Berlin Diary (49 page)

Surprising with what ingenuity these tough little sailors had fixed up their dark hole—for that it was—for Christmas. In one corner a large Christmas tree shone with electric candles, and along one side of the room the sailors had rigged up a number of fantastic Christmas exhibits. One was a miniature ice-skating rink in the midst of a snowy mountain resort on which couples did fancy figure-skating. A magnetic contraption set the fancy skaters in motion. Another showed the coastline of England and another electrical contraption set a very realistic naval battle in action. After the broadcast we sat around a long table, officers and men intermingled in a manner that shocked my
Oberleutnant
, singing and talking. The commandant served rum and tea, and then case after case of Munich beer was brought out. The
Oberleutnant
and I had a
bit of trouble downing the beer from the bottle, there being no glasses. Towards midnight everyone became a bit sentimental.

“The English, why do they fight us?” the men kept putting it to me, but it was obviously not the time nor place for me to speak out my own sentiments. Impressive, though, the splendid morale of these submarine crews, and more impressive still the absolute lack of Prussian caste discipline. Around our table the officers and men seemed to be on an equal footing and to like it.

We walked back to the hotel through the moonlight, and after a final round of drinks to bed at three.

B
ERLIN
,
December
28

I must record Dr. Ley’s Christmas proclamation. “The Führer is always right. Obey the Führer. The mother is the highest expression of womanhood. The soldier is the highest expression of manhood. God is not punishing us by this war, he is giving us the opportunity to prove whether we are worthy of our freedom.”

Himmler has suddenly decided to revoke the permission for cafés and bars to stay open all night on New Year’s Eve and warns the public against excessive drinking on that night. Is he afraid the people of this land may go out on a binge, get drunk (which Germans rarely do, normally), and express their feelings about this war? At any rate, everyone must shut up shop at one a.m. on New Year’s.

B
ERLIN
,
December
31

A flood of New Year’s proclamations from all and sundry—Hitler, Göring, Himmler, etc. Hitler holds out hope of victory to the people in 1940. Say
she: “United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history…. May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory.” He goes to extreme lengths to justify
his
war, and if the German people were not so poisoned by propaganda and suppression of the slightest factual news from abroad, they would laugh. He says the “Jewish reactionary warmongers in the capitalistic democracies” started the war! Words have no more meaning for the man nor, I fear, for his people. He says: “The German people did not want this war.” (True.) “I tried up to the last minute to keep peace with England.” (False.) “But the Jewish and reactionary warmongers waited for this minute to carry out their plans to destroy Germany.” (False.)

Curious how the Germans, who should know better by this time, try to
scare
the English by blustering threats. Göring has a piece in tomorrow’s
V.B.
: “Until now German airplanes have been content to keep a sharp eye on England’s war measures. But it needs only the word of the Führer to carry over there, instead of the present light load of cameras, the destructive load of bombs. No country in the world is so open to air attack as the British Isles…. When the German air force really gets started, it will make an attack such as world history has never seen.”

Cold, and a coal shortage. The office boy said tonight we were out of coal at the office and that there was no more coal to be had.

B
ERLIN
,
January
1, 1940

What will this year bring? The decision, as Hitler boasted yesterday? I haven’t met a German yet
who isn’t absolutely certain. Certain it is that this phony kind of war cannot continue long. Hitler has got to go forward to new victories or his kind of system cracks.

More drunkenness on the Kurfürstendamm last night than I’ve ever seen in Berlin. Himmler had thousands of police scattered over town to see that no one used his car and that the cafés shut up promptly at one a.m. Saw the old year out at Sigrid Schultz’s, then an hour or so with the Germans at the
Rundfunk
, then with Russell Hill over to Virginia’s. About two a.m. in the Kurfürstendamm we jumped into a taxi. A German, his wife and daughter, aged about twelve, sprang in through the other door and we agreed to share it, there being practically no taxis out. A soldier and his girl then climbed in next to the driver. We had not gone far when a policeman stopped us and ordered us all out, on the ground that we could not ride in a taxi unless we were on state business. I admitted I had no state business at two a.m. on New Year’s Eve, but pointed out that we had a child with us and that she was ill. He finally allowed us to pile in again. We rode a few blocks and then the soldier began to throw a fit—whether from drink or shell-shock I couldn’t tell. At any rate, he clamoured for the driver to stop and let him out, and his girl screamed first at him and then at the driver to do something. The driver, whether from drink or nature I don’t know, was inclined to do nothing. We kept on going. Then the alarming psychological atmosphere of the front seat began to spread to the rear one, where we five were jammed in. The little girl suddenly started to scream, whether from claustrophobia or fear of the screaming soldier, or both, Russell and I were not sure. She too cried to get out. Her mother joined her. Then her father. Finally the driver, apparently awakened
by the bedlam, decided to stop. Out on the curb the father and the soldier began to engage in a fierce argument as to who had spoiled whose New Year’s Eve. Russell and I and the taxi-driver stole away, leaving them to fight it out. The frayed nerves of the war, we decided.

B
ERLIN
,
January
3

I learned today what the Russians have promised to deliver to Germany this year:

1,000,000 tons of fodder and grain;

500,000 tons of oil seeds;

500,000 tons of soya beans;

900,000 tons of petroleum;

150,000 tons of cotton (this is more cotton than Russia had to export to the whole world last year);

Three million gold marks’ worth of leather and hides.

This looks good on paper, but I would bet a lot the Russians deliver no more than a fraction of what they have promised.

An official statement announces that Göring is to become absolute dictator of Germany’s war economy—a job he has had in effect for a long time. The press is beginning to harp about “Britain’s aggressive designs in Scandinavia.” Hitler, we hear, has told the army, navy, and air force to rush plans for heading off the Allies in Scandinavia should they go in there to help Finland against Russia. The army and navy are very pro-Finnish, but realize they must protect their trade routes to the Swedish iron-ore fields. If Germany loses these, she is sunk.

B
ERLIN
,
January
8

Did a mike interview with General Ernst Udet tonight, but Göring, his boss, censored our script so badly that it wasn’t very interesting. I spent most of the day coaching the general on his English, which is none too good. Udet, a likable fellow whom I used to see occasionally at the Dodds’, is something of a phenomenon. A professional pilot, who only a few years ago was so broke he toured America as a stunt flyer, performing often in a full-dress suit and a top hat, he is now responsible for the designing and production of Germany’s war planes. Though he never had any business experience, he has proved a genius at his job. Next to Göring and General Milch, he is given credit in inner circles here for building up the German air force to what it is today. I could not help thinking tonight that a man like Udet would never be entrusted with such a job in America. He would be considered “lacking in business experience.” Also, businessmen, if they knew of his somewhat Bohemian life, would hesitate to trust him with responsibility. And yet in this crazy Nazi system he has done a phenomenal job. Amusing: last night Udet put on a little party in his home, with three generals, napkins slung over their shoulders, presiding over his very considerable bar. There were pretty girls and a great deal of cutting up. Yet these are the men who have made the Luftwaffe the most terrible instrument of its kind in the world.

B
ERLIN
,
January
9

Harry C., probably the best-informed man we have in the Moscow Embassy, passed through today with his wife, who is going to have her baby in America.

Harry, no Bolo-baiter, had some weird tales. He says the one and only thought of a Russian nowadays is to toe the Stalin line so that he can save his job or at least his life. The Russians, he says, have hopelessly bungled the attack on Finland. A hundred thousand casualties already, the hospitals in Leningrad and the north jammed with wounded. But they are the lucky ones because thousands of lightly wounded died of cold and exposure. Harry says everyone in Moscow, from Stalin down, thought the Red army would be in Helsinki a week after the attack started. They were so sure that they timed an attack on Bessarabia for December 6, and only called it off at the last minute.