Berlin Diary (86 page)

B
ERLIN
,
September
12

Off to Geneva for a few days so that I can talk some matters over with New York on the telephone without being overheard by the Nazis. The Germans want Hartrich, my assistant, to leave, and I’m against it.

The rumour is that the big invasion hop against England
is planned for the night of September 15, when there will be a full moon and the proper tide in the Channel. I’ll chance this trip anyway.

G
ENEVA
,
September
16

The news coming over the near-by border of France is that the Germans have attempted a landing in Britain, but that it has been repulsed with heavy German losses. Must take this report with a grain of salt.

Lunch with John Winant, head of the International Labour Office, who strives valiantly to keep his institution,
and what it stands for, from going under after the blow the war has given it. More than any other American in public life whom I know, he understands the social forces and changes that have been at work in the last decade both at home and in Europe, and that are now in new ferment as a result of the war. We talked about the job to be done after the war if Britain wins and if the mistakes of 1919 are not to be repeated. He spoke of his own ideas about reconstruction and how war economy could be replaced by a peace economy without the maladjustment, the great unemployment and deflation and depression that followed the last war. Personally I cannot look that far ahead. I cannot see beyond Hitler’s defeat. To accomplish that first is such a gigantic task and so overwhelmingly important that all else seems secondary, though undoubtedly it is a good thing that some are taking a longer view.

Winant is a likable, gaunt, awkward, Lincolnesque sort of man and was a good enough politician and executive to be re-elected Governor of New Hampshire a couple of times. I think he would make a good president to succeed Roosevelt in 1944 if the latter gets his third term.

B
ERLIN
,
September
18

Somewhere near Frankfurt on the train from Basel last night the porter shouted: “
Flieg er-Alarm!
” and there was a distant sound of gun-fire, but nothing hit us. We arrived at the Potsdamer Bahnhof right on time and I observed again that the station had not been hit despite the claims of the BBC. I noticed several lightly wounded soldiers, mostly airmen, getting off a special car which had been attached to our train. From their bandages, their wounds looked like burns.
I noticed also the longest Red Cross train I’ve ever seen. It stretched from the station for half a mile to beyond the bridge over the Landwehr Canal. Orderlies were swabbing it out, the wounded having been unloaded, probably, during the night. The Germans usually unload their hospital trains after dark so that the populace will not be unduly disturbed by one of the grimmer sides of glorious war. I wondered where so many wounded could have come from, as the armies in the west stopped fighting three months ago. As there were only a few porters I had to wait some time on the platform and picked up a conversation with a railway workman. He said most of the men taken from the hospital train were suffering from burns.

Can it be that the tales I heard in Geneva had some truth in them after all? The stories there were that either in attempted German raids with sizable landingparties on the English coast or in rehearsals with boats and barges off the French coast the British had given the Germans a bad pummelling. The reports reaching Switzerland from France were that many German barges and ships had been destroyed and a considerable number of German troops drowned; also that the British used a new type of wireless-directed torpedo (a Swiss invention, the Swiss said) which spread ignited oil on the water and burned the barges. Those cases of burns at the station this morning bear looking into.

Ribbentrop suddenly went off to Rome tonight. Many guesses as to why. Mine: to break the news to Mussolini that there will be no attempt at invading Britain this fall. This will put II Duce in a hole, as he has already started an offensive on Egypt and advanced a hundred miles over the desert to Sidi-el-Barrani. But this Italian effort, it seems, was originally planned only
to distract attention from the German invasion of Britain. It begins to look now (though I still think Hitler
may
try to attack England
) as though the war will shift to the Mediterranean this winter, with the Axis powers trying to deliver the British Empire a knockout blow by capturing Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Palestine. Napoleon did this once, and the blow did not fell the British Empire. (Also, Napoleon planned to attack Britain, gathered his ships and barges just where Hitler has gathered his, but never dared to launch the attack.) But the Axis seizure of Suez might knock out the British Empire now. The reason Franco’s handyman, Serrano Suñer, is here in Berlin
is that Hitler wants him either to take Gibraltar himself or to let the German army come in from France to do the job. Much talk here, I find, of Germany and Italy dividing up Africa between themselves, giving Spain a larger slice if Franco plays ball.

Only one air-raid here since I left, and the five million people in Berlin have caught up on their sleep and are full of breezy confidence again. They really think the British planes can’t get through. Churchill is making a mistake in not sending more planes over Berlin. A mere half-dozen bombers per night would do the job—that is, would force the people to their cellars in the middle of the night and rob them of their sleep. Morale tumbled noticeably in Berlin when the British visited us almost every evening. I heard many complaints about the drop in efficiency of the armament workers and even government employees because of the loss of sleep and increased nervousness. The British haven’t enough planes to devastate Berlin, but they have enough—five or six for Berlin each night—to ruin the morale of the country’s most important centre of
population. Can it be that the British hope to get the Germans to stop their terrible bombing of London by laying off Berlin? This would be a very silly calculation.

B
ERLIN
,
September
19

Having saved a little extra gasoline from my ration of thirty-seven gallons a month, I drove out to Siemensstadt with Joe Harsch and Ed Hartrich this afternoon to see if there had been any damage by bombing to the Siemens Electrical Works, one of the most important war industrial plants in Germany
. I was also curious to see what mood the workers were in. We drove slowly around the plant, but could find no trace of any damage. The thousands of workers filing out after the afternoon shift seemed well fed and quite contented. Some of them looked downright prosperous and lit up cigars as they came out. During the fortnight that the British came over practically every night, the strain of working a full ten-hour shift after a night without sleep had begun to affect them, several Germans had told me. But today they looked disgustingly fit.

Returning to town somewhat disheartened by our findings, we noticed a large crowd standing on a bridge which spanned a railroad line. We thought there had been an accident. But we found the people staring silently at a long Red Cross train unloading wounded. This is getting interesting. Only during the fortnight in September when the Poles were being crushed and a month this spring when the west was being annihilated have we seen so many hospital trains in Berlin. A diplomat told me this morning his Legation had checked two other big hospital trains unloading wounded in the
Charlottenburg railroad yards yesterday. This makes four long trains of wounded in the last two days that I know have arrived here.

Not since the war started has the German press been so indignant against the British as today. According to it, the British last night bombed the Bodelschwingh hospital for mentally deficient children at Bethel in western Germany
, killing nine youngsters, wounding twelve.

The same newspapers which have now begun to chronicle with glee the “reprisal” attacks on the centre of London town and which, to show the success of the “reprisals,” published British figures telling of the thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, killed by German bombs, today are filled with righteous indignation against the British for allegedly doing the same thing to Germans. Some of the headlines tonight:
Nachtausgabe
:
“NIGHT CRIME OF BRITISH AGAINST 21 GERMAN CHILDREN—THIS BLOODY ACT CRIES FOR REVENGE.”
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
:
“MURDER OF CHILDREN AT BETHEL; REVOLTING CRIME.”
B
.Z.
am Mittag
:
“ASSASSINS’ MURDER IS NO LONGER WAR, HERR WINSTON CHURCHILL!—THE BRITISH ISLAND OF MURDERERS WILL HAVE TO TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES OF ITS MALICIOUS BOMBINGS.”

Editorial comment is in a similar vein. The
Börsen Zeitung
writes: “They wished, on the orders of Churchill, simply to murder…. Albion has shown herself to be a murder-hungry beast which the German sword will liquidate in the interest not only of the German people but of the whole civilized world…. The sadistic threats of the British apostles of hate will end in the smoke of their cities.”

This paper in the very same editorial points out how
stores in the west of London as well as a subway station there have been hit by German bombs.

The
Diplo
, written and edited in the Foreign Office, says pontifically tonight: “It is a fact that Germany is waging war with clean weapons and in a chivalrous manner.” (And London bombed indiscriminately nearly every night now, the British fighter defence having stopped the Luftwaffe’s day-time attacks.)

One must keep in mind that the newspapers here do not reflect public opinion. This hysterical indignation is artificially created from above. No doubt the real reason for it is to justify in the minds of the German people what the Luftwaffe is doing to London.

Censorship of our broadcasts is growing daily more impossible. I had a royal scrap with one Nazi censor tonight. He wouldn’t let me read the newspaper headlines quoted above. He said it gave America a “wrong impression.” He said I was too ironic, even in my selection of headlines.