Berlin Diary (92 page)

Betty Sargent tells me Robert Dell has died in America—that grand old man of liberal English journalism whose love of justice, decency, peace, democracy, life, good talk, good food, good wine, and beautiful women was scarcely equalled by that of any man I know. I shall miss him.

B
ERN
,
October
24

A sad, gloomy trip with Joe [Harsch] up from Geneva this afternoon. I gazed heavy-hearted through the window of the train at the Swiss, Lake Geneva, the mountains, Mont Blanc, the green hills and the marble palace of the League that perished.

M
UNICH
,
October
25

Blind-landed in a thick fog and the authorities would not let us continue our flight to Berlin because of the lack of visibility. Am taking the night train. All the restaurants, cafés, and beer-halls here packed tonight with lusty Bavarians. Notice they’ve completely stopped saying: “
Heil Hitler
.”

B
ERLIN
,
October
27

Ed Hartrich off in a couple of days for home and I shall leave early in December. Harry Flannery is arriving from St. Louis to take over.

B
ERLIN
,
October
28

Today we’ve had a classic example of how a Fascist dictatorship suppresses news it feels might too easily shock its people. This morning the Italian army marched into Greece. This morning, too, Hitler popped up in Florence and saw Mussolini about this latest act of Fascist aggression. The Berlin newspapers have great headlines about the meeting in Florence. But they do not carry a single line about the Italian invasion of Greece. My spies report that Goebbels has asked for a couple of days to prepare German public opinion for the news.

No word from Tess since she left Geneva. With the present chaos in unoccupied France and Spain, anything can happen.

B
ERLIN
,
October
29

Twenty-four hours after Italy’s wanton aggression against Greece, the German people are still
deprived of the news by their rulers. Not a line in the morning papers or the noon papers. But Goebbels is carefully preparing his public for the news. This morning he had the press publish the text of the outrageous Italian ultimatum to the Greek government. It was almost an exact copy of the ultimatums which the Germans sent to Denmark and Norway, and later to Holland and Belgium. But the German public may have wondered what happened after the ultimatum, since it expired yesterday morning.

L
ATER.—
The news was finally served the German people in the p.m. editions in the form of the text of today’s Italian war communiqué. That was all. But there were nauseating editorials in the local press condemning Greece for not having understood the “new order” and for having plotted with the British against Italy. The moral cesspool in which German editors now splash was fairly well illustrated by their offerings today. After several years of it I still find it exasperating. Also today, the usual Goebbels fakes. For example, one saying that the Greeks disdained even to answer the ultimatum, though the truth is that they did. They rejected it.

There is certainly no enthusiasm among the people here for the latest gangster step of the Axis. German military people, always contemptuous of the Italians, tell me Greece will be no walk-away for Mussolini’s legions. The mountainous terrain is difficult for motorized units to operate in and moreover, they say, the Greeks have the best mountain artillery in Europe. General Metaxas, the Premier, and quite a few Greek officers have been trained at Potsdam, the Germans tell me.

B
ERLIN
,
October
31

The story is that Hitler
rushed from France, where he had seen Franco and Pétain (the Führer greatly impressed by the French marshal, but not by Franco, say the party boys), to Florence to stop Mussolini from going into Greece. He arrived four hours too late, and by the time he saw Mussolini there was no turning back. The fact is that Hitler thinks he can take the Balkans without a fight. He does not want a war there for two reasons: first, it disrupts the already inadequate transportation facilities which are needed now to bring food and raw materials from the Balkans to Germany
; secondly, it forces him to spread still further his forces, which now must hold a line stretching for more than a thousand miles from Narvik to Hendaye in the west, and on the east the long frontier with Russia, where he keeps a minimum of thirty-five divisions and one whole air fleet. Hitler is reported furious at his junior Axis partner for jumping the gun.

With winter upon us, it is now obvious that there will be no German attempt to invade Britain this fall. Why has the invasion not been attempted? What has happened to the grand lines of Hitler’s strategy? Why no final victory, no triumphant peace, by now? We know that at the beginning of last June he felt certain of them by summer’s end. His certainty inspired the armed forces and the entire German people with the same sure feeling. He and they had no doubts about it. Were not the stands erected and painted, and decorated with shining Swastika eagles and black-and-silver iron crosses for the great Victory Parade through the Brandenburger Tor? Early last August they were ready.

What, in truth, went wrong?

We do not yet know the entire answer. Some things we can piece together.

In the first place, Hitler hesitated and his hesitation may well prove to have been a blunder as colossal as the indecision of the German High Command before Paris in 1914, marking a turning-point in the war that none of us can yet grasp, though it is manifestly too early yet to say so. The French army was liquidated by June 18, when Pétain asked for an armistice. Many who followed the German army into France
expected Hitler to turn immediately and strike at Britain while the iron was hot, while the magic spell of invincibility was still woven round him and his magnificent military machine. The British, Hitler knew, were reeling from the titanic blows just struck them. They had lost their ally, France. They were just receiving home the demoralized remnants of their Continental expeditionary force, whose costly, irreplaceable arms and equipment had been abandoned on the beach of Dunkirk. They had no longer a great organized, equipped land army. Their shore defences were pitiful. Their all-powerful navy could not fight in great force in the narrow waters of the English Channel, over which Göring’s bombers and Messerschmitts, operating from bases in sight of the sea, now had control.

This was the situation when Hitler strode into the little clearing of Compiègne Forest on June 21 to dictate a harsh armistice to France. I recall now—though the fact did not make any impression on me at the time—that at Compiègne there seemed to be no hurry on the part of the German military to finish with Britain. Piecing together today—long after the event—stray bits of conversation picked up here and there in Compiègne and Paris, I think the word had come down from Hitler that an invasion of Britain, though it must be
quickly and thoroughly prepared, would never be necessary. Churchill would accept the kind of peace which the little Austrian was mulling over in his mind. It would be a Nazi peace, it would bar Great Britain from the continent of Europe at long last; it might be merely an armistice, a breathing-spell during which Germany
could consolidate such overwhelming strength on the mainland that Britain in the end would have to bow to the Nazi conqueror without a fight—but it would be a face-saving peace for Churchill. And he would accept it. I believe Hitler really thought he would. And his certainty delayed and slackened the work which was necessary to prepare a devastating invasion force—the construction and concentration of barges, pontoons, shipping, and a thousand kinds of equipment.

[L
ATER.
1941
.—The breathing-spell might also be used to settle accounts with Russia. Some observers in Berlin were convinced at the end of June that Hitler was sincerely anxious to conclude peace with Britain (on his own terms, of course) so that he could turn on the Soviet Union—always his long-term objective. Hitler, they believed, felt sure the British would understand this. Had not Chamberlain’s policy been to encourage the German military machine to turn east against Russia? The fact that during the last days of June and throughout the first three weeks of July one German division after another was recalled from France and hurriedly transported to what the Germans usually referred to as the “Russian front” would seem to bear this out. But it is by no means certain. Russia, Hitler believed, was weak. Russia could wait. What was important was getting Great Britain out of the way. Yet his mind seemed full of puzzling contradictions. He
realized very clearly that German hegemony on the Continent, not to mention a foothold in Africa, could never be safely maintained as long as Britain held command of the seas and possessed a growing air force. But Hitler must have known that Britain, battered and groggy though she was by what had happened in France and the Low Countries, would never accept a peace which would rob her of her sea power or curtail her increasing strength in the air. Yet this was the only kind of peace he could afford to offer her. The evidence seems conclusive, however, that he was confident that Churchill preferred this manner of peace to facing a German invasion.]