Berlin Diary (44 page)

Theatres here doing a land-office business, playing mostly the classics, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare. Shaw is the most popular living playwright here now. Only successful German modern play on is Gerhart Hauptmann’s new one,
The Daughter of the Cathedral
. Poor old Hauptmann, once an ardent Socialist and a great playwright, has now become a Nazi and a very senile man.

In the movie world the big hit at the moment is Clark Gable in
Adventure in China
, as it’s called here. It’s packing them in for the fourth week at the Marmorhaus. A German film is lucky if it holds out a week.

The power of radio! My remarks about the scarcity of shaving soap and the probability of my having to
grow a beard have brought a great response from home. I gave up my beard after ten days. It was pink and straggly and everyone laughed.

B
ERLIN
,
October
30

Bad news for the people today. Now that it has become cold and rainy, with snow due soon, the government has decreed that only five per cent of the population is entitled to buy new rubbers or overshoes this winter. Available stocks will be rationed first to postmen, newsboys, and street-sweepers.

B
ERLIN
,
October
31

Consider the words of Comrade Molotov, spoken before the Supreme Soviet Council in Moscow today, as reported here: “We stand for the scrupulous and punctilious observance of pacts… and we declare that all nonsense about Sovietizing the Baltic countries is only to the interest of our common enemy and of all anti-Soviet provocateurs.”

The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.

B
ERLIN
,
November
2

General Hugh Johnson, one of the few Americans—Lindbergh is another—often quoted in the Nazi press, makes the front pages here today. Johnson’s
views on the American ship
City of Flint
, which was captured by the Nazis the other day are headlined in the
12-Uhr Blatt
:
“UNCALLED-FOR INDIGNATION OVER THE ‘CITY OF FLINT’—GENERAL JOHNSON AGAINST OBVIOUS AGITATION.”

The anti-Comintern is dead. I learn the Nazi anti-Comintern museum, which used to show us the horrors of Bolshevism here, has quietly closed down. This week the Nazi editor of the
Contra-Komintern
wrote his subscribers apologizing for the non-appearance of the magazine in September and explaining that it would be coming out under a new name. He intimated that the editors had ascertained that Germany’s real enemies after all were not Bolsheviks, but Jews. “Behind all the enemies of Germany’s ascendancy,” he writes, “stand those who demand our encirclement—the oldest enemies of the German people and of all healthy, rising nations—the Jews.”

B
ERLIN
,
November
4

The radio people here in great secrecy had kindly offered to take me up to a Baltic port and let me broadcast the arrival of the
City of Flint
, which was scheduled for tomorrow. But the Norwegians seized it day before yesterday and saved me the assignment. The Wilhelmstrasse furious and threatening the Norwegians with dire consequences if they don’t turn the American ship over to Germany.

B
ERLIN
,
November
5

CBS wants me to broadcast a picture of Hitler at work during war-time. I’ve been inquiring around among my spies. They say: He rises early, eats
his first breakfast at seven a.m. This consists usually of either a glass of milk or fruit-juice and two or three rolls, on which he spreads marmalade liberally. Like most Germans, he eats a second breakfast, this one at nine a.m. It’s like the first except that he also eats a little fruit. He begins his working day by wading into state papers (a job he detests, since he hates detail work) and discussing the day’s program with his adjutants, chiefly S.A. Leader Wilhelm Brückner, and especially with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was once his private secretary and is one of the few men he trusts with his innermost thoughts. During the forenoon he usually receives the chiefs of the three armed services, listens to their reports and dictates decisions. With Göring he talks about not only air-force matters but general economic problems, or rather results, since he’s not interested in details or even theories on this subject.

Hitler eats a simple lunch, usually a vegetable stew or a vegetable omelet. He is of course a vegetarian, teetotaller, and non-smoker. He usually invites a small circle to lunch, three or four adjutants, Hess, Dr. Diettrich, his press chief, and sometimes Göring. A one-percent beer, brewed specially for him, is served at this meal, or sometimes a drink made out of kraut called “Herve,” flavoured with a little Mosel wine.

After lunch he returns to his study and work. More state papers, more conferences, often with his Foreign Minister, occasionally with a returned German ambassador, invariably with some party chieftain such as Dr. Ley or Max Amann, his old top sergeant of the World War and now head of the lucrative Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag, which gets out the
Völkische Beobachter
and in which Hitler is a stockholder. Late in the afternoon Hitler takes a stroll in the gardens back of the Chancellery, continuing his talk during the walk with
whoever had an appointment at the time. Hitler is a fiend for films, and on evenings when no important conferences are on or he is not overrunning a country, he spends a couple of hours seeing the latest movies in his private cinema room at the Chancellery. News-reels are a great favourite with him, and in the last weeks he has seen all those taken in the Polish war, including hundreds of thousands of feet which were filmed for the army archives and will never be seen by the public. He likes American films and many never publicly exhibited in Germany are shown him. A few years ago he insisted on having
It Happened One Night
run several times. Though he is supposed to have a passion for Wagnerian opera, he almost never attends the Opera here in Berlin. He likes the Metropol, which puts on tolerable musical comedies with emphasis on pretty dancing girls. Recently he had one of the girls who struck his fancy to tea. But only to tea. In the evening, too, he likes to have in Dr. Todt, an imaginative engineer who built the great Autobahn network of two-lane motor roads and later the fortifications of the Westwall. Hitler, rushing to compensate what he thinks is an artistic side that was frustrated by non-recognition in his youthful days in Vienna, has a passion for architects’ models and will spend hours fingering them with Dr. Todt. Lately, they say, he has even taken to designing new uniforms. Hitler stays up late, and sleeps badly, which I fear is the world’s misfortune.

B
ERLIN
,
November
7

The Queen of the Netherlands and the King of the Belgians have offered to mediate peace. Small hope. The offer coolly received here. The Dutch and Belgians still decline to have staff talks together. But
their historic neutrality, their refusal to ally themselves with one side or the other, may land them in the soup unless they junk it. Much talk here about the Germans pushing through Holland. This would not only turn the Maginot Line, but give the Germans air bases a hundred miles from the English coast.

L
ATER.—
Four or five of us American correspondents had a talk with Göring tonight at—of all places—the Soviet Embassy, to which we had repaired for the annual reception on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Amid the glittering decorations and furnishings left over from Czarist Russia, but with the portrait of Lenin smiling down upon us, Göring stood against the buffet table sipping a beer and smoking a long stogey. He was in an expansive mood, and when a frightened adjutant reminded him he was speaking to the “American press,” he said he didn’t mind. We thought—naïvely, I suppose—that he might be resentful of the repeal a few days ago of our neutrality bill and of the boast at home that we would soon be selling thousands of planes to the Allies to help beat Nazi Germany. He wasn’t. Instead, he kidded us about our capacity to build planes.