Berlin Diary (69 page)

B
ERLIN
,
June
6

The church bells rang, and all the flags were out today, by order of Hitler, to celebrate the victory in Flanders. There is no real elation over the victory discernible in the people here. No emotion of any kind. In grandiose proclamations to the army and the people, Hitler announced that today a new offensive was being launched in the west. So far no details are available here, but the BBC says the offensive is on a two-hundred-kilometre front from Abbeville to Soissons, with the biggest German pressure along the Somme-Aisne Canal.

I’ve heard here that the Allies have been bombing Munich and Frankfurt the last few nights. But Berlin is never told of these enemy air-raids. No one here feels the war as yet.

B
ERLIN
,
June
7

The Germans are keeping very mum about their new offensive on the Somme. High Command simply states that the so-called Weygand line has been broken through on the entire front. Strange, though, that no details are given; no place names at all. No special war communiqués tonight. Can it be that the drive isn’t going so well?

Our Ambassador to Belgium, Cudahy, arrived here today. He confirms what I was told a few days ago, that the Belgians have food for not more than fifty days.

I took the day off from the war yesterday. I walked for hours in the Grunewald, swam in the Havel, and found a neat little restaurant in the woods which produced a surprisingly good beefsteak. After lunch I walked, sun-bathed, swam some more.

B
ERLIN
,
June
8

Still no news here of the offensive, although it’s at the end of its fourth day. The High Command merely states that it is continuing successfully, but gives no details, no place names. One almost dares to think…

B
ERLIN
,
June
9

The High Command broke its reserve about the great offensive with a bang this afternoon. It says the French south of the Somme and in the Oise district
have been beaten all along the line. It talks about the German troops driving towards the lower Seine, which is a hell of a way forward from the Somme, where they started four days ago. BBC at six tonight confirmed this. Weygand issues another order of the day to his men to hold. But there is something desperate in it.

The Germans also announce: “This morning on a further part of the front in France a new offensive has started.” Weygand reveals it’s on a front from Reims to the Argonne. The Germans are now hurling themselves forward on a two-hundred-mile front from the sea to the Argonne. No drive in World War I was on this scale!

The High Command also states that Germany’s only two battleships, the
Gneisenau
and the
Scharnhorst
have put to sea and have gone to the relief of the German forces driven out of Narvik a couple of weeks ago Hand it to the Germans for their daring, their sense of surprise. How could the British fleet allow two battleships to get up to Narvik? High Command says the two have already sunk the British aircraft-carrier
Glorious
, the 21,000-ton transport
Orama
, and an oil tanker of 9,100 tons. Another instance of the Germans taking a chance—taking the initiative. The Allies seem to take neither.

B
ERLIN
,
June
10

Italy is in the war.

She has stabbed France in the back at the moment when the Germans are at the gates of Paris, and France appears to be down.

At six o’clock this evening, just as people here were tuning in on their radios to hear the latest news of the German army’s onslaught on Paris, the announcer said:
“In one hour the Duce will address the Italian people and the world. All German stations will broadcast his speech.”

An hour later they did—with a German radio commentator conveniently at hand (he’d been sent to Rome last Saturday, June 8, for the job) at the Piazza Venezia to describe the tumult.

We got wind of it early in the afternoon when we were convoked for a special press conference at the Foreign Office at seven p.m., to hear Ribbentrop make a declaration. At four thirty p.m., at the Propaganda Ministry, we were shown the English propaganda film
The Lion Has Wings
. Even making allowances for the fact that it was turned out last fall, I thought it very bad. Supercilious. Silly. At the six p.m. press conference we were given another dose of the weekly German news-reel. Again the ruined towns, the dead humans, the putrefying horses’ carcasses. One shot showed the charred remains of a British pilot amid the wreckage of his burnt plane. Most Germans there seemed to get a sadistic pleasure from these pictures of death and destruction. A few I know, however, didn’t. A few react still like human beings.

I went over to the Foreign Office about seven and soon found myself crowding into the Hall of whatever-it-is. Designed to hold about fifty people, five hundred had already jammed their way in. It was a hot day, the windows were sealed tight, and hot Klieg lights were burning so that Ribbentrop could be properly photographed. In one corner of the room the most screeching radio I ever heard was screaming out Mussolini’s speech at the Piazza Venezia in Rome. I caught just enough of it to learn that he was announcing Italy’s decision to enter the war on the side of Germany. The combination of this tin-pan racket and the foul, hot air,
and the photographers scrapping and most of the newspapermen standing there sweating, and of some other things, was enough for me. S. and I pushed our way out before Ribbentrop arrived. I went back to Joe’s room, tuned in on the radio, and got from Rome a rather comical English translation of the Duce’s words.

About the same time there was a comedy act in front of the Italian Embassy, which Ralph described to me. Two or three thousand Italian Fascists, residents of Berlin, shouted themselves hoarse in the little street that runs off the Tiergarten past the Italian Embassy. The Germans had rigged up loud-speakers, so that the mob could hear the Duce’s words. Later Ribbentrop and Alfieri, the new Italian Ambassador, appeared on the balcony, grinned, and made brief inane speeches, Ralph reported.

In the meantime the German army closes in on Paris. It looks dark for the Allies tonight. Roosevelt is broadcasting at one fifteen a.m. tonight.

B
ERLIN
,
June
11

Roosevelt came through very clearly on the radio last night. He promised immediate material help for the Allies. Scorched Mussolini for his treachery. Not a word about the speech in press or radio here.

The Wilhelmstrasse keeps making the point that American aid will come too late. A man just back from seeing Hitler tells me the Führer is sure that France will be finished by June 15—that is, in four days—and Great Britain by August 15 at the latest! He says Hitler is acting as if he had the world at his feet, but that some of the generals, although highly pleased with the military successes, are a little apprehensive of the future under such a wild and fanatical man.

Word here is that the French government has left Paris. The Germans tonight are roughly about as near Paris as they were on September 1, 1914. This led the High Command to point out to us today that the German position is much better than it was then. First, because their right wing is stronger, and has maintained its advance
west
of Paris, whereas in 1914 it wheeled
east
of Paris. Second, there is no real British army to help the French. Third, there is no eastern front, so that, not as in 1914, the entire German army can now be hurled against Paris. (In 1914, two army corps were hurriedly withdrawn from France
to stop the Russians in the east. How Paris and London are now paying for their short-sighted anti-Russian policy! Before Munich, even
after
Munich, even a year ago this June, they could have lined up the Russians against Germany.)

After my twelve forty-six broadcast tonight we were sitting in D.’s room at the
Rundfunk
when we picked up a broadcast from New York saying that the liner
Washington
, a day out from Lisbon en route for Gal-way, Ireland, and packed with American refugees, mostly women and children, had been halted by an unknown submarine just at dawn and given
ten
minutes to lower boats before being sent to the bottom. Tess and child had booked on that voyage of the
Washington
, but had been unable to get to Bordeaux in time after the liner had cancelled its scheduled stop at Genoa. Finally at zero hour, after the ten minutes had elapsed, the U-boat commander signalled: “Sorry. Mistake. Proceed.” A German naval officer, himself a U-boat commander in the last war, happened to be listening with me. He became quite angry. “A British submarine! No doubt of it!” he exclaimed. “Those British will stop at nothing!” The captain added angrily,
when I suggested that maybe it might have been a German U-boat: “Impossible. Why, a German commander who did such a thing would be court-martialled and shot.”