Berlin Diary (79 page)

Himmler announced today that a Polish farm labourer had been hanged for sleeping with a German woman. No race pollution is to be permitted.

Another American correspondent kicked out today. He is Captain Corpening of the Chicago
Tribune
, said to be a confidential man of Colonel McCormick’s. He arrived yesterday from Switzerland and broke a story about Germany’s peace terms to Britain which he thinks have been sent to London through Sweden. The Propaganda Ministry attempted to pin the story on the
Tribune
’s regular correspondent, Sigrid Schultz, whom they
would like to toss out because of her independence and knowledge of things behind the scenes, but finally decided to expel only the captain.

B
ERLIN
,
July
31

The news-reels today show German army engineers blowing up the French armistice monuments at Compiègne. They dynamited all but the one of Marshal Foch. Last month in Paris a German official invited me to Compiègne to see the dynamiting, but when I expressed amazement that the Germans would do such a barbaric thing he withdrew the invitation.

I remarked in my broadcast tonight that the German people at the moment were certainly benefiting by the amount of vegetables, eggs, and bacon which the Dutch and Danes were sending in. The censors said I could not mention the subject.

B
ERLIN
,
August
1

Goebbels made the German radio today falsify a statement by Secretary of War Stimson. It quoted Stimson as saying: “Britain will be overpowered in a short time and the British fleet will pass under enemy control.” This is part of a new propaganda campaign to convince the German people that even the United States has given up hope of saving Britain.

Everyone impatient to know when the invasion of Britain will begin. I have taken two new bets offered by Nazis in the Wilhelmstrasse. First, that the Swastika will be flying over Trafalgar Square by August 15. Second, by September 7. The Nazis say General Milch, right-hand man of Göring, has tipped the latter date as a dead certainty.

B
ERLIN
,
August
3

Sir Lancelot Oliphant, British Ambassador to Belgium, who is being held a captive by the Nazis at a Gestapo training school between here and Potsdam, is sore. The other night they had an air-raid out there and he said he’d be damned if he’d take refuge in the cellar when his own people came over to bomb. The S.S. guards thereupon removed him forcibly to the cellar. Sir Lancelot raised such a howl that the matter went to Hitler. The Führer’s decision is that he may damned well stay where he pleases when his own folks come over, but that he must sign a paper absolving the Germans of any responsibility.

Great excitement at our noon press conference at the Foreign Office yesterday. The official spokesman was droning away as usual when suddenly all the anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of the Chancellery and Air Ministry down the street started blazing away. He stopped abruptly. Just as all present were getting ready to run for shelter the firing stopped. Seems a German student flyer entered the forbidden air zone over Berlin
without giving the proper signal.

B
ERLIN
,
August
4

I flew to Hamburg yesterday in a weird old transport plane which the German army had been using previously to transport captive horses from Paris to Berlin. There were no seats, so we sat on the floor, which vibrated considerably. The German authorities had phoned that they were inviting me and two others to fly to Hamburg, where we could see anything we wanted. The British, they said, had just announced that Hamburg had been “pulverized” by the RAF bombings.

When I got to the airport there were twenty others
who had been invited, and when we arrived at Hamburg I soon saw that the Germans had no intention of showing me “anything” I wanted to see. For two hours before leaving I had studied the map of Hamburg and made a list of certain military objectives such as oil-storage tanks, airplane factories, shipbuilding yards, and one secret airfield. After we had been taken around on a conducted tour for a couple of hours and shown among other things how one British bomb had wiped out a wing of an institute for epileptics, I presented my list to those in charge of the party.

“Certainly,” they answered. “We will show you all.”

Whereupon they rushed us in a bus through the docks at thirty-five miles an hour. The docks certainly weren’t pulverized, but it was impossible to see whether there had not been hits here and there. Afterwards we climbed to the top of the St. Michaelis tower, three hundred feet high, from where we had a panoramic view of the port. Even with field-glasses, I must admit, I couldn’t see anything. The oil tanks were too far away for accurate observation. But the docks and one Blohm & Voss shipyard near by seemed intact. In one part of the river a couple of small boats had been sunk, their masts still visible above the water. Soon it was getting dark, and we were rushed back to the plane.

Ruminating on the vibrating floor of the plane returning to Berlin I was depressed. Even if the Germans hadn’t kept their promise to show me the things I asked for, it was plain from what little we saw that slight damage had been done. I had expected that after two months of almost nightly bombings the RAF would have accomplished much more. The port, though it undoubtedly had been hit here and there, had not really been affected by the bombings. The two all-important bridges over the Elbe in the middle of the harbour had not been
touched—the nearest bomb had landed two hundred yards away. Germany’s two great passenger ships, the
Bremen
and
Europa
, lay in the distance, tied up at Finkenwerder and apparently untouched. Several troop trains were unloading their men in the harbour, part of the force for the invasion of Britain, I suppose. The talk was that they would be crowded on to the two big liners.

The point was that a square mile or more in the centre of Rotterdam had been utterly wiped out in one half-hour of bombing by German Stukas. Why had not the British, then, in two months of bombing wiped out the Hamburg harbour works and the Blohm & Voss shipping yards, which were busy constructing naval vessels, especially submarines? The important targets were largely concentrated on two islands in the Elbe—objectives which at night you could hardly miss if you followed the river up from the sea. It was depressing, too, to think that perhaps British propaganda had exaggerated the effects of their raids in other places in Germany.

The chief complaint of the people in Hamburg with whom I talked was not the damage caused, but the fact that the British raids robbed them of their sleep.

Strolled in the Tiergarten this afternoon, it being warm and the sun out brightly. At six different spots a crowd had gathered to watch someone feed the squirrels. Even soldiers on leave stopped to watch. And these squirrel-feeders are the ones who have stormed through Norway to Narvik and through Holland, Belgium, and France to the sea.

B
ERLIN
,
August
5

Despite all the talk about the invasion of Britain being launched within the next few days, the
military people here tell me that the Luftwaffe must do a great deal more work before there is any question of an attempt at landing troops. Göring said as much in an article in the
Völkische Beobachter
yesterday signed “Arminius,” which is Latin for Hermann, his first name. He explained that the first job of an air force is to gain complete superiority in the air by destroying the other fellow’s planes, airfields, hangars, oil stores, and anti-aircraft nests. That over, he said, the second phase begins with the air force able to devote most of its energies to supporting the land army. This was the German strategy in Poland
and in the west.

My question is: Why hasn’t the Luftwaffe attacked Britain on a bigger scale, then? Is it because Hitler still hopes to force Churchill to accept peace? Or because the generals of the land army still don’t want to attempt the invasion? Or because the RAF is too strong to risk the Luftwaffe in one big blow?

French coal mines are working again. They were not destroyed by the French this time as in 1914. A photograph in one of the papers shows French miners unloading coal at a pit. Watching over them is a steel-helmeted German soldier with a bayonet. Their Moscow-dominated Communist Party and their unions told them not to work and not to fight when France
was free.
Now
they must work under German bayonets.

A big conference in the Chancellery tonight between Hitler and the High Command. My spies noticed Keitel, von Brauchitsch, Jodl, Göring, Raeder, and all the other big military shots going in. They are to decide about the invasion of Britain. The censors won’t let us mention the business.