Three anti-Soviet books, I’m told, are still selling well despite official orders to soft-pedal any anti-Soviet or anti-Bolshevik talk since the August pact with Moscow. Most popular of these books is
Socialism Betrayed
, by a former German Communist named Albrecht. Detective stories still hold their own in war-time Germany, and hastily written volumes about submarine and aerial warfare are also doing well. A German told me today that the only American magazine he could find at his news-stand this afternoon was one called
True Love Stories
, or something like that, October issue.