Berlin Diary (87 page)

B
ERLIN
,
September
20

Another beautiful example today of Nazi hypocrisy. I wrote in both my broadcasts today that the German press and radio were making the most of a New York report that the British censor had decided to forbid foreign correspondents in London to mention air-raids while they were on. The German Propaganda Ministry jumped on this dispatch and through its shortwave and foreign-press services tried to tell the world that henceforth America was going to be deprived of trustworthy news from London. I pointed out, incidentally, that the Nazis had clamped the same kind of censorship on us some time ago. My censors would not hear of my saying any such thing.

I ask myself why I stay on here. For the first eight months of the war our censorship was fairly reasonable—more so than Sevareid and Grandin had to put up with in Paris. But since the war became grim and serious—since the invasion of Scandinavia—it has become increasingly worse. For the last few months I’ve been trying to get by on my wits, such as they are; to indicate a truth or an official lie by the tone and inflexion of the voice, by a pause held longer than is natural, by the use of an Americanism which most Germans, who’ve learned their English in England, will not fully grasp, and by drawing from a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or their juxtaposition, all the benefit I can. But the Nazis are on to me. For some time now my two chief censors from the Propaganda Ministry have been gentlemen who understand American as well as I, Professor Lessing, who long held a post in an American university, and Herr Krauss, for twenty years a partner in a Wall Street bank. I cannot fool them very often. Personally, both are decent, intelligent Germans, as is Captain Erich Kunsti, former Program Director of the Austrian Broadcasting System and now my principal military censor. But they must do what they’re told. And the Foreign Office and Propaganda Ministry keep receiving reports from the United States—not only from the Embassy at Washington, but from their well-organized intelligence service throughout our country—that I’m getting by with murder (which I’m not) and must be sat upon. Dr. Kurt Sell, the Nazi man in Washington whose duty, among other things, is to report to Berlin on what we send, has several times reported unfavourably on the nature of my broadcasts. I haven’t the slightest interest in remaining here unless I can continue to give a fairly accurate report. And each day my broadcasts
are forced by the censorship to be less accurate. Tonight I noticed for the first time that one of the young Germans who do my modulating (call New York on the transmitter until time for me to speak) and follow my script to see that I read it as written and censored was
scanning
a copy of my broadcast as I spoke, making funny little lines under the syllables as we used to do in school while learning to scan poetry. He was trying to note down, I take it, which words I emphasized, which I spoke with undue sarcasm, and so on. I was so fascinated by this discovery that I stopped in the middle of my talk to watch him.

B
ERLIN
,
September
21

X came up to my room in the Adlon today, and after we had disconnected my telephone and made sure that no one was listening through the crack of the door to the next room, he told me a weird story. He says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them “mercy deaths.” He relates that Pastor Bodelschwingh, who runs a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children at Bethel, was ordered arrested a few days ago because he refused to deliver up some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police. Shortly after this, his hospital is bombed. By the “British.” Must look into this story.

B
ERLIN
,
September
22

We know that Himmler has hanged, without trial, at least one Pole for having had sexual relations with a German woman. We know too that at least half a dozen German women have been given long prison sentences
for having bestowed favours upon Polish prisoners or farm labourers. Several Germans have told me of placards prominently displayed in the provincial towns warning Germans not to have anything to do with Polish labourers and to treat them rough. Last week every household in Berlin received a leaflet from the local office of the “Bund of Germans Abroad” warning the people not to fraternize with the Poles now working as labourers or prisoners in Germany
. A few choice extracts from this document:

“German people, never forget that the atrocities of the Poles compelled the Führer to protect our German people by armed force!… The servility of the Poles to their German employers merely hides their cunning; their friendly behaviour hides their deceit…. Remember, there is no community whatever between Germans and Poles! Be careful that no relationship shall result because of the common religious faith!…. Our farmers may think each Pole who greets them with a ‘Jesus Christ be praised!’ is a decent fellow and may answer: ‘For ever and ever, amen!’

“Germans! The Pole must never be your comrade! He is inferior to each German comrade on his farm or in his factory. Be just, as Germans have always been, but never forget that you are a member of the master race!”

I note that Poles working in Germany now have been forced to wear an arm-band or an emblem sewn on the front of their coat marked with a large “?” in purple on a yellow background. In German-occupied Poland, Jews wear a similar emblem marked with a “J.”

L
ATER.—
Ribbentrop is back from Rome, and the press hints that the “final phase” of the war has been decided upon. Rudolf Kircher, editor of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, writes from Rome that the military situation is so rosy for the Axis that Ribbentrop and the Duce actually spent most of their time planning the “new order” in Europe and Africa. This may make the German people feel a little better, but most Germans I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over before winter, which will be on us within a month. I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall—or should—receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter. Today when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Neither would they bet.

German correspondents in Rome today reported that Italy
is displeased with Greece and that the British are violating the neutrality of Greek waters as they once did those of Norway. This sounds bad. I suppose Greece will be next.

B
ERLIN
,
September
23

After a week’s absence the British bombers came over last night and kept the populace in their cellars for two hours and twenty minutes in the middle of the night. This was a little shock for most people, for they had been told all week that for several nights the British had been trying to get through but had always been turned back by the anti-aircraft defences. The local papers again rage against the “British criminals” for having bombed us last night. The
Nachtausgabe
bannerlines: “NEW NIGHT ACT OF THE PIRATES.” The same paper editorializes: “Winston Churchill again yesterday gave British airmen the order to drop their bombs on the German civilian population and thus continue their murder of German men, women, and children.” The
Börsen Zeitung
holds that “last night Churchill continued the series of his criminal blows against the German civil population. Frankly, Churchill belongs to that category of criminals who in their stupid brutality are unteachable.”

While this line of nonsense is of course dictated to the German press by Goebbels, it does indicate, I think, that the Germans can’t take night bombing as the British are taking it. If London was only more on its toes it would realize this. RAF strategy, I gather, is to concentrate on Germany
’s war industries and supply-depots. But while they’ve no doubt hit some interesting targets, like the Leuna works, where coal is made into oil (they’ve hit Leuna, but not knocked it out), it is certain that they have not succeeded in crippling Germany’s war industrial production to any appreciable extent, nor have they blown up many stores. What they must do is to keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping, and wear down their nerves. Those nerves already are very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization for Total War.

Last night an old German acquaintance dropped in on me. He’s in the Luftwaffe now and for the last three weeks has been a member of the crew of a night bomber which has been working on London. He had some interesting details.

1. He was impressed by the size of London. He said they’ve been pounding away on it for three weeks and he is amazed that so much of it is left! He said they
were often told before taking off that they would find their target by a whole square mile of the city on fire. When they got there they could find no square mile on fire; only a fire here and there.

2. He relates that they approach London at a height of from 15,000 to 16,000 feet, dive to about 10,000 feet, and release their bombs at this height—too high for accurate night bombing. They don’t dare to go below 7,000 feet, he says, on account of the barrage balloons. He describes the anti-aircraft fire over London as “pretty hot.”

3. German night bomber crews, he says, are tired. They are being overworked. The Luftwaffe figured that they would destroy the RAF during daylight operations as they had destroyed the Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and French air forces and neglected to train enough men for night work. Present crews, he divulged, are flying four nights out of seven a week. Unlike Dr. Goebbels, whose propaganda machine drums it into the people that British airmen are cowards when they’re not brutes, my friend says quite frankly that the German pilots have the highest admiration for their British adversaries—for their skill and their bravery. They’re particularly fond of one British fighter-pilot, he relates, who roars into a fight with a cigarette stuck at a smart angle between his lips. If this man is ever shot down on the German side, the German airmen have sworn to hide him and not to hand him over as a prisoner of war.

4. He confirms that the British bombers are pounding hell out of the French and Belgian coasts at night. And often they swoop down in the night and machinegun the German bomber bases just as the German planes are taking off or alighting.

5. Göring
did
fly over London, he asserts. This news
was given the foreign press here, but withheld from the German papers, which made us suspicious of it.

6. He relates that the British have built a number of dummy airfields and littered them with wooden planes, but the Germans have most of them spotted by now.

7. He confirms that the German bombers usually return from a flight over Britain to different bases, rarely to the one they have taken off from. He says the bombers start from widely scattered fields in France, Belgium, and Holland, but always on a strict time-table so as to avoid collisions in the darkness. The exact course back from London is always prescribed in advance, so that planes entering over the area will not crash into those leaving. He has an interesting explanation of the big beating the Germans took in a daylight attack on London a week ago Sunday when, according to the British, 185 German planes were shot down, mostly bombers. He says that the German time schedule went wrong, that the German fighters which were to protect the bombers arrived at a prearranged rendezvous off the English coast, but found no bombers there. After waiting twenty-five minutes they had to fly home because their gas was getting low. The bombers eventually arrived, coming over the North Sea, but there was no fighter escort for them, and the British chasers mowed them down.